Easy Agile Podcast Ep.35 Jeff Gothelf on Customer-Centric OKRs, Goal-Setting, and Leadership That Scales
TL;DR
Jeff Gothelf, renowned author of "Lean UX" and "Who Does What By How Much," discusses the evolution from output-based work to outcome-focused goal setting with OKRs. Key insights: Teams need to shift from "we're building a thing" to defining success as "who does what by how much" – meaningful changes in human behaviour that drive business results; the biggest barrier to agile ways of working is that people get paid to ship features, not deliver value; leaders should change their questions from "what are you building?" to "what are you learning?"; psychological safety is critical – teams need to feel safe admitting when something isn't working; start small by simply asking "what will people be doing differently when we ship this?"; rename teams around outcomes (mobile revenue team) rather than outputs (iPhone app team); proactive transparency through weekly three-bullet-point updates builds trust with leadership. Bottom line: OKRs, when done right, are the "Trojan horse" that enables all other agile practices to succeed.
Introduction
For years, agile practitioners have championed better ways of working – Lean UX, design thinking, continuous discovery, customer centricity. Yet despite widespread adoption of these practices, many teams still struggle with the same fundamental problem: they're rewarded for shipping features, not delivering value.
In this episode, our CEO Mat Lawrence sits down with Jeff Gothelf to explore how this misalignment of incentives undermines even the best agile practices, and why customer-centric OKRs might be the missing piece that makes everything else click into place.
Jeff Gothelf is a renowned author, speaker, and consultant whose work has shaped how product teams approach collaboration and customer-centricity. Along with co-author Josh Seiden, Jeff wrote "Lean UX," which revolutionised how designers work in agile environments. Their follow-up book, "Sense and Respond," helped leaders understand how to manage in software-based businesses. Their latest book, "Who Does What By How Much," tackles the thorniest problem yet: how to align incentives and goals with customer outcomes.
This conversation traces Jeff's journey from helping designers work better in agile teams, to helping leaders create the conditions for success, to finally addressing the root cause – the goals and incentives that determine what gets celebrated, rewarded, and promoted in organisations. It's a masterclass in shifting from output thinking to outcome thinking, with practical advice for both team members and leaders navigating this transformation.
About Our Guest
Jeff Gothelf is an author, speaker, and organisational consultant who has spent over 15 years helping companies build better products through collaboration, learning, and customer-centricity. His work focuses on the intersection of agile software development, user experience design, and modern management practices.
Jeff is best known as the co-author (with Josh Seiden) of three influential books that have shaped modern product development practices. "Lean UX" (now in its third edition) began as a guide for designers working in agile environments but has evolved into a comprehensive framework for cross-functional collaboration and risk mitigation in product development. The book's core principle – moving from deliverables to outcomes – has influenced how thousands of teams approach their work.
Following "Lean UX," Jeff and Josh wrote "Sense and Respond," a book aimed at leaders and aspiring leaders. It makes the case that the overwhelming majority of businesses today are software businesses, and that managing software-based businesses requires fundamentally different approaches to team structure, management, and leadership. The book provides a roadmap for creating organisations where teams can actually practise the collaborative, customer-centric approaches described in "Lean UX."
Jeff's latest book, "Who Does What By How Much," represents the natural evolution of this work. After years of helping teams work better and leaders manage differently, Jeff and Josh identified that the real barrier to change was incentives and goals. Teams kept saying, "That's great, Jeff, but I get paid to ship features." This book tackles that problem head-on, showing how to use objectives and key results (OKRs) to create customer-centric goals that align with – rather than undermine – modern ways of working.
Beyond his books, Jeff has also authored "Forever Employable" and "Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking," and he regularly speaks at conferences and consults with organisations on product strategy, team effectiveness, and organisational transformation. His approach is characteristically practical and rooted in real-world experience, making complex concepts accessible through clear frameworks and relatable examples.
Jeff's work continues to evolve as he helps organisations navigate the challenges of building products that customers actually want and need, whilst creating work environments where teams can thrive.
Transcript
Transcript
Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Why Write Another Book? The Journey from Lean UX to OKRs
Mat Lawrence: Well, Jeff, welcome. I'm Mat Lawrence for our audience. I'm COO at Easy Agile, and today I'm talking with Jeff Gothelf, who is the renowned author, speaker, and consultant. You've written a good few books, Jeff. I've been looking through the list – Lean versus Agile versus Design Thinking, Forever Employable, and co-authored a few. The latest one being "Who Does What By How Much," and I was just telling Jeff in the intro here how you've managed to get across a lot of the things that I care about when trying to build teams and get them to understand OKRs. I've already given it to a few people and I'm definitely going to be giving it around. So, Jeff, welcome.
Jeff Gothelf: Thank you so much, Mat. That's very kind of you on all of that stuff. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Mat: I'd love to cover a little bit around the book and the concept you're trying to get across. So I suppose the first question I have is what problem are you hoping to solve with the book? Why did you write it?
Jeff: It's really interesting. I wrote a blog post about this a while back because somebody challenged me on LinkedIn – and I appreciate a good challenge. They said, "How can you write about all this stuff? There's no way you know enough about each one of these topics to write a book. You're spreading yourself way too thin."
I thought that was a really interesting challenge. No one had ever asked that question, and it got me thinking. The answer that I came up with is that this book, "Who Does What By How Much," and it's a conversation about customer-centric objectives and key results, is the natural evolution of the work that Josh Seiden and I have been doing together for more than 15 years.
"We started with Lean UX, and Lean UX was a solution for designers helping them work more effectively in agile software development environments. The response to that book was, 'That's great, Jeff and Josh. We'd love to work this way. My company won't let me work this way.'"
So we wrote "Sense and Respond," which was a book for leaders and aspiring leaders to inspire them to manage differently, to recognise that the overwhelming majority of businesses today are software businesses, and that managing software-based businesses is different.
As we began to work with that material and talk about that, we kept bumping up against the same ceiling, and that ceiling was incentives and goals. No matter how hard we tried to convince people to be customer-centric, to learn continuously, to improve continuously, to work in short cycles, they said, "That's great, Jeff. But I get paid to ship features."
The goal, the measure of success, was shipped – preferably on time and on budget. That's what got celebrated and rewarded, incentivised and promoted. It was in the job descriptions and all that stuff. So it felt like we were really fighting a losing battle.
Objectives and key results has been gaining momentum for the last decade or so. To us, that felt like the perfect Trojan horse – and I know Trojan horse has a negative connotation, but I don't think of it in this case as a negative thing. It was the perfect way to have a conversation about goals in a customer-centric fashion that, if applied in the way that we describe in the book, would enable everything else that we've done to happen more easily.
"What Will People Be Doing Differently?" – The Question That Changes Everything
Mat: I love the evolution of it, Jeff. I've been working in tech now for about 15 years. Prior to that, I used to work in the arts and special effects, which in itself is a very agile industry where you're constantly building prototypes and figuring out what things need to do before they go on stage or be filmed.
When I entered into the tech world as an inexperienced founder and product developer, I was designing to solve problems, and I found the teams I was working with responded really well to that. "What are we trying to do? What are we trying to get here?" They used to give me feedback all the time on whether I was helping them see far enough ahead with the value we're actually trying to deliver.
When I joined Atlassian in 2014, when we were introducing OKRs there, I think we were facing a problem that you described really well in the book, which is around people focusing on shipping their to-do list. They have a backlog that is predefined, full of great ideas, and they really want to get it out the door. Trying to change that conversation to be around "how do we know if this is any good?" – the answer was we just don't know.
I'd love to touch on how have you guided teams to move from that more traditional output-based metrics and shipping into that outcome approach? Maybe you could give an example of where that shift has led to some significant success.
Jeff: Sure. The title of the book is "Who Does What By How Much?" Overwhelmingly, the teams that we've worked on and with over the years have focused on delivering output, making stuff. The question that we tried to get them to understand is: if you do a great job – let's say when – when you do a great job with this feature, how will you know? What will people be doing differently?
That's the question that starts the mindset shift from outputs to outcomes. Outcomes, the way that we describe them, is a meaningful change in human behaviour that drives business results. The human that we're talking about is the human that consumes the thing that you create.
"The question is how will you know you delivered value to that human? Traditionally, it's been like, 'Well, we made the thing for them. There it is.' We made the Sharpie. Terrific. Did anybody need a Sharpie? Anybody looking for a Sharpie? How do we know? What are people doing now that the Sharpie is out there?"
The mindset shift starts with that question. Even in an organisation that just doesn't get this yet, it's a really safe question. I think it's a safe question to say, "Okay, we're gonna build the thing. What do we expect people to be doing differently once we ship this thing?" And when I say people, let's get specific about who. Which people? Who?
This is the evolution of the book title and how we teach this stuff. So what would people be doing differently before we start? Which people? Who? Okay, it's accountants in large accounting firms. Great. When we ship this new system to them, what are they gonna be doing differently than they're doing today? Well, they'll be entering their data more successfully and finishing their work in half the time.
Terrific. What are they doing? Who does what? And how much of that do we need to see to tell us that this was actually valuable? Well, today they're seeing at least a 30% error rate in data entry. Okay, great. What's meaningful? What's a meaningful improvement? If we cut that in half, that's a meaningful improvement. By how much?
All of a sudden, we've constructed the success criteria that has moved the team away from "we're building a thing" to "accountants in large accounting firms reduce their data entry errors by 50%." Who does what by how much. That begins the mindset shift in that conversation in a safe way because we're not saying let's set new goals, let's rewrite our incentives. We're just saying, "Look, I'm just asking a question."
Then once we start to build stuff, and especially once we start to ship stuff, you remember that conversation we had three months ago? We talked about who does what by how much. Is it happening? Do we know? Can we find out? And if it isn't, let's figure it out.
The Non-Profit That Changed Their Approach - From One Million Buses to Ten Iterations
Jeff: I'll give you an example. There was an organisation I worked with – I really loved working with them. They were a non-profit organisation that was looking to address major diseases in the developing world. They had three or four very specific diseases that they were targeting in very specific locations around the world, and I was thrilled to be working with them and helping them.
They managed everything with a task list. They were like, "We're gonna create this campaign and we're gonna put it on buses in China." And I was like, "Okay. How do you know that? So what? If the campaign works, what will people be doing differently?"
"Well, they'll scan the QR code that's on the bus."
"Okay, alright. And then what?"
"They'll sign up for an appointment to get a cardiovascular check."
"And then what?"
"For those who need actual care, they'll sign up for care."
"All of a sudden, we've taken 'put an ad campaign on a bus' to 'who does what by how much.' When we started to think about it that way, they fundamentally were rethinking the level of effort."
Because you might imagine, it was going to be one million buses and hope that it works. Instead, they decided, "Hey, we're gonna do 100 of these in one locality, and we're gonna give it a week, and we're gonna not only see what happens, but find out if people saw the ad, if it speaks to them, if they understood what it said. Then based on that learning, we're gonna iterate on the campaign."
So instead of getting one giant shot at this advertising campaign to drive people to take better care of themselves, now they're gonna get ten iterations. I think that was massively impactful in helping that organisation do better work and help more people.
Mat: I love how you're bringing that back to the experimental and iterative approach that people so often want but really struggle to get to. I've seen so many occasions where OKRs end up describing something that takes three, four, five months to build and ship, and they're only trying to measure the big outcome at the end, whereas what you're talking about there is breaking it down, making it far more iterative and experimental.
Jeff: Reducing your risk. Imagine this organisation had, let's say, £100,000 for this campaign. Traditionally, they would spend that whole hundred grand and hope. The reality is there's no need to do that. They could spend 10 and learn and do a better job with the next 10 and a better job with the next 10, and if they've de-risked it enough, take the last 50 and dump it on the thing that you've actually validated.
It's a de-risking strategy as well. You're increasing the value you're delivering and reducing the risk of spending money on stuff that isn't gonna work. Feels like a no-brainer, doesn't it?
The Reverse Five Whys - Asking "So What?" to Find Your Outcome
Mat: You make it sound like everyone should be doing it, which I agree with. There was something that you did in the middle of that conversation which I really like, and it's kind of like the opposite of the five whys. You know, where you see the problem and you ask why, why, why and you go back to the root cause. Whereas you took that in the other direction there.
Jeff: Right. We were moving forward in time for the desired outcome.
Mat: Yeah, exactly. You said, "Okay, you want to put this thing on a bus. So what?" And you took that three or four steps forward to get to that ultimate outcome. I love that, and that's probably a tactical, practical approach that our audience can take.
I think some of the stuff that I've struggled with over the years is getting teams who are new to OKRs to understand how to move from writing their to-do list, writing their backlog, turning that into their key results, and actually getting it into the outcome base. I think that's one of the things that a lot of teams find hardest to grasp.
Jeff: And as I kicked off with, if your entire career you've been rewarded for shipping and producing and ticking off a to-do list, then it's really hard to break away from that without some form of leadership buy-in. That's coming back to that incentives and performance management criteria side of things. That's really hard because that's what people optimise for.
We can preach outcome-based work until we're blue in the face, as they say in America at least. But if you're paid to ship product, you're gonna optimise in most cases for what gets you paid. That's an important component of this that I think gets ignored a lot.
Two Audiences, Two Approaches - What Should Teams and Leaders Do Differently?
Mat: Let's talk practically around this. We're probably going to have different people listening to this. We could probably give two bits of advice. One is somebody who's in a team and they really want to try this, or maybe they've been trying this and struggling because the incentives don't match. The other group may be someone who's in leadership who is trying to change their organisation to move into this more outcome-based approach. What advice would you give to each of those people?
Jeff: Great question. Let's start with the folks trying to make this happen initially. In my opinion, one of the easiest ways to move this conversation forward in your organisation is to ask that question I mentioned: What will people be doing differently when we ship this?
Have that conversation. Position it any way you'd like, word it any way you'd like. But ultimately, you're not challenging the work. You're not saying "I'm not gonna do the work." You're not pushing back yet.
"All you're saying is, 'Look, we're gonna build this thing, and we're gonna do a great job. What do we hope people will do with this once we have it out there? What are we trying to see? Are we trying to see them increase average order value? Do we want them to abandon their shopping carts less? Are we trying to get them to sign up for a medical check-up at least once a year?'"
That starts it. That starts getting people to think about more than just "I am making a thing."
Mat: If you took that to leadership and said, "Yeah, we're gonna get this stuff out the door, but I want to check with you that you're happy that this is the outcome we're trying to get to, that this is the result if we get it right."
Jeff: I think that's great, and I think that you should come back to them after you ship and say, "Look, remember we met three, six, nine months ago and I said we're building this and we're hoping people will do this? Well, we built it as designed, on time, on budget, and so far we're not seeing the results that we anticipated. We talked to some customers, and here's why we think that is. What we'd like to do next..."
To me, that should be a safe conversation inside your organisation.
Mat: I can imagine people listening to this and getting some cold sweats at the concept of going to someone and saying, "I did everything that you expected from me, but it wasn't good enough."
Jeff: It's not that. What tends to happen in these situations is a lot of upfront planning and commitments, and then we execute. Regardless of all the work that people have done to convince people that there are better ways of working, that's generally speaking how people are doing work still. We did the thing, and guess what? It didn't work. It didn't work as we had hoped. It's not because we built it poorly. It works as designed. We did usability testing on it. People can use it, they can get through the workflow.
What we think is it's not solving a meaningful problem, or we decided to put it somewhere in the workflow that didn't make sense, or whatever the case is. I understand it's not a risk-free conversation. I'm not encouraging people to do things that are career-limiting per se, but at some point we've got to talk about this kind of stuff. Otherwise, we're just a factory. I don't think anybody wants to work in a factory.
It's Not About the Quality of Your Code, It's About Learning
Mat: I couldn't agree more, and I think that the heart of what I spend a lot of my time doing is helping people understand how to get the benefits out of being agile, that agility piece. What we've been discussing there is that key part of learning. You can plan and you can build, you can have alignment on those things, you can improve how you're building all the time and reach quality standards and pass usability testing. But ultimately, if you don't learn, you're never gonna get the insight that you need to adapt what you do next.
"Where a lot of people fall down with agility is they go through all of the motions up to that point, and then through fear, self-preservation, or they've just not seen anybody else around them do it before, they hesitate to say, 'This thing that we've all invested all this time and effort into isn't working as expected.' It does take some courage to do that."
Jeff: It does. I agree. But it's an evidence-based conversation. It's not "we did a crap job." We didn't. It's bug-free, it's high performance, it's scalable, it's usable. But you can build products like that – there are infinite stories of products that were amazingly executed that didn't meet a need, didn't solve a problem.
Mat: Yeah, I built one of those and had to close a business for it, so I know that all too well. If there's a lesson I learned through the years of doing that, which you touched on earlier, it's around by focusing on the outcomes that you want to see, those behaviours you want to change, and bringing the work down, de-scoping the work to start to experiment and iterate, you de-risk all of that. You'll learn a lot earlier whether you're on the right track or not rather than getting that big bang at the end.
Jeff: Yeah. Again, you're reducing the risk of building something that people don't want. Let's just use round numbers because they're easy. If you have a million-pound budget to build something – a new product, a new feature, a new service – and you spend 100 of that million and find out that this isn't the right thing to make, it's not a real problem, for whatever reason, you've just saved the company £900,000.
They should hoist you up on their shoulders and sing your praises, parade you around the halls. That's how it should be. You're a hero, and now we can take that £900 and do something that actually will deliver value with it.
If You're a Leader: Stop Asking "When Will It Be Ready?" and Start Asking "What Are You Learning?"
Mat: The second half of that question was around if you're a senior leader in an organisation and you want to move to an outcome-based approach, maybe you start with celebrating the people who are trying to do that and positively reinforcing it in that way. But what advice would you give that person?
Jeff: Absolutely. Celebrate anybody – literally hoist them up on your shoulders and parade them around the halls and say, "Look, this team tried this, figured out it wasn't going to work, and pivoted, and saved the company a million pounds." That should be a regular conversation and a regular thing that the company celebrates.
What's interesting is that you can find yourself on a team with resistant leadership, and you can also find yourself in leadership with resistant teams. And for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that they've never actually been allowed to work this way and don't believe you that you're gonna let them work this way.
"Without getting caught up in too much process or training or dogma, I think as a leader you start to soften the conversations around this stuff by changing the questions that you ask."
Normally, it's like, "Hey, what are you guys working on? When will it be ready? How much is it gonna cost me? What do you predict the ROI is gonna be?" That's a typical line of questioning for a product team.
Conversely, you can say, "Hey, folks. What are you learning this week? This sprint? This quarter? What did you learn?" You might get a bunch of blank stares initially. They'll say, "What do you mean, what did we learn? We're building what you told us to build."
"Okay, well, cool. Next quarter when we meet, I'd love for you folks – I'm gonna ask you this question again. What did you learn this quarter about the product, about the customer, about the value of the thing that we're delivering? If you don't know how to answer those questions, I can help. I can get training for you. I can get some folks who've done this in other parts of the company to show you how they're doing this work."
To me, you're not enforcing. One of the issues of organisations just mashing process on top of organisations is folks don't understand why. Why are we doing this, and how is this supposed to make anything better? One of the ways to ease folks into a different way of working is to change your expectations of them and make that clear to them.
Instead of saying "What are you building? When will it be ready? What's the ROI?" say "What are you learning? Are we doing the right thing? How will we know?" And then if they don't know how to get the answers to that, don't make them feel stupid. Say, "Look, I'm gonna help you with that. I'll show you how the other teams are doing it. I'll get you some training. We'll work on this."
That's super powerful because you're changing the expectations that you have for your team, and you're making it explicit to them.
Navigating Conflicting Forces - Outcomes vs. Predictability
Mat: I've got this image in my head of people in a large organisation where they're on this journey that you've described with their team. Maybe they're a leader somewhere in the middle of the organisation, working with multiple teams, and they're starting to see some progress. The teams are on board, they trust that the questions you're asking are genuine and authentic, and they really want to understand the outcomes.
They're starting to come back with great questions themselves around who does what, what's the behaviour we're trying to change, how are we trying to change it, are we successfully doing that or not. Whilst that starts to get some traction and momentum, at the same time this leader's got other people in the organisation – maybe some more traditional executives who are getting investors on their boards asking for their KPIs to be met and the efficiency and the predictability they expect so they can forecast.
They have jobs to do themselves, and they seek some predictability. How do you help guide that person to navigate those two conflicting forces?
Jeff: It's hard. I've seen it multiple times. I think there are a couple of ways to navigate those political challenges in an organisation. One is you have to model the behaviour that you want to see both in your teams and in your colleagues as well.
Every interaction that you have with your peers at leadership level should contain these types of conversations around the customer, around learning, around value, around risk mitigation, and continuing to model the behaviour you want to see.
Someone says, "Well, we just have to build the iPhone app."
"Okay, great. But why? Why do we have to build the iPhone app?"
"Because we have to increase mobile revenue."
"Why? What is it today? What are we hoping to get?"
The Power of Renaming Teams
There's a super simple trick I wrote about probably a decade ago. If you're in a leadership position to get the organisation to start to think differently about how to do work, it's simply changing the names of the teams.
For example, let's say you and I work on the iPhone app team. What's our mission? Build an iPhone app. Exactly. So that's the iPhone app team, and that's the CRM team and that's the Android app team, whatever.
"What if we change the name of that team? Same team, same people. But it's the mobile revenue team. All of a sudden, the purpose of the team has fundamentally changed. It's no longer 'build iPhone app.' It's 'increase revenue through the mobile channel.'"
That might be an iPhone app, might be an Android app, might be a better website, might be a million different things. But from a leadership perspective, one of the things that you can influence is the name of these teams, and how you name them determines what work they do. That's really powerful.
Prove the Model
The other thing that you can do as a leader is prove the model. There's a lot of "my idea is better than your idea" type of conversations at work. Instead of saying, "I think we should work this way," say, "Look, I've got a pilot team in my group that's been doing this for the last three months. Here's what the team looks like. Here's the work that they're doing. Here's how they work. Here's what they're producing. Here's their happiness score. Here's their productivity. Here's their efficiency. Here's the impact of the work that they're doing with the customer."
If you've got one or two of those teams working that way, that's a compelling argument for saying, "Look, let's give it a shot." You've got the evidence that says this is a better way of working. Proving the model is always a good way to go.
Team Autonomy and Empowerment
Mat: One of the things that I'm picking up on in what you're saying leads to an outcome within teams that I've seen – around autonomy and empowerment within teams. Something I'm always trying to do in my role in organisations is make myself redundant. If the team don't need me anymore, I've done my job.
I'm at work where I've been very clear with the rest of the leadership team: I'm getting involved in way too many decisions, and I need to remove myself from those decisions because I'm slowing us down. If I have to have all of the context to be able to get involved with that and help move us forward, then we're gonna go slower than we should.
We're very quickly removing me from decisions, and it's been a great journey. Terrifying for me because I don't know as much about what's going on. But I'm seeing the teams themselves equipped with questions like "who does what by how much?" – that's one tool around the OKRs. Also equipped with other tools and ways of working, and usually it comes down to: are they asking the right questions? Are they applying the level of critical thinking to achieve those outcomes?
"Ultimately, if we can get teams to be more autonomous, leaders have a much better time of scaling themselves without burnout, without having to get really drawn in. When teams make decisions when you're not in the room that are fighting to achieve the outcome that you also want to achieve, that's when you really start to move quicker. That's when you start to really see the benefits of agility."
Have you got any thoughts on that that you'd like to share?
Jeff: It's a really tough sell. I see it all the time because I think that leaders have defined themselves – I don't want to speak in absolutes, so the majority of leaders have defined themselves in a way that says, "I tell people what to do." That's my job.
If you ask any kid – 10 years old, 12 years old, 9 years old – "What's a boss?" they'll say "A boss is someone who tells people what to do." I think we grow up with that, and I think leadership canon for the last hundred years has roughly said that, with the exception of the last 20 to 30 years where we've seen a lot of agile-themed, agility-themed leadership books and materials come out.
Still, I think the overwhelming majority of people believe that it's their job when they're in a leadership role to tell their teams what to do and to be keenly aware of every little detail. Because what if my boss comes to me and says, "Hey, what are your teams doing?" If the answer is "I don't know," that's probably a bad answer.
I agree with you. Day-to-day decision stuff – who better to make that decision than the teams doing the work day to day? They know far more about it than I do. They're with the work every day, they're with the customer every day, they're getting the feedback.
There's no reason for you to run these tiny things past the leader every day. It's exhausting for the leader, as you said, and the team knows more about it. Big strategic shifts, invalidated hypotheses, radical shifts in the market, new competitive threats – absolutely, let's talk about that.
The Two-Way Solution
I think there's a two-way solution here. Number one, leaders need to let go a little bit and understand that the most qualified people to make decisions about the day-to-day trivial stuff are the team doing the work.
David Marquet said this in "Turn the Ship Around." He ran the worst-performing nuclear submarine crew in the American Navy and turned it around to the best-performing crew. Basically, what he said was he pushed decision-making down as close to the work as possible. The only decision he kept for himself was whether or not to launch a nuclear missile, because people are gonna die and he didn't want that on anybody. That's his job as the leader.
Same thing here. You're gonna push decisions all the way down, and we've got to get folks to think about that.
Demand Proactive Transparency
To make that easier for people to swallow, people who are not used to this way of working, I think we have to demand greater proactive transparency from the teams.
Teams love to play the victim. "They don't let me work this way. My boss won't let me work this way. My boss doesn't get agility, doesn't get customer-centricity. She just comes down here and yells at us."
"What if on a weekly basis, without being asked for it, you sent your leader three bullet points in an email every week? Here's what we did this week. Here's what we learned. Here's what we're planning on doing next week."
If there's anything significant, you're gonna put that in there as well. But otherwise, just those three things. You're not even asking for a response. Weekly update, three bullet points, 15 minutes max of effort on your part.
In my opinion and in my experience, what happens is leaders chill out. Because all of a sudden they know what's going on. They see that you're doing work, that you're making objective decisions, and that you're taking the time to keep them informed. When their boss comes to them and says, "Hey, what are your teams doing?" they can just look at that email and be like, "This is what Mat's team is doing, this is what Jeff's team is doing."
To me, if there's a role here – and it's not an insignificant one – for the teams to play to improve their ways of working or to improve the comfort level that leaders have with new ways of working, this is it.
Mat: I have had the privilege of being someone on the recipient of those equivalent three-bullet-point emails running 12 different product teams, trying to understand what was going on. You're right – the stress levels go down when you understand proactively what's going on. It became the first thing I would do on a Monday morning knowing I had all that information.
It was something that teams were doing as part of their own weekly reviews as a team, and they just captured it and shared it. So there's no extra work for them. But it made this huge difference of suddenly I could understand where did I need to actually spend my time to help, rather than trying to chase and get information or get too close into managing people who didn't need it because they had it in hand.
I was able to prioritise and think, "Oh, that team looks like they're struggling, so we're gonna go and ask them some questions, see how I can remove some blockers for them."
Jeff: And if there is a blocker, add it in there. "We've been trying for three months to get access to customers. The sales team keeps blocking us. Can really use your help here."
The Shift from Being Rewarded for Knowing to Being Rewarded for Learning
Mat: There's a thing I've observed over the years – it takes a while to get there before you actually start getting rewarded for it in most organisations. In forward-thinking, very agile organisations, it starts a lot earlier, and I think that's something I'd like to try and shift left, try and get it earlier in people's careers.
It's this shift between: spend your entire career being rewarded for being knowledgeable, for being the expert, and knowing how to do something. You get promoted for that, you'll get a bonus for that, you'll get rewarded for it time after time. The more you learn, the more capable you become, the more experienced you are, you've got the answers for everything, you get promoted. You work your way up the career ladder.
Then you hit this tipping point where you hit a level where you realise there aren't many people around you at that point who are seeing the problems. Everyone's busy, everyone's focused on their thing. Then you realise that actually it's your job to call out that this thing isn't working. It becomes your responsibility to say, "There's a problem here we need to address as a company, as an organisation."
As an exec – Nick Muldoon is our CEO – we have an exec weekly, and the majority of that conversation is each of us saying what we don't understand, what we don't know, what we haven't figured out yet. We trust each other that all the rest of it's in hand and working beautifully. The things we really want to talk about is what don't we understand and what are we learning or what are we seeing that we need to try and figure out what to do with.
I see people struggle with that transition if they've not started it earlier in their career. Going back to the basics around sharing the learnings and are we actually achieving what we wanted to, are we seeing the behaviour shift, are we seeing it measured – if we're saying no, having the freedom to be able to call that out earlier, I think it makes that transition in life a lot more straightforward.
Jeff: Look, there's a level of seniority, and the subtheme here that we are dancing around but haven't yet named is psychological safety. It's this feeling that I'm comfortable calling things out that are against the grain, that contradict the plan, that are not working, and I keep seeing and nobody's addressing.
"I think there's a level of seniority that brings some psychological safety. But ultimately, organisational culture has to make it safe."
In other words, if leaders like you and your leadership team are consistently curious – "What do we not know? What are we not aware of? What's not working?" – your teams are going to feel comfortable calling those things out to you because you're asking those questions.
When they change the questions that they ask, it models psychological safety. It models the kinds of questions they want their teams to ask, and that's how change starts.
Building Psychological Safety - "If You Don't Know How, I'll Help You"
Mat: I couldn't agree more, Jeff. I think we've covered a lot of ground today, and psychological safety is one of those really hard intangible things for some people, particularly if they've never experienced it. We see it when we get new people joining our team. We're in a privileged environment where we have a lot of psychological safety.
When new people join from organisations that haven't had that, their behaviour is almost fighting against it. They hold on to their protected ways of working where they get a little bit territorial and they don't want to be vulnerable. It can take a good few months for people to settle in and relax into it.
There was a piece that I want to go back to, and maybe we wrap up on this. You talked earlier around a leader talking to their team and asking them questions to help them understand that it's okay to come back and say, "This thing that we've been developing, this product that we've been getting out the door, isn't having the desired impact." To look at it, question it, be curious, and come back to it.
The thing that you touched on there which I really love was that supportive nature of it. It's okay to do this, and if you don't know how to do it, I'll help you. If you were to give one last tip to our audience – how would you encourage people, leaders specifically, to move more into that space?
Jeff: I think it's a question of asking the right questions. I've been married a long time – half my life, it turns out. I did the maths the other day. If I've learned nothing in my 20-plus years of being married, I've learned that you don't start out immediately solving the problem. You listen and you ask questions. I've learned that. It took a long time.
I think that's our nature as leaders as well. The tendency is "let me solve that for you." Well, hang on. Before you jump to solutions, dig into the problem. What's the issue here? What's the problem? How can I best help you?
"Well, listen, we've set these customer-centric goals now. We've got great OKRs. Thanks for teaching us how to do that. Normally though, we're told what to do, and no one's telling us what to do now, and we don't know what to do. We have no idea how to figure that out. In the past, people have told us. Now I don't know what to do. Can you help us? How do we figure that out?"
To me, those are the kinds of answers you want to elicit from your teams. What's actually going on here?
This is where five whys comes in. "Well, you know, we keep hearing that we should be talking to customers. The reality is it's really difficult to get to our customers."
"Why is it difficult?"
"Well, because we're in a B2B space and we sell aeroplane engines."
"Okay, great. And why does that make it difficult to reach customers?"
"Well, because we have a sales team."
"Why does that make it difficult?"
"Well, because they guard their contacts and they don't want us messing with it."
"Okay, now I understand."
"I think if it's about asking the right questions as a leader, and then when you get to the root cause, you say, 'Well, listen, I can try to unblock it in this way. Do you think that would be helpful? Yes or no?' That becomes far more of a partnership than a hierarchical relationship."
Then you trust me to be honest with you about how well things are working and where things need help, and that's tremendous.
I run a very, very tiny business in the sense of number of people – it's three and a half people total. Even in a three-and-a-half-person business, people try to do good work and people don't want to bother you with what's going on. Sometimes people get overwhelmed, whether it's with work or personal stuff or a combination of the two, and then things start to slip.
The more you can foster that kind of transparency and trust, psychological safety, the less you find out that something is broken with the consequences of it being broken. You find out well in advance of anything actually happening.
Mat: I love that, Jeff. I think that's a great place to wrap up. I'm really grateful for your time, really enjoyed the conversation, and thank you for sharing your wisdom.
Jeff: My pleasure, Mat. Thanks so much for having me. This was fun.
---
Thank you to Jeff Gothelf for joining us on this episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. To learn more about Jeff's work and get your copy of "Who Does What By How Much," visit jeffgothelf.com. You can also find his other books, including "Lean UX" and "Sense and Respond," which provide the foundation for the customer-centric approach to OKRs discussed in this episode.
Subscribe to the Easy Agile Podcast on your favourite platform, and join us for more conversations about agile, product development, and building better teams.
Related Episodes
PodcastEasy Agile Podcast Ep.24 Renae Craven, Agile Coach on team alignment and taking a leap out of your comfort zone.
"I had an inspiring conversation with Renae around the benefits of leaping out of your comfort zone and aligning team behaviour " - Chloe Hall
Chloe Hall- Marketing Coordinator at Easy Agile is joined by Renae Craven - Agile Coach, Agile Trainer, Scrum Master Coach and QLD Chapter Local Leader at Women in Agile.
Join Renae Craven and Chloe Hall as they discuss:
- Renae’s journey to becoming an Agile Coach and Agile Trainer
- Taking a leap out of your comfort zone
- The importance of taking time to gather feedback and reflect
- Building a team environment where everyone feels safe to contribute
- Aligning team behaviour and how prioritising learning impacts team delivery
- Why sitting all day is bad for you and how to bring movement into your work routine
- + more
Transcript
Chloe Hall:
Hello and welcome back to the Easy Agile Podcast. I'm Chloe, Marketing coordinator at Easy Agile, and I'll be your host for today's episode. Before we begin, we'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Dhuwal speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that same respect to all Aboriginal Torres Strait Islanders and First Nations people joining us today. Today we have a very exciting episode for you. We will be speaking to Renae Craven. Renae is an Agile coach, Agile trainer, scrum master coach, BASI Pilates instructor, and runs her own Pilate Studio.
Renee is also a chapter local leader at Women in Agile Brisbane and is the host of the podcast The Leader's Playlist alongside David Clifford. Renae's passion in life is to help people to be a better version of themselves by raising your awareness of areas they wish or need to improve them and to support them in their learning and growth through these areas. According to Renae, coaching is not about telling people what to do. It is about questions to allow them to dig deeper, uncovering realizations and their desire for change. Welcome to the podcast, Renae. Thank you so much for coming today. Really appreciate it and very excited to unpack your story, your journey, and all the success you have achieved, which is amazing. How are you today anyways?
Renae Craven:
I'm all, I'm good. Thank you, Chloe. It's Friday, so I'm always a bit wrecked on a Friday. Looking forward to sleeping in on the weekends and things like that. So yeah, Friday I'm already, always a little bit dreary, but other than that I'm fine.
Chloe Hall:
Well, that's good. Friday afternoon definitely can always do that to you. I'm very pumped for a sleep in as well. I think let's just get straight into it. So some of that I wanted to start was I just want to unpack you as a person, Renae, and kind of your story, who is Renae and the journey you've taken to become so successful today. So if you wanted to provide a little bit of background about yourself.
Renae Craven:
How far back do I go? So I did IT at uni, Information Technology at uni. So I started my career out as a graduate developer, software developer, pretty crap one at that.
Chloe Hall:
Surely not, I don't agree with that. I can't see it.
Renae Craven:
I knew enough to get by, but it was definitely not going to be something that I was going to do for the rest of my life. But back then I was 20 and kind of just was doing things that you were supposed to do when you grow up. You're supposed to go to school and you're supposed to do well in grade 12 and go to uni and get a degree and then get a job.
Chloe Hall:
Definitely.
Renae Craven:So yeah, I ticked all those boxes and found myself with a degree in a job in a good organization. And I was in that development job for a couple of years and then I kind of moved more into team leadership and I was a team leader for a while and then I became a scrum master back in 2010. So that was when I discovered Agile.
Chloe Hall:
Okay. Yup.
Renae Craven:
And I think the rest is kind of history. So when I discovered Agile, things started to make more sense to me. Talking to people, having teams, working together, collaborating together, solving problems together, getting multiple brains onto a problem. That kind of thing was one thing that I never made sense to me when I was a grad straight out of uni. And I'm like, "What do you mean?" Because even during my university, I was a little bit different and I was remote. I did university remotely years ago and with a group of four others, there were four others, it was a group of five. We did everything together, we did all our group assignments, we studied together, we ate lunch together, we just kind of did.
Chloe Hall:
So with the exact same group?
Renae Craven:
Yeah. All the way through uni. I went from that kind of group setting to working and more of an individual on my own like if I've sat in a cubicle with walls that were higher than me, I didn't have to speak to anyone else if I didn't want to. And that never really sat well with me. It was never kind of who I was. So when Agile was, Scrum specifically was here's all these people we're going to throw together in a team and here's all of the problems and you work out together how you're going to solve it.
Someone's not going to tell you what to do or how to solve it, you've got to figure it out as a team, it was a much more, cool this is what makes sense, this works better. Why wasn't it always like this? So yeah, that's kind of where my Agile journey started and it kind of progressed as I did scrum mastering for quite a few years in different organizations, different scenarios, different contexts. And then I guess I was able to comfortably call myself an Agile coach I would say maybe 5, 6 years ago. I mean, there's nothing really that you can do that you go tick, Oh, I'm an Agile coach now.
Chloe Hall:
There's no kind of straightforward degree or certification.
Renae Craven:
No, it's really just experience. And I had experience around and people were telling me, "You can call yourself a coach, an Agile coach now, you've got plenty of experience". I'm like, "Yeah, but I feel like there's so much more that I need to know or that I could learn". So I don't really feel comfortable. But I was working for a consultancy, so that was just how I was being marketed anyway. So that was kind of 5, 6, 7 years ago that that started to happen. And then I do other things as well, like Agile training. I love training people, I run training courses, do the coaching as well. And then I've got my Pilates as well.
Chloe Hall:Just an all rounder, a lot going on, that's for sure. I think as well, I just want to unpack, you had that transition when you were a graduate developer and you found it quite isolating. And then you came into this concept of Agile when you are working in teams. Was it when you started doing that Agile, did that kind of spike like a passion, a purpose of yours and that's what led you down that Agile training, Agile coaching road?
Renae Craven:
I think, I mean purpose, I still don't know if I know what my purpose is in life. Passion. I think what it helped me understand about myself is where some of my strengths were. And my strengths aligned with what was needed to be a scrum master and a coach later on. So the ability to facilitate, that's a big part of being a scrum master, a big part of being one of the key things about being a coach. And that was just something that I was kind of naturally able to do, but I didn't know until I started doing it, if that kind of makes sense.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah. I feel like, isn't that always the way, It's like you don't know something or you don't really know your strengths until you just step into it. You've really got to get out of your comfort zone and just try new things, experience new things. Otherwise, you're never going to know.
Renae Craven:
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, can't trying to create that equal participation in a room or in a workshop from a facilitation and facilitating a group of people from different walks of life to an outcome and just letting it kind of flow and let the conversations flow. But still, you've got to get to this outcome by the end of the day or end of the workshop. That was something that I was naturally able to do. And I mean, my first workshop, how I facilitated that, I don't even remember what it was, but I'm sure how I facilitate now is very, very different. But it was still something that I loved doing, that I enjoyed doing. And the training part of it, it's funny because at school I used to hate public speaking. I used to hate.
Chloe Hall:
You sound like me.
Renae Craven:
Yeah. All of that, how I used to get up in English and do an oral exam and things like that. I hated all of that stuff. I was very happy to just hide in the background and never answer a question or never cause any trouble or be disruptive or whatever. Except in maths class I was a little bit disruptive in math class.
Chloe Hall:
I am resonating so much with you right now because I was literally the exact same. And I've always had a bit of a passion for math. So in maths I was super outgoing, would ask so many questions. But in English my biggest fear was public speaking. I just could not stand up for the life of me. It was the worst. I was always so nervous, everything about it. And I think that's really interesting to see how far you've come today from what you thought back then. Was there any type of practices, lots of work that you had to do on yourself to get to this point today?
Renae Craven:I think similar to what you said before, you got to get out of your comfort zone. And I think, especially early on in my career, that being pushed out of my comfort zone. There's a few leaders that I was working for at the time that, well a handful of people that over the years have pushed me out of my comfort zone. And in the earlier days where I wouldn't have done that for myself. So doing that for me or I didn't really have a choice because I was a good girl and I followed orders back then. It was just something that I went, "Oh okay, well that's cool". I'm glad in hindsight, I'm glad he did that because I wouldn't be where I am right now if I wasn't thrown into the pilot team, the pilot agile team. So yeah, there's things like that where I've been pushed into my comfort zone and just had a go and found out that, oh, it wasn't so bad after all.
Maybe I could do that again. And then you start to build your own kind of resilience, you go, well I've did this before so that's not much harder. I reckon I could do that. Or it's kind of thinking about it like that, but it's also changing. It was shifting my mindset to be you've got to get out of your comfort zone, you've got to screw up to learn. The way that it was at school where you got rewarded for being correct, you got rewarded for doing the right thing. And that's not how I learn. That's not how a lot of people learn. You have to screw up to then go.
Chloe Hall:
Definitely.
Renae Craven:
Okay, well next time I do that I'll do this instead.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, definitely.
Renae Craven:
Or getting that feedback of how you did this, well next time maybe you could do this or whatever it is. Just getting that feedback. Whereas, I never got any of that at school. It was always Renae's perfect angel child, whatever it was.
Chloe Hall:
Still, nice though, but yeah.
Renae Craven:
Nice for the parents. Can we have more of Renae's in our class, nice for mom and dad. But in hindsight, it didn't really do much for setting me up for how.
Chloe Hall:
For reality.
Renae Craven:
Yeah
Chloe Hall:Really.
Renae Craven:
Exactly.
Chloe Hall:
Especially because I've recently gone through that transition from graduating uni into a full time job and working for Easy Agile, I'm always being pushed out of my comfort zone in a good way. Everyone's so supportive, they're always like, "Oh Chloe, try this, try that". And I'm just like, "okay, yep, I can do it". And if it doesn't go amazingly well that's okay. I've learned something and I can do it better next time.
Renae Craven:
Yeah.
Chloe Hall:
You can't just sit in your comfort zone forever, you don't get that feeling of when you do something outside of your comfort zone, you just feel so good after and you're like, oh, prove to myself I can do this.
Renae Craven:
Yep. And I think the big part of that is acknowledging the learning is sitting down. So one of the things we do, I do as a coach is one of the key times for a team or an individual to learn is to actually sit down and reflect back and then what was good, what was bad, and what am I going to do differently the next time. And I coach teams to do that, but I have to do that myself as well. So kind of realizing that as a practice, that's something that I have to do is sit down and when I do these things I would need to gather feedback and then I have to sit down and reflect on how it went. What I think I can do better or do differently the next time around I do something like this so that I am also myself improving in the things that I do. So it's really having that time and that practice to learn to sit down and what did I learn?
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, I do. And I agree with that. You need to take the time to understand, reflect, realize what you have learnt. Otherwise, life is so busy and you just keep going and going and going and you can just completely forget and it's good to take that moment. I really like how that's something that you do in your Agile coaching as well. What else do you do when you're coaching teams? What other elements are there?
Renae Craven:
Some of the stuff I've already spoken about, having that equal, trying to get that equal participation, equal voice. Trying to, the buzzword is psychological safety, but trying to make, trying to build an environment for a team where everyone feels safe to ask a question or to voice their opinion or whatever it is. And when we've come from, as a coach, what we're doing is usually coaching teams, people, organizations, through a shift from a certain way of working to an Agile way of working. And that means that the whole telling people what to do and when to do it and how to do it is gone. That's gone. And now you want to build that capability within the team itself. So creating that safe space so that the
team can ask questions and understand what they have to do so that they can collectively deliver something as opposed to someone just telling them what to do.So it's using your brain, using the collective group brain as well, instead of just having, not using your brain really, just waiting to be told what to do and then you'll know what to do, you just do it. But collectively solving a problem together as a team and then figuring out as a team how we're going to solve that or how are we going to deliver that is something that is quite, that's the bit I love as a coach, working with teams, building that kind of environment where they do feel safe to ask the dumb questions and things like that.
Chloe Hall:
And not have to be like, I think this is a silly question, but you definitely want to remove that.
Renae Craven:
And I think the other part is the learning still, it's exactly the same. It's taking the focus, trying to get the focus off, we must deliver and then we'll do some learning stuff if we get time trying to flip that around so that your, "No, no, no, you need to learn in order to get better at delivery". So take that focus, because a lot of teams will just say, we've got all these deadlines, all of this delivery pressure, we have to get this stuff done. We don't have time to sit down and think about what we've learned or how we can get better as a team. They're never going to get better as a team if they just keep in this endless delivery cycle. Making the same kind of time wasting things over and over and over again. So it's kind of flipping the mindsets of the teams as well to go, "No, hang on, we need to do this otherwise we're not going to get better as a team".
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, definitely. And I think that's where the Agile retrospective fits in perfectly. And I know I actually just came out of my retrospective with my team and we do that weekly and it's so good to come out of that with action items too. And it's like, okay, next week this is how we're going to get better. This is how we're going to advance, this is our focus and there's also no hidden problems because it comes up every Friday, we talk about it. So you're not going into Monday the next week with a grudge or you're annoyed about something with the workflow of the team. You've addressed it, you've left it in the last week, you've brought the action with you obviously, and hopefully it's going to get better from there.
Renae Craven:
Yeah, absolutely. And that's the key. It's the whatever we've decided in our retrospective of what we're going to do differently, we're doing that differently the next day or Monday in your case. It's not something we talk about and then we just kind of ignore it and we just talk about it again in two weeks time or whatever it is. It's the putting into practice the decisions you make as a team and those retrospectives all of the time. They're not massive actions either. They're just little tweaks here and there.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, there's small things.
Renae Craven:
They just kind of build up over time.Chloe Hall:
And that's the thing, it's like if you do it on a regular occurrence, they are small things, but if you are not doing it regularly, then that's when they build up and they become big things, big problems and massive blockers within the team as well.
Renae Craven:
Yeah, absolutely.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah. So I'm wondering too, Renae, when you do your Agile coaching and your Agile training, so you do that on an individual basis as well as teams. Do you think there's an aspect of the mindset, the agile mindset there, and does each individual need to come to work with that agile mindset for the team to be able to flow better?
Renae Craven:
Mindsets. If everyone had the same mindset then it would be robots or.
Chloe Hall:
True.
Renae Craven:
The world would be very boring.
Chloe Hall:
Very good point.
Renae Craven:
I think that's a bit, for me when I think about a team, an agile team, as long as there's some alignment on how the team behaves, why they exist, what their purpose is and how they treat each other and how they solve problems together, then the mindsets of the individuals within that team, they can be different. And that's fine as long as there's that agreement amongst everyone of this is how we are going to behave. I come up against people all the time who have been forced to work in this agile way. So their mindset's definitely not in the mindset that you need for an agile team, but if they're in an agile team and there's people in that team that have got the mindset or the behaviors that you need to have in order to deliver in an agile way, over time it kind of balances out.
And over time those the mindsets will start to shift as well as they see how other people in their team are behaving, how their leaders are behaving, things like that. So I kind of always think of it as more of a behavioral thing than a mindset thing. How do we make decisions, like I said, how do we treat each other, how do we approach problems, who are our customers, all of that sort of stuff. It's more that behavior that I like to, instead of me thinking, oh, they don't have the mindset, they don't have the mindset, I just kind of look at how they behave. Because at the end of the day, you can't force that
mindset. But as a team, when they start humming to working together as a team, they're going to be delivering what they need to deliver. And they all just, that's the whole cross-functional part of it. You're bringing together different minds, different backgrounds, different experiences, different skills, all of that stuff.Chloe Hall:
Definitely.
Renae Craven:
You're putting them in a team together so that they can use their skills. They're all those different pieces to solve these problems.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, no, definitely. I think the way people behave, it has a lot to do with it as well. And I think on that too, you can be in the right type of mindset, you can behave in the right way. And that has a lot to do with the way you're showing up at work as well. It's the way you come to work. If you're had a bad morning, then that's going to impact how you are that day. Or if you've waking up that morning and you have kind of a set morning routine that gets you into that good routine for the day, that good mindset and behavior, then it can help a lot. And I think as well, this is something I'd love to chat to you about too, because you've got the background of Pilates, you're in your own studio and you've been a instructor for how many years now?
Renae Craven:
It'll be a year and a half since I qualified.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah. Nice. Yeah, so I'm also an instructor. I've been teaching I think for about six months now. But I'm just wondering too, so you've got your two passions, Pilates studio owner and then also an Agile coach. Is there that element of setting yourself up for the day in the morning, do you think if someone, they meditate have the type of morning routine they exercise, can they behave better at work essentially? What are your thoughts on that?
Renae Craven:
Yeah, I think definitely the better you feel in yourself or the way feel within yourself, definitely has a direct correlation to how you come across how you behave at work. So yeah, if you've had a rushed morning or a traffic was crap on the way to work or whatever it is, then definitely you're going to be quite wound up by the time you get to work.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, definitely.
Renae Craven:
It's going to impact the way that you respond to questions or respond to people or respond to your team or whatever it is. Yeah, absolutely. But myself, I don't really have a set routine in the morning. I go to gym but I don't go to gym every day. But the mornings that I do go to gym, I never feel like going because no, I just want to sleep.Chloe Hall:
It's early. Yeah.
Renae Craven:
Yeah. But I have to go in the morning or I won't go to gym. Gym's something that, it's a bit of a love hate relationship. I know I have to do it, but I don't like doing it.
Chloe Hall:
Not even after? That feeling after?
Renae Craven:
Afterwards is good. It was like, but from, oh thank God that's done.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah.
Renae Craven:
Tick I'm done for the day.
Chloe Hall:
Out of the way.
Renae Craven:
If it was in the afternoon, if I went to gym in the afternoon I wouldn't go. It would just be, "Nah, it's too hard or I can't be bothered, I'm too tired". So getting up first thing in the morning, I set my alarm 15 minutes before my gym class starts.
Chloe Hall:
Wow. That is effort.
Renae Craven:
I know.
Chloe Hall:
That is good.
Renae Craven:
I race to get there but I have all my clothes set out the night before so I don't even have to think. I just get out of bed, I put my clothes on and I get in the car and I drive to the gym and.
Chloe Hall:
I do the same thing.
Renae Craven:
I do my class, I haven't had time to talk myself out of it just yet. But afterwards it's like, oh yes, excellent. That's done for the day. And yeah, it is nice to know that you have done that for the day as you start your work day as well. So on my gym days, that's probably my routine to get myself ready for work. But other days they're a little bit more relaxed I guess. I think if anything having a coffee is my, I cannot deal with the world without coffee. So whether I'm at home or I'm in the office, the first thing I'll do is if I get to the office I'll get a coffee on the way in. So I'm drinking coffee as I walk into the office. So yeah, I guess that you could call that my routine.
Chloe Hall:
No, I think a lot of people, a lot of listeners as well will be able to resonate with that. And I used to be like that and then it just, coffee wasn't sitting well with me. I found it was just really triggering my nerves for the day and everything. So it was so hard. I went from drinking two to three coffees a day to getting off it and now I'll drink like a matcha instead. But that was such a big part of my morning routine as well and getting off it was one of the hardest things I've had to do.
Renae Craven:
Yeah, I did that once. I detoxed for one of those health retreat things years and years ago and I had to detox off coffee and everything actually.
Chloe Hall:
Oh really?
Renae Craven:
Before two weeks leading up to it and yeah, coffee was hard.
Chloe Hall:
Yes.
Renae Craven:
Very, very hard. Because I love the taste of my coffee. I just have it straight, I don't have any milk so I love the taste of my coffee.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, wow. Okay.
Renae Craven:
But maybe it's also the other benefits of not wanting to kill people that coffee does to me as well. I can deal with the world now. I've had my coffee.Chloe Hall:
You're like okay, all right. Who needs coaching now? Who needs training? And I'm ready to rock and roll.
Renae Craven:
Yeah, I'm good now.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Well the reason as well why I wanted to talk about the whole exercise correlation with work was because I did read your article on LinkedIn about what sitting all day is doing to your body and you're saying how Pilates can help with that. The section that I think resonated really well with me was when you said, when COVID-19 shut down the world and confined everyone working from home, those people who were working in the office environments, you found yourself sitting bent over a PC at home all day and it's back to back virtual meetings, you don't really have that chance to get up, have a break, go for a walk around and everything. And I think, I'm sure a lot of our listeners will be in that reality and even after COVID it is still the case. So I think just for the sake of everyone listening, is there any tips or anything to get you up, get you moving so you're not experiencing that on the daily.
Renae Craven:
I think the other difference is before COVID, sure you were sitting at your desk all day at work but you are also walking to the office and walking to meetings and walking to the kitchen and walking to go and buy your lunch and things like that. And you weren't kind of back to back meetings either. So you had that chance and if you were walking from room to room so you were getting up. Whereas at home it's just back to back meetings and I don't know about you but I run to go to the bathroom in between meetings.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah. I do. I actually do. Yesterday actually bit triggered by that.
Renae Craven:
I did that too yesterday actually. And even at the height of COVID, the back to back meetings were so bad. I didn't even have a lunch break. I was working, I was making my lunch in meetings and daylight saving as well. It always throws things because Queensland stays where they are and it throws everything out so. So in my article actually, it was more of a paper that I had to submit as part of my instructor course.
Chloe Hall:
Oh cool. Yeah.
Renae Craven:
And as well as my 600 hours of practice and.
Chloe Hall:Yeah. I can relate, I didn't have to do the article though.
Renae Craven:
So I kind of just pulled bits out of that and because I thought this is still relevant and maybe it will resonate with people and especially the people that I'm linked, LinkedIn is the audience, right? So that just things that happen from sitting, sitting down's bad for you, full stop. Where you're working or sitting on a couch all day, whatever it is, sitting down's bad for you. And the longer you sit, the more kind of slouched you get. The more your spine is always kind of in the rounded state, the less you are using your back muscles, your back extensors, the more you're sitting down your pelvis, your hip flexes are shortening because you're always sitting down and that kind of tightens your lower back. And then you've got your, even just using your mouse, you've got that shoulder that's doing extra stuff or backwards and forward stuff constantly. And then your neck as well and your traps, everything gets kind of tight.
So things that you can do. I wrote a, my article's got an example class plan to undo the effects of sitting down all day in an office job. But that class plan uses all of the apparatus. So there's things you can do on the mat or the reformer or the Cadillac or under chair. But I run a few online classes after work and they started during COVID and they're still going. And I designed those specifically to undo, I know those people have been sitting down all day. So my classes are very much unraveling everything that they've done the all day.
Chloe Hall:
The body.
Renae Craven:
I mean my classes, my math classes anyway, they're usually focused around, I mean tips for people not actually coming to a class but undoing, you're doing the opposite of what you've been doing all day. So if you sit all day, stand up, walk around, at least listen to your smart watch when it tells you take a break. Stand up and take a break. And walk out to the letter box and get some sunshine at the same time, if you're lucky there's not much suns around these days.
Chloe Hall:
If it's out, make a run for it.
Renae Craven:
Doing kind of shoulder rolls and neck stretches and hip flexors stretches so that you, like I said, just undoing, doing the opposite of what you do when you're sitting. So think about the muscles or the tendons or whatever they're, even if you're not familiar with what they are, you know there's some at the front of your hip. And when you're sitting you can imagine that they're not being used, they're just being stuck there. So straighten them. Stretch them. If you're rounded all the time in your spine, then press roll your shoulders back, press your chest for and use your back muscles. And I don't even know if people are that familiar with back extensors. I don't know if people understand that. Because you've got your spine and then you've got these muscles that they're twisted that run either side of your spine. I can't remember the scientific name for them right now.
Chloe Hall:No. Me neither.
Renae Craven:
We just call them back extensors. And when you straighten in your spine, they're working and you're switching them on. It's just working your bicep, strengthening that muscle when you straighten your spine and you can even go past straight and go kind of backwards. You are using those back muscles and you're strengthening those back muscles and it'll stop you being like a rounded.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, just bent over in the computer all day.
Renae Craven:
Hunched over.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah. That's it. You don't want that.
Renae Craven:
So it's really just doing the opposite or yeah. Joining online classes. I can put you through some exercises.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, well we'll definitely share that article as well with this podcast so people can see that program or might be something that helps. For me at work we're very fortunate that we have a standing desk and I think that that is just so amazing. Because if I work from home, I don't have a standing desk and I can feel the difference. My body just feels, you just don't feel right and I feel more fatigued and yeah, I just need to get up and move more often.
Renae Craven:
Yeah. If you stand all day, it's the same thing. You've got to sit as well. You've still got to do the opposite. Standing is like, because you can get slouch when you stand as well, so you can still over time get tired and kind of slouch over or you're still kind of tense in your shoulders and things like that. So you can kind of need to still be aware of your posture when you're standing and just self-correct or still go for walks, still give everything a chance to move the way it's supposed to move not stand still all day.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, definitely. On that, Renae. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Really enjoyed this chat with you. I think there's a lot that our listers will get out of it and I definitely want to continue more of this Pilates conversation too.
Renae Craven:
Thank you Chloe. Thanks for having me.
Chloe Hall:No worries, thank you.
PodcastEasy Agile Podcast Ep.34 Henrik Kniberg on Team Productivity, Code Quality, and the Future of Software Engineering
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.
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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.
PodcastEasy Agile Podcast Ep.18 Top qualities of an agile leader and team
"It was great to chat with Alana and learn from her experience" - Sean Blake
In this episode, I was joined by Alana Mai Mitchell. Alana is a results coach, author, podcast host, and Senior Product Development Manager at one of Australia's largest banks where she works with Agile teams every day.
She has over 13 years experience in digital financial services and coaching. She's spoken live on Channel 10 here in the Australian media and has had her mental health story featured in publications, like The Daily Mail and Mamma Mia. She's the author of a book, Being Brave, and she's the host of the Eastern Influenced Corporate Leader Podcast.
We covered a lot of ground in today's episode. We talked about:- The importance of putting your hand up and telling your manager when you want to be challenged more and to be exposed to new opportunities.
- Building trust with your team and disclosing some vulnerabilities about yourself.
- Alana's mental health journey over the course of six years, and that journey continues today. What she's learned and what we can learn from her experience to better look after our teams and people in our community.
- Servant leadership and being a generous leader.
- The importance of authenticity and direct communication.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode as much as I did.
Transcript
Sean Blake:
Hello, welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name's Sean Blake and I'll be your host today. Today, we have a really interesting guest and a fantastic episode ahead for you. Our guest today is Alana Mai Mitchell. Alana is a results coach, author, podcast host, and Senior Product Development Manager at one of Australia's largest banks where she works with Agile teams every day. She has over 13 years experience in digital financial services and coaching. She's spoken live on Channel 10 here in the Australian media and has had her mental health story featured in publications, like The Daily Mail and Mamma Mia. She's the author of a book, Being Brave, and she's the host of the Eastern Influenced Corporate Leader Podcast.
Sean Blake:
We covered a lot of ground in today's episode. We talked about communication styles. We talked about the importance of putting your hand up and telling your manager when you want to be challenged more and to be exposed to new opportunities. We talked about the importance of building trust with your team and disclosing some vulnerabilities about yourself. We covered Alana's mental health journey over the course of six years, and that journey continues today. What she's learned and what we can learn from her experience to better look after our teams and people in our community. We talked about going first in servant leadership and being a generous leader. The importance of authenticity and direct communication. I hope you enjoyed today's episode as much as I did. Let's get started. Alana, thanks so much for joining us on the Easy Agile Podcast today. It's great to have you here.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Thanks so much, Sean.
Sean Blake:
Before we jump into our conversation, Alana, I'm just going to do an acknowledgement to country. We'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we're recording today, the Watiwati people of the Tharawal speaking nation, and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging. We extend that same respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples who are tuning in today.
Sean Blake:
Well, Alana, there's so much to talk about today. The background is, we used to be colleagues in the financial services industry. We bumped into each other again out of the blue at Agile Australia '21 Conference, just at the end of last year, which was a great conference. We thought we'd have you on the podcast because you've got so many different stories to tell, but I thought maybe we could start this episode by talking about your career journey and how working with Agile Teams has weaved into your career trajectory.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Yeah, sure. Agile really came into the forefront right back in 2013. I always remember my first Agile training. We had a team day, where I was working at the time. We had an external facilitator come in because the Agile framework was something totally new to financial services at that time. We played Lego. We had each of our wider team was divided into smaller teams, like scrum teams, all this new terminology. Then we were building island and we had an island each and the product owner was feeding user stories in from the customer. Partway through we were building, I think, a rocket launcher and then no, we didn't want to rocket launcher anymore.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
We wanted to tweak it. We had to adapt to things on the fly. I always remember that experience because it was so transformative, just having such a direct and collaborative way of working with people on a project. To this day, of all the Agile trainings and experiences that I've gone through, it's always the ones that are really interactive that I've remembered the most and gained the most and taught them, like learnt them myself as a participant and then taught them to other people as well.
Sean Blake:
Along the way, do you think, you've been through all these training sessions and you've been working with teams on the ground. What have you found from Agile, which is a big topic, but what have you found to be the most transformative and the most helpful from the way that these teams used to do things to the way that they do them now?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I would say communication. What I found was, because I had the contrast with both, I've worked in Water Force style projects and Agile projects as well. I think the biggest part is the amount of effort and rigor that we would go through reviewing requirements and have those be delivered into technology. Then it go quiet and you not hear from technology until they come back with something and they're like, "I've got a baby." You're like, "What kind?" The difference with Agile is that you are able to co-create them.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
You're creating with your customer or your end user, if you're working with an internal user, and then you are also working with technology and finding out what kind of constraints technology has or what kind of ideas they have as well. You have that ability to communicate with the dev. Sometimes your devs are on-shore, often cases they're offshore. We're all remote now, so it doesn't make as much difference as it did when we were in the office. You can really just pull away a lot of the process that gets in between people and have conversations. That's what I really think is the most transformative part.
Sean Blake:
Great. Yeah, so that communication. Do you feel like the communication throughout COVID and working remotely has been more challenging? Are you one of those people that find those face-to-face communication skills, you really prefer the face-to-face or has remote been okay for you? Because I know some people have struggled. Some people have found it easier to be on Zoom all the time.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Well, I mean, when I go in the office and we have that brief time where we were back in the office, I had a smile on my face the whole time. Because I just love seeing people and I'd go around and walk over to my team and say, "Hey, how are you going?" Just catch up with them. I think the one piece that's missing for me in the remote working whilst there's greater flexibility, you can do multiple things at the same time. You focus a lot of your work. You can get a lot more done quicker. I do find that informal relationship building, you need to actually schedule in time or pick up the phone out of the blue and connect with someone.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Whereas in the office, I would just find that because people were there and I don't know, you might be having lunch at the same time or going downstairs for something at the same time or even the corridor conversations that happen after the meeting where you can just chase someone or ask someone a question or they chase you and you just get things done. It's just different. I'd say it's more, the catch ups are more scheduled and formal, I find in a remote work setting.
Sean Blake:
I feel the same way. I feel the small talk and the talk about the weekend on Zoom is much harder for me and much more tiring to try and sustain that than in person. It becomes more naturally. I really have to make a big effort, especially on one-to-ones with people in the team when I'm trying to check in on their health and wellbeing and how they're going at work. I just find that much more exhausting than what I do in person. I think it's just those nonverbal communication skills and you can see people's body language easier when you're in the office.
Sean Blake:
Someone's slumped at their chair for six hours out of a seven-hour work day. Then you're like, "Oh, something's wrong." If you know that you've got to get on Zoom and try and pretend to be happy and that everything's okay, then you can fake it a little bit easier. Of course, there's loads of benefits to remote work, as you say. That human element personally, I find it's much more challenging to replicate using digital tools. Maybe there'll be more innovation that comes, but the time will tell on that.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Yeah. On that, I wanted to add some of my friends in the technology space. Talking about the metaverse and how at the moment you and I are having this conversation through screens. I'm in my space, in my house, and you can see my painting in the background and I can see that you've got a podcast set up. One of my friends was talking about how, he's an architect, and so he was thinking about how we create digital spaces. When we meet digitally, if we were meeting as our avatar, what kind of space would facilitate better conversation? That blew my mind when he was talking about that. I was like, "Oh, I hadn't even thought of that." Absolutely, you could meet in a virtual space because we're doing what we've got with the tools that we have today, but the tools can change.
Sean Blake:
I guess it's almost certain they will change. I can't see that Zoom will be the market leader forever. I'm sure there'll be things that come along very soon that will try and replicate some of those physical experiences that we miss so much of being in the office and having those social experiences together. Alana, I'm wondering about the teams that you work with now or in the past, those Agile teams, do you have any tips for people who are new to Agile teams or maybe they're coming in?
Sean Blake:
They want to improve their communication, whether they're remote or in office, and improve their organization's Agile maturity, but they're just finding it a bit of a struggle. Do you have any tips for people who are just, they're butting their heads up against the wall and they can't seem to make progress with some of those patterns and habits that you talked about, like taking requirements away and not knowing what's happening for so many months or years before you hear something back from technology? How do you actually start to influence that culture and behavior, if you're new to Agile?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I'm going to take a slightly different approach on that to answer your question. Because the thing that came to mind for me was when I in Outward Bound, which is a remote wilderness organization in 2012 in the US. I was instructing there. One of the frameworks that they use is William Glass' Choice Theory. Choice Theory talks about that we have five needs, and I'll put myself on the spot. Well, I'll mention some of them, because I can't remember all of them. There's like need for fun. Some people have a high fun need. Then there's like need for power, like feeling powerful. There's like, love and belonging, is another important need. There's two others, which I can't recall right now. I think when you are coming out of a situation, from a perspective, you've tried a couple of times when you're approaching it, and not getting anywhere, I would have a look at what needs am I, myself looking to get met out of this communication.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Then on the flip-side, what needs is my communication partner or the team that I'm working with? What is the most important need for them? As we were talking about remote working, like the fun need. People love to have fun and you can actually have fun at work. It doesn't need to be separate. Thinking about like, if you have a high fun need, and you also notice your team has that as well. How can you address that in your communication style or bring out some kind of activities that can bring that to life? I would always go back to what are my needs and what are the needs of other people that I'm working with? Because when you're working with different teams, they have different agendas, they have different goals. If you can figure out what you have in common, it's a lot easier to bring another team or people in those team on the journey, once you figured out what the common ground is.
Sean Blake:
That's great advice. Think about it from their point of view, rather than just what you need and your own agenda and try and adapt to your approach to them. That's really good. I saw this quote recently, Alana, which reminded me a little bit about your mental health journey, which we'll talk about more in a moment. The quote was about, when you're looking for a new role or a new job, you shouldn't just look for a great company to work for. You should look for a great manager to work for, because the influence and your experience as an employee, working for a manager, is often so much more important than and influential than just picking a great or a well-known company to work for. Have you found that to be true in your own career?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Oh, yeah. I have found that some really phenomenal leaders. In a previous organization that I was working in, I like to keep learning and growing all the time. In previous roles, sometimes I get bored. It happens. That's really valuable to organizations because I'm constantly looking at where to improve things. I had a time where my manager was focused on other things and learning and development wasn't as important. Then I had a lady named Christina come in and Christina was like fire. She was just, "This is what we got to do." Open to change, really clear communicator, she's from the US. She's really direct in a compassionate way and she's really progressive as well. I found because of her influence in the organization.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Also, through my willingness to put my hand up and say, "I'm willing to participate." Which is, for the people who are tuning in, it's not just about the leader creating the opportunities for you and saying, "Hey, present to this general manager forum or executive general manager forum." Or whatever it is. It's also about you saying, "Hey, I'm willing and I'd love to." And communicating what you are after. We met on that path and I had some of the most, stronger success working with Christina. I was fortunate at that the culture was also really great. The immediate team culture needed to shift as well, which is part of why Christina came on board, and the company culture is really good.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I would say on the point on like manager over culture is that when you are someone who is progressive and you're wanting to shape the culture for the better, you're going to find cultures that need a little attention or need a little work or things that aren't quite as performing as well as they are. With the sales perspective, opportunity plus. If you go to a culture and everything's amazing, you're sure you can make it a little bit more amazing. Really, when you have the support of your manager, who's, you see these initiatives and they're going to say, "Okay, go for it. I've got this GM forum coming up that you can present at, or let's find your sponsor. Let's find your mentor." That the two of you working as a team can be at the forefront of the new culture, which impacts the rest of the culture.
Sean Blake:
Interesting. I don't know if I've ever been in a culture that's perfect and overachieving and too good, but absolutely you can get too comfortable and complacent in roles and you can almost just be a little bit shy from putting your hand up for those opportunities. Do you think there's many cultures out there that are too good? How do you assess the quality of a culture before you accept the role and start working in that team?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Oh, good question. I always asked, what's the vision and how does it relate to this role? I want to hear it from the hiring manager before I join a company. What I'm looking for is I'm asking that question to multiple people. I'm looking for a congruence, about the hiring manager sees a similar story as to what their peer, who's maybe interviewing in the second interview or their leader in the third interview. I'm looking for those things to match up, because that's telling me there's consistency. It's just, I'm getting the same story. That they're also communicating well. That would be a sign to me. Yeah, that's about what I do.
Sean Blake:
That's good. Good tip. Alana, you have a quote on your website, which talks about your mental health journey. It says, "I have totally recovered from five mental health breakdowns across six years, where doctors once talk would me, I would be homeless." That sounds like a lot of hardship and a lot of sweat and tears and pain over many years. Do you want to walk us through a little bit of that journey and what you've learned about yourself through those experiences?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Oh, yeah. Thanks for pulling that out from the site, Sean. In 2013, I started to notice that things weren't right. I wasn't feeling myself. I sought help from a counselor, career counselor. Because I thought, "Is it my career?" I said, "Am I not in the right job?" I spoke to a psychiatrist and a psychologist and they did a little bit of an investigation, but no one really got to what was going on. Then I made some quick decisions in my career, which I look back on and I think, "Wow, I really was in the throes of it and not thinking clearly at all when I made those choices." I found myself, about November 2014, in between roles. As someone who was previously really ambitious, like high-achiever, chronic high-achiever without having a role and a career prospect at the moment back then was a big deal.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I had what was called a psychotic episode. Essentially, that was like me, believing deluded thoughts and not having a really strong grip on reality, having some story going on in my head that wasn't true at all. It ended up because I was taken by ambulance to hospital. Then still at that point, people didn't really know what was going on. I was a in mental health ward and came out from that, started on medication, which improved things. I thought, and this is part of why I had the multiple psychotic episodes, is that I thought that the stress of being in between jobs or stressful situations at work, I thought they were the triggers for the psychotic episodes.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I would take the medication for a while, get better temporarily, think everything was normal, stop the medication. Then six months later I would have another breakdown. Then that happened over six years and I realized towards the fifth and final, so that was when I was running a coaching business that had a few clients at the start and then we didn't have any clients at all. I essentially ran out of money and got into debt. Then when the doctor learned about my financial situation, he said, "You're going to be homeless." I was so offended. I was like, "How dare you." I was like, "No, I will not. I will not." I look back now and I'm so thankful for him sharing that with me, because he provided me with a choice. Something to push against and choose another way. He activated my will, from me going from being offended to being thankful, where I'm at today.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I charted my way out of that. Now, I have well-managed schizophrenia and I take medication. I'll be taking medication for the rest of my life. It's part of who I am. I don't experience like, some people have a lot of appreciation for, because I know that they're in their mental health journey. It's not all smooth sailing, even after they have an answer of a diagnosis. It still can be challenging in there's up days and down days. For me, I'm consistent. It's been now coming up to four years since the doctor and I had that conversation in the hospital. Life is just incredible since then.
Sean Blake:
That's great. I'm so happy to hear that. Thank you for sharing your story with our audience. I think it's really important, isn't it? To be vulnerable and to share the truth about things that have happened in the past. Do you think that there's something that we can learn? With the people that you work with now, do you have a clearer understanding or are you looking for signs of people in your life who might be struggling with some of the similar issues and what can we do as people in our own communities and working with teams to look out for each other and to better support each other with some of these mental health issues front of mind so that we can be more supportive?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I always listen for and check in with how the team is doing and it's not just, you ask how are you, and you're listening for more than what they say. If they say they're good, how are they saying it? We had that conversation before about the remote working and it's different. To come to the, are you okay, and we have the, are you okay days. Someone asked me in the office where we were actually working together. They're like, "Are you okay, Alana?" I couldn't answer her. It's not always as simple as getting a no, sometimes it's, you don't get a response. Then the alarm does go off. I really think taking in all the points of interaction that you have with someone and aligning to, is that consistent with how do they were, is there something different, check in with them, how is it going? If you're having a conversation, great. If they're sharing with you, even better.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
If they're not, you can always just check in with yourself and being like, "Is it something you need?" As to, why are they not sharing or is that something that's going on with them as well? The other piece I wanted to tie it, bring it back to the Agile leadership piece and from the conference that Agile Australia that we were at. I really see that building trust with teams is so key. We're in this remote working environment or hybrid working environment, depending on what office you're in. It really is important to build trust with your team. One of the quickest ways you can do that is by sharing vulnerably with what you have to share. I don't mean going for exposure and putting yourself in vulnerable situations where you are uncomfortable with what you share.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
It's disclosure, so it's something that you're 100% comfortable within yourself, and you've accepted it within yourself and you share that with your team in openness. When you do that, you see that your team also, they hear it and they mirror it as well. You go first and they share. The mental health example, I shared that on LinkedIn. I've shared it in situations with my team. Then I've been invited to talks and I've had people approach me. It really builds without having to go through a lot of, I ask this thing of this person, do they deliver it above and beyond expectations when I ask for it? How many times do you need to go through that process before you trust someone versus you, coming out and creating an environment of trust through of vulnerability? I do caveat that it's like not oversharing, it's sharing what you're comfortable with at that point in time, and that might change as you go on.
Sean Blake:
Interesting. Does this apply to leaders as well? I know that you've spoken about being a generous leader in the past, and that reminds me of servant leadership, which is another kind of Agile phrase that you hear come up quite a lot. This idea of going first, disclosing what you're comfortable with to your team, even as a leader, showing vulnerability is really important. I know in my experience, if you can share some of the honest and harsh realities of what it's like to be in your position, then your team are more empathetic with the challenges that you have.
Sean Blake:Because a lot of people assume that when you are in a position of leadership and responsibility, then things are easier because you can just delegate or you've got budget to solve some of these problems, but it's not actually the reality of it. The reality of it is you struggle with things just like anyone else. By sharing and disclosing things with people at all levels of the organization, then that helps to build empathy and a bit more care and support no matter what level you're at. Are there other things or habits or qualities of a generous leader or a servant leader that you've seen or that you try and model or encourage?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
The big one that stands out for me is authenticity. Really knowing yourself, knowing what your leadership style is, knowing what your challenges are, what your strengths are, what you're working on and being authentic about that. When you feel something, sharing what you feel, not having to feel like you need to say it a different way or sugarcoat it, being able to speak your mind in a way that's direct and compassionate. We're not going for like arrogance, and we're not going for wishy washy. We're going for direct and compassionate, then share what's in your heart, so authenticity. Those are the leaders that you, I'm so glad you brought up empathy because when you're vulnerable, empathetic, and authentic, those are the leaders that really stand out for you and me.
Sean Blake:
That's great advice. Authenticity, direct communication, build empathy. All right, thanks for sharing that.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
You're welcome.
Sean Blake:
Alana, how did you decide that you wanted to write a book about some of your experiences and can you tell us about how your book, Being Brave, has changed your life and how you think about sharing your story?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I naturally have a lot of things going on. I love projects. I love it, that's why I'm in projects. Because I love setting a goal and reaching it. The company I was working at had done a number of workshops and I got to a point where I didn't have as many activities going on. I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting. I don't have as much stuff going on." This was just at the start of the pandemic in 2020. A friend, a really dear friend of mine said, "Try meditation. Try meditation daily." I meditated each day and I had been surrounded, my network is very much of a coaching network. I know a lot of coaches and they had written their own books as well. I was on the radar and I was meditating and I got the idea to write a personal memoir about my story.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
It's really interesting that even in through that process of doing a lot of personal development work and going through the process of writing the story, there were still some things in that, that I wasn't quite comfortable owning yet. It's been, since I wrote the book that I've accepted that. In a book, if people read it, I talk about psychotic episodes. I don't talk about schizophrenia because it was all later when I was asked to do a media thing about schizophrenia, that I was like, "Okay, yep. Time to own that." I feel like the book at a point in time had me accept all that had happened with unconditional love and then to still, modeling that piece of going for disclosure and not exposure. Still, I had my fragility on what I wasn't ready to disclose yet. Since then, that had progressed further.
Sean Blake:
That's awesome. That therapy you're sitting down to write the story actually helped flesh out the story itself and you came to terms with some of those things that happened. What has been the reception to the book?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Most people, when they pick up the book, it's a short book, so some people even call it a booklet, because it's 11,000 words. It's short. They say, "Wow, I read that in an hour and a half, in one sitting. I couldn't put it down." someone had said, "It's the story of the famous rising from the ashes." They can take a lot of inspiration from it. The point of the book and a lot of what we're talking about vulnerability is going first as the leader. You set an example that others can follow in, so that will flow into their lives as well. The book is set out with a story and a few questions at the end that people can go through for their own insight.
Sean Blake:
Great, awesome. Alana, is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we start wrapping up the episode today?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I did, because I know this is about Agile more so, and that's a really important topic to your audience. I did write and have a think about after that conference we went to, Agile Australia, about what is beyond the Spotify model? Because the Spotify model is very, word is spoken about it at the moment with the crews and the tribes and squads of course, and the chapter lead models and all that they have, which I'm sure everyone tuned in would be really familiar with. I started to think about, what are the things that are relevant beyond the Spotify model? What's next? If your organization is at a point where you've already at your job at some of that, and you're looking for what's next. I did write an article about that. It's on LinkedIn, and I'll give it to you. If you want to, you can put it in the show notes.
Sean Blake:
That's awesome. We will definitely do that. Where can people go to find out more about you? Where can they buy your book or visit your website?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
My site is www.alanamaimitchell.com. On there is more about my story. There's a few things about coaching, which may be relevant. I'm not coaching at the moment, I'm more focused on my career in financial services. Then the book is on Amazon and it's in English and also in Spanish. There's the audio book and also the print book and the eBook.
Sean Blake:Awesome. Well, Alana, thanks for disclosing what you've disclosed today and sharing your story with us. I've learned a lot about your experiences, and I've got a lot to think about, to reflect on, how to be a more generous leader. Thanks for spending time with us and being part of the Easy Agile Podcast.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
You're so welcome. Thanks for having me on the show, Sean.
Sean Blake:
Thanks, Alana.