Are your technical and business teams at odds with each other? They don't have to be. Join us tomorrow to discover the secret to gaining alignment. Dominica DeGrandis, Director of Learning and Development at LeanKit, will share how clarity on priorities, cross-functional dependencies and team metrics drive unity. You'll learn how to: - Balance business requests with maintenance work - Prioritize up, down and across the hierarchy - Get visibility on cross-functional dependencies Dominica will share her observations while working at a SaaS company on the methods used to create clarity.

1. From Divided to United –
Aligning Technical & Business Teams
@dominicad
ddegrandis.com
@dominicad
Dominica DeGrandis
Director, Learning
& Development
www.leankit.com

2. Alignment: a position of agreement/alliance
@dominicad

3. improving alignment with clarity
@dominicad
Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure/measures?
Communication effective?

4. Nashville, TN August 2015
@dominicad
Katie
Sr. Product Marketing Manager
What do you do
when you are unable
to do what you were hired to do?

5. system limits + delayed delivery =
@dominicad
high demand on
application impacts
architecture
and
features not delivered as
expected,
results in sad panda

6. @dominicad
a move closer to the core changes the game

7. Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure & measures ok?
Communication effective?

8. @dominicad
Customers determine business goals
After innovation of
a new tool,
what are the
priorities based
on customer
demand?
feature
#1
feature
#2
feature
#3

9. @dominicad
capacity limits provoked priority convo
collective
agreement by
leadership
reached after
energetic
discussion
✔ prioritize top
3 features

10. @dominicad
large customer affirms good experience
“you were a
huge part of
moving > 90%
of our projects
from waterfall
to agile.”

11. Not everyone was happy
@dominicad
more please
• ux enhancements
• new features
• better integrations
• faster loading

12. @dominicad
internal customers determine biz goals

13. @dominicad
marketing coordination cost is high
Will product feature
be released in
the timeframe
Marketing team
expects?

14. @dominicad
the need for change was self-evident
Become more
predictable
Allow Sales &
Marketing to
influence the
roadmap

15. @dominicad
Ops team sacrifices go unoticed
Business exec
investigates new
technology
promising zero
impact on tech
teams, but
guess what
happens?

16. @dominicad
Let’s talk about IT like it’s part of the business
Apologies only
go so far.
need actions
to improve
the mindset

17. Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure & measures ok?
Communication effective?

18. @dominicad
transparency is the necessary factor

19. donenext
up
work-in-progresstheme

21. Optimize your workflow –
Avoid starting new projects until
done with current project.
@dominicad

22. All team boards roll up to the roadmap
Each team has a team board
where work is broken down into smaller chunks.
roadmap team board

23. From theme to working software
A3
the most valuable thing that fits within a
sweep
(≤ 5 weeks)
DIV: Deployed, Iterative, Value
(≤ 5 days)
Task
DIV
Task Task
Task
A3
DIV
Task
DIV
Task Task
Task

24. Sequence of DIVs add up to A3 value
DIVs deployed
to prod
donein production

25. @dominicad
Ops Team board Current DIVs

26. MKT MKTFIN
UXMKT
MKT MKT
SLS DEVUXUX
SLS CSS
QAUX
DEVOPS SLS
SLS
1
2
3
4
6
5
DEV
DEV
OPS
How the A3 is populated
Cost of Delay?
Impact to users?What benefits who?
What does feature do?
Sustainability impact? fine print /misc?

28. What? So what? What now?
Demo DIV – Each squad has 5 min to demo their DIV*
*DIV – Deployable Iterative Value

29. Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure & measures ok?
Communication effective?

30. @dominicad
team organization & measures

31. Web DevCore DevOperations Mobile
Product Development team structure 2015

32. FSGD as a company wide thinking tool

33. Web2 - Rocket
Web1 - Groot
Platform Ops
Mobile
Product Development team structure 2016
Analytics
Automation & Tools
Business Enablement

34. @dominicad
conversation on
number of
deployments
metric
• What does it mean to deploy to prod?
• concerns with this measurement?
• What was learned during experiment?
• What counts?
• What doesn’t count?

35. @dominicad
Vanity metric?
Does metric pass “so what?" test?
Does it:
1) Matter to my customer?
2) Help me make a decision?

36. @dominicad
Number of deployments
is easy to game?
Not so easy when
the qualification of a
deployment is that it must be
related to a DIV*, on the
roadmap.
DIV – Deployable Iterative Value

37. Team metric morphed to dept metric
Deployments this Sweep

38. @dominicad
Cycle Time metrics

39. @dominicad
Prod issues impacting cycle time on feature work

40. @dominicad
“Be approximately right instead
of exactly wrong”
~John Tukey

41. Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure & measures ok?
Communication effective?

42. @dominicad
team communication protocols

43. @dominicad
Demo DIV feedback from Biz teams
* DIV - deployed iterative value
“I just want to learn about the things I can sell.
“I don’t want to listen to the technical stuff.”

44. @dominicad
Forum for discussing A3’s
A3 reviews
A3 Wall
• all invited
• context provided
• user perspective
• why’s addressed
• goals explained
• concerns heard
• opinions aired
• feedback welcome

45. @dominicad http://leancoffee.org
Forum for retrospectives

46. @dominicad
Forum for raising & solving problems

47. @dominicad
What makes a great team?
Google two year study results:
Who is on a team matters less than
how team members interact.
The willingness to talk about errors is
by far the most important factor for a team
Amy Edmonson TED talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhoLuui9gX8

48. Alignment requires absolute clarity
@dominicad
Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure/measures?
Communication effective?

49. @dominicad
For the innovators
Generate ideas to
increase transparency

50. @dominicad
For the doers
Investigate and study customer recommendation levels
Net Promoter Score = % promoters - detractors

51. @dominicad
For those with budgets
Offer teams the tools
and training they
need to do their job
well.

52. @dominicad
For the influencers
Acknowledge
perceptions
- then shift
incentives toward
transparency,
safe measures,
& listening.
Wired article - The science of why no one agrees on the color of this dress

53. @dominicad www.ddegrandis.com Dominica DeGrandis www.leankit.com

54. Questions
@dominicad www.ddegrandis.com Dominica DeGrandis www.leankit.com

55. tech stack
@dominicad
.net webservers and SQL DB Servers
Docker hosts node services
Redis for caching and volatile storage
Rabbit MQ for messaging hosted off linux
Puppet for managing infrastructure configuration automation
Tableau for Analytics

56. yes - relational data model limits, but
@dominicad
does the way the
code consumes
the data
factor in?
strangler pattern
in play to tackle
architecture

57. @dominicad
metrics on individuals avoided