2018 06-19 DeveloperWeek NY - Building a Lean Culture through Servant Leadership

Building a Lean Culture
through
Servant Leadership
A technical manager’s guide to agility
Vishal
Bardoloi

@bardoloi #AgileLeadership
HELLO!
VISHAL BARDOLOI
Lead Consultant at ThoughtWorks
@bardoloi
medium.com/@v.bardoloi
2

Exploring the relationship
4
Agile
DevOps
Lean
Leadership

#1: Major Airline
6

200 million visitors
annual e-commerce traffic
3 years old
current portal
9.5% conversion
shop → buy
7

“
Let’s build the next version of our e-
commerce platform!
8

Project Motivations & Goals
9
! 15% Conversion
! Better user experience
! Desktop + Phone + Tablet
! Latest technology stack
! Scalable infrastructure
! Lower TCO
! Better talent retention

@bardoloi #AgileLeadership 10
3 Years
$30 Million
150 people
1 Million hours
12 dev teams
Later...

9.2%
Conversion rate (after 2 weeks of go-live)
12
↓

Poor Results
! Didn’t meet business
goals
! Over budget
! Missed schedule
! Highly coupled architecture
! Prod deploys: Once a
month
! Daily builds took 4-8 hours
13

Did all the right things
Process
! Scrum
! 2-week sprints
! User stories
! Velocity, backlog
! JIRA, Confluence,
Hipchat, ...
Technology
! React front-end
! Java Microservice
APIs
! Jenkins CI
! 96% unit test
coverage
14
People
! Small teams
○ Aligned to a product flow
! Each team had:
○ Product Owner
○ ScrumMaster (not PM)
○ QA
○ BA
○ Devs

What happened?

#2: Sports Management Organization
16

“
We need a new e-commerce platform!
17

Set up to fail?
18
Statement of Work
Feature a
Feature c
Feature d
Feature e
Feature z
…..
Feature b
Feature f
! Fixed scope
! Over-promised by 3x
! Fixed bid contract
! Deadline non-negotiable
! Limited resources

6 months later...

Successful Go-Live!
20
! Exactly on time
! Under budget
! Pilot program started earning $$$ at 4
months
! 0 customer service calls
! Rave reviews on Social Media

66% of original scope: didn’t implement
21
Statement of Work
Feature a
Feature c
Feature d
Feature e
Feature z
…..
Feature b
Feature f

How?

What does your project lifecycle look like?
24

How soon does you project start delivering value?
25

The reality of most projects
26
Time

The reality of most projects
27
Time
++ Tech Debt
++ Bugs
++ Architectural Coupling
++ Development friction
++ Stress
++ Attrition
-- Product quality
-- Code quality
-- Decision flexibility
-- Employee happiness
-- Value to end user
Time

“
“We need a better ____!”
(process / solution / methodology)
28

Outside-In:
doing vs being agile

Agile is deceptively simple
32
Observe
Decide
Act

Being (Why)
▪ must come from within
▪ grows through practice
▪ experimentation & failure
▪ cannot be mandated
▪ is never complete
Doing (What, How)
▪ easier to mandate top-down
▪ easier to get certified on
▪ easier to measure
▪ easier to teach
▪ easier to blog/speak/write about
▪ easier to scale!
Why people end up “Doing” Agile
33

DevOps can’t succeed
where Agile is failing
Agile can’t scale up
when it isn’t scaling down
34

Case Study #1:
A simple scenario
Rediscovering agility from the ground up

Set up to fail?
36
Statement of Work
Feature a
Feature c
Feature d
Feature e
Feature z
…..
Feature b
Feature f
! Fixed scope
! Over-promised by 3x
! Fixed bid contract
! Deadline non-negotiable
! Limited resources

66% of original scope: didn’t implement
37
Statement of Work
Feature a
Feature c
Feature d
Feature e
Feature z
…..
Feature b
Feature f

Understand your users to define “Value”
39
Statement of Work
Feature a
Feature c
Feature d
Feature e
Feature z
…..
Feature b
Feature f
For each and every feature:
! “Why?”
! “For whom?”
! “How many?”
! “How do they use it?”
! “What alternatives?”
! “What if…?”

Their feature request
Underlying need or problem
The right solution
“Why?” x 5
“What if?” x 10

! Solves the user’s true needs
! While also doing this:
○ Fits the budget
○ Can evolve in complexity over time
○ Is simpler than the problem it’s trying to solve
○ Doesn’t create undue tech debt
○ Doesn’t burn out the team
○ Is maintainable
The “Right” Solution or Architecture
41

! What is the most valuable feature you need right now?
! If this were the last sprint, how would we build the feature?
! What is the quickest way to test that our solution works?
! How should we architect this so we can pivot or add layers quickly?
The Art of Designing Experiments
42

1 good MVP
>>>>>>
10 requirements gathering meetings

Real-world feedback
>>>>>>
Your opinion

Shared understanding of the
customer’s problem
>>>>>>
Your clever solution

Solving their real needs
>>>>>>
Following orders

The tighter this loop, the more agile you will be
47
Observe
Decide
Act

Servant leaders tighten this feedback loop
48
Observe
Decide
Act
! Delegate decision-making authority
close to the action
! Provide goals, context and coaching to
aid decision-making
! Bring a keen knowledge of customers
and the business environment
! Open lines of communication with
other teams
! Make it safe to fail
! Create trust and inclusion
! Create a learning environment

! Make metrics visible
! Ask for details
! Hold people accountable (including
themselves)
! Tie organization’s goals to team’s
metrics
! Welcome productive conflict
Servant leaders share accountability and make metrics public
49
Scope Done
Today 102 ↑ 45 →
Yesterday 100 45

Leadership has a bigger
impact on agility than
any methodology or
implementation detail
50

Agile is a mindset
DevOps is a culture
Lean is a way of thinking

True Understanding
>>>>>>
following someone else’s script

Profile of a
Servant Leader
Some indicators that you may be one

“Servant Leader”
“Courageous Executive”
“Transformational Leader”

TECH@CORE
BUSINESS
SUPPORTING ROLE COLLABORATION
TECH-LED
DIFFERENTIATION
Formal walls
and moats
Tech creates
digital assets
Tech / business
boundaries blur
Collaborative
execution
Tech pervades a
digital business
TECH

“Random forests, naïve Bayesian estimators,
RESTful services, gossip protocols, eventual
consistency, data sharding, anti-entropy…
walk into certain Amazon meetings, and
you may momentarily think you’ve
stumbled into a computer science lecture.”
- Jeff Bezos, 2010 Amazon letter to shareholders
Tech Savvy Leadership
57

Not this:
Tech Savvy Leadership
58

Experimentation mindset encourages:
! Evolution: small steps towards “better”
! Constraints → innovation
! Quick, real world feedback
! Data-driven decisions
! Giving teams autonomy to run experiments
60

! Humility
○ “I don’t have all the answers”
○ “I could be wrong”
! Curiosity
○ “Why?”
○ “Why not?”
! Courage
○ “This seems like a good bet. Let’s do it!”
○ “Ok, that was dumb. Let’s pivot at once.”
Experimentation mindset requires:
61

“
If it hurts, do it more often.
Frequency reduces difficulty.
- old DevOps proverb
64

Not this:
! Tech Debt
! Boredom
! Stagnation
! Lack of autonomy
! Bureaucracy
! “Death march” projects
Servant leaders only tolerate certain kinds of pain
65
But this:
! Embracing change
! Constraints
! Balancing priorities
! Non-stop learning
! Occasional failure

Command & Control leaders permit silos to flourish
67
“My architecture”
“My budget”
“My idea”
“Not my problem”
“Not my job”
“Not my decision
to make”

Command & Control leaders love decision-making authority
68
Observe
Decide
Act Face
Consequences

“I’m the decider... and I decide what is best.”
- a famous person

Do this:
! Reiterate the vision
! Provide “fitness functions”
! Want progress
! Measure for outcomes
! Remove process barriers
! Give autonomy
Servant Leaders don’t fear loss of control; they give it away
Instead of this:
! Micromanage the details
! Give orders
! Want “perfect”
! Measure for compliance
! Process-heavy
! Aggregate authority
70
e.g. Bjorn-o-grams, Amazon’s 10 Leadership Principles

Do this:
! Learning, growth culture
! Actual $$ set aside for training
! Open, easy knowledge
sharing
! Frequent lateral career moves
! Think in terms of potential
! High influx of talent
! Low attrition
Instead of this:
! “My folks aren’t smart enough to
figure out this stuff”
! “We don’t have the skills to do
this internally”
! Think in terms of roles & titles
! Little flexibility to move internally
! Constant attrition
Servant leaders intentionally invest in people’s growth
72

“
73
“Our architects and engineers have had to
advance research in directions that no academic
had yet taken. Many of the problems we face
have no textbook solutions, and so we --
happily -- invent new approaches.”
- Jeff Bezos, 2010 Amazon Letter to Shareholders

“
“The scope didn’t change.
Our understanding grew.”
- Jeff Patton, “User Story Mapping”
75

“Everything looks like a failure in the middle” - Virginia Satir
76

5 or 6 conflicting demands are pulling at you at all times
78
Budget
Schedule
Tech Debt
Customer
demands
People

The key to the Wobble
79
Budget
Schedule
Tech Debt
Customer
demands
People
1. You can never balance all the
dimensions
2. AND you can’t ignore any
dimension for too long, or else
it overwhelms all the others

! Mix of delivery and foundation teams
! Small steps towards “better”
! Sustainable pace
! Scheduled tech debt pay-down sprints
! Planned investments in people
Servant leaders actively balance delivery, investment, and growth
80

Transformational Leaders
create & support a
Generative Culture
81

Case Study #2:
A complex scenario
Indirectly influencing change in a large organization

Large e-Commerce Project: Poor Results
! Didn’t meet business
goals
! Over budget
! Missed schedule
! Highly coupled architecture
! Prod deploys: Once a
month
! Daily builds took 4-8 hours
84

Even though they were doing all the right things
Process
! Scrum
! 2-week sprints
! User stories
! Velocity, backlog
! JIRA, Confluence,
Hipchat, ...
Technology
! React front-end
! Java Microservice
APIs
! Jenkins CI
! 96% unit test
coverage
85
People
! Small teams
○ Aligned to a product flow
! Each team had:
○ Product Owner
○ ScrumMaster (not PM)
○ QA
○ BA
○ Devs

Even if everyone agrees on
what the problem is,
no one agrees
on what the solution should be

Organizational Inertia
>>>>>>
Your project timeline
(and your patience)

In large organizations, one courageous executive is not enough
90
! Executive / Board buy-in
! Imperative to change (external / existential)
! “Unfrozen” middle
! Plain old timing and luck

Cultural Influence
>>>>>>
Any specific actions

Momentum
>>>>>>
One Big Win

Find a catalyst for change

Focus on mitigating risks up front

Attack the problem from all 3 angles
People
! Invest time in training
up front
! Shared deployment
pain across Dev &
Ops
! Shared responsibility
for operational uptime
! Cross-functional
teams
Process
! Work backwards from the
customer to find value
! Small targets, small wins
! Pick early goals that
multiply future capabilities
! Run regular fire drills, so
real fires are handled well
! Retrospectives help the
team improve over time
Technology
! Automate everything
that you can
! Have mitigation plans:
things will go wrong
! Use SaaS for any
functionality not core
to your business
! Apply Strangler
pattern to minimize
code migration risk
96

Be prepared to accept partial success

Thinking deeply about your
organization’s reality is a better
use of your time than blindly
implementing a methodology
99

Transformational Leader: Impact
! Highly correlated with:
○ software delivery performance
○ employee satisfaction (eNPS)
! Predictive of:
○ high performing teams
○ Lean Product Development capabilities
○ Lean technical capabilities
- Accelerate (2018, Forsgren et al.)
101

Transformational Leader: Characteristics
1. Vision
2. Intellectual Stimulation
3. Inspirational Communication
4. Supportive Leadership
5. Personal Recognition
102

My leader or manager:
1. Has a clear understanding of where we are going
2. Has a clear sense of where he/she wants our team to be in 5 years
3. Says things that make me proud to be a part of this organization
4. Says positive things about the work unit
5. Challenges me to think about old problems in new ways
6. Has challenged me to rethink some of my basic assumptions about my work
7. Behaves in a manner which is thoughtful to my personal needs
8. Sees that the interests of employees are given due consideration
9. Commends me when I do a better than average job
10. Acknowledges improvement in my quality of work
Transformational Leader: from a follower’s perspective
103

THANKS!
QUESTIONS?
▪ @bardoloi
▪ medium.com/@v.bardoloi

2018 06-19 DeveloperWeek NY - Building a Lean Culture through Servant Leadership

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2018 06-19 DeveloperWeek NY - Building a Lean Culture through Servant Leadership