Embrace Agile - Jargon-free
Agile values (AV) and Agile principles (AP) have served as a foundation and source of inspiration as I’ve served in various leadership roles, particularly as I was building out organizations who want to grow quickly, with big results. Earlier in my career, I worked at a consulting firm which practiced Scrum. I absolutely loved it. The daily stand ups, collaborating on sprints, improving through retrospectives— it all made sense to me. But when I left that world I quickly realized that the vocabulary was so specific and “strange” to most corporate environments, and to people who had no training, the Agile terminology actually served as a barrier to people who could benefit from the Agile values and principles.
Customer centric. I’ve heard plenty of strategies and seen plenty of roadmaps which look mighty fancy and are packed full of projections, but not a lot of substance. As COO, I want to embrace the Agile Value (AV) “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” + Agile Principle (AP) “Our highest priority is to satisfy our customer.“ What I have found is that people like this in theory, but have little in their toolkits to not only have clarity on who the customer is they are serving, but to have a real dialogue and relationship. This means engaging with customers should be built into the DNA of your culture. In all of my roles, I make it a point of spending 50% of my time with my customers, and building strong relationships with the people serving them. I go on listening tours, conduct focus groups, test out rough prototypes to get their feedback, and build advisory councils whose purpose is not to rubber stamp, but shape our roadmap and focus. Finally, I remove the barrier between engineers, designers and clients by finding ways for our teams to feel personally connected to our customers, and give them a chance to hear directly what they like and need.
Focus on impact over activity. Ever see those status dashboards with 8 point font updates? How do you know those things are what your customer wants? How do you know those things will drive business results (e.g. revenue, efficiency, employee engagement or risk reduction?) Scrum practices include product framing, and writing up epics and stories which can tie to business value and KPIs. But I learned quickly that asking a sales person to do a product framing exercise doesn’t always land well. As COO, I start by asking questions like “what does success look like?” and “how will we know and measure if we’re being effective?"
Don’t wait for perfect. I once worked on a team where there were lots of lawyers and consultants helping us work on a multiyear program. The result was we spent way too many cycles perfecting an idea before throwing it over the wall to our experts. The idea became watered down and had little impact once completed. This not only slowed us down, but made it difficult to respond to refinements and changes. The AV of “Responding to change over following a plan” + the AP of “Welcome changing requirements" speaks to this. Getting out a draft early to this team, scheduling sessions to talk through the approach and debate the unintended consequences meant we were more innovative and collaborative as we moved quickly together. Over time as we built trust, we were able to get more and more groundbreaking and have even bigger impact in achieving our business objectives.
Communicate and share. The AV “Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools + AP “The most efficient method of conveying information is face-to-face conversation” both speak to collaborative culture I create as COO. What are ways to encourage the human connections and magic that happens when people bring their whole selves to work, feel their ideas and voice is needed, and they have a sense of belonging? When in doubt I pick up the phone over sending an email. I take time to grab coffee and get to know someone. I have a long list of mentees, and work hard to connect people to each other so they can benefit from an expended and diverse network. Yes I create artifacts and use tools to document, but that is a reflection of the conversations that took place.
Focus on learning. More than anything, this AP of “Regularly reflect on how to become more effective then tune and adjust behavior accordingly” is the one which gives me and the organization i’m working with the most impact. I work to build learning into everything we do, in a way that the team takes ownership of. For example, if I have a meeting with a senior stakeholder and my boss, I might call my boss afterwards as ask “what would have made that conversation extraordinary?” I ask for feedback regularly and give it in kind. I build in time for debriefs at regular intervals. We discuss "what’s working and what we want to improve, and what actions we’ll take.” I introduce language to the team let them embrace scientific methods. What is your hypothesis? What will your experiment be? How will you collect and evaluate the data to reach a conclusion?
It’s exciting to embrace agility as a COO, and build a culture which can put your business goals into hyperdrive. Having a toolbox of Agile values, principles and practices has distinguished me in the role. I have learned about the language and norms of the teams I’m joining, and about how to connect to the individuals and build trust so that they are open to working in a new way.
