Simon Powers on Transitioning to Product Teams and Advice for New Managers

Show Notes

• 00:27 Introductions
• 01:44 Working with very large organisations helping them move towards agile ways of working – to make businesses more successful through technology
• 02:05 The changes that have happened in the agile industry over the last 13 years
• 02:13 Initially the focus was on small teams and practices which helped them become more effective
• 02:32 The technological problems of software delivery have largely been solved
• 02:41 The real challenge now is removing impediments from large teams who have to work on a single product
• 03:10 Today the challenges are less technological and more cultural
• 03:28 How large teams function
• 03:58 The challenge of building large-scale, complex products where up to 100, or more, people need to work on the problem collaboratively
• 04:17 The value of having a sense of identity with the wider team rather than just with the nuclear 7 +-2 person two team
• 04:21 The team is everyone who works on the product or service, working collaboratively to meet customer needs
• 04:54 The organisation structure needs to change to support these types of teams
• 05:40 This is hard to achieve and it does work; it needs the right support to enable it to happen
• 05:45 Leaders have to go first – bottom up transformations are not sustainable in the long term
• 05:57 Leadership buy in is needed for the large scale structural and cultural changes which are needed
• 06:32 It’s about not focusing on agility, rather focus on the real challenges which leaders face in their organisations
• 06:58 Leadership support is needed to change structure to create end-to-end cross-functional, collaborative teams who are responsible for complete products
• 07:25 We are looking to create a structure that enables truly self-organizing teams at scale
• 07:41 Implement agile in an agile way – iteratively and incrementally using small experiments
• 08:20 Start by getting everybody involved with a product in a room and support their exploration of the way of working to identify small experiments
• 08:58 The aim is to move towards self-organisation at scale to solve the real business problems that leadership faces
• 09:34 Keys to success include being inclusive, encouraging diversity of opinions, attitudes and ways of thinking
• 10:04 If we create the truly psychologically safe environment then the team can be empowered to run the experiments and make the changes
• 10:42 The challenge with the big agile frameworks is that they perpetuate the “one person is the expert” thinking that takes away from self-organisation and empowerment
• 10:54 Take ideas from the different frameworks and teach them as concepts, but empower the teams to design their own ways of working
• 11:45 The role of middle-tier leaders is to truly adopt a servant leadership mindset and help work out what the team can do to solve their own problems, rather than solving the problems for the team
• 12:24 The role becomes an enabler, helping the teams to become great
• 12:52 Leading larger teams is very different and people moving into that area need to take the time to learn about management and leading people,
• 13:03 Emphasize the creation of an environment such that people can be amazing
• 13:18 Once you’ve created that environment, get out of the way and solve problems around the team
• 13:55 The mistaken belief that management is something that people can just do – it takes learning and deliberate practice to become competent
• 14:34 In order to learn the competencies needed managers should get involved in leadership community groups, and look to your peers to help and network
• 15:12 Find an exemplar, a mentor whom you can trust to help you as you build your own competencies
• 15:32 Different approaches to mentoring programmes in different organisations and industries
• 16:10 People are always willing to give their opinions – be comfortable asking for help
• 16:22 Mentoring is about more than telling someone what to do, it is about growing a person and giving them options so they can work out the solutions for themselves
• 17:02 Trends that Simon is seeing in the large organisations he is working with
• 17:04 Leadership as already discussed
• 17:08 Moving away from agile as a technology solution towards true business agility
• 17:21 The challenges caused by the bottom-up adoptions that have been prevalent – lots of enthusiasm at the lower levels in the hierarchy and a lack of understanding about complex adaptive problems at the more senior levels
• 17:48 Include leadership and understand their problems in order to bring them along on the transformation journey
• 18:27 The need to heal the organisational wound from the split between business and technology
• 18:46 There is no difference between business and technology – we are all in this together
• 18:58 Organisations need to restructure to create product and service-based teams
• 19:15 HR practices and programmes are becoming much more human-friendly than they used to be
• 19:52 In the technology space, the slow move of enterprise architecture from a design function into a risk management function
• 20:22 Architects sitting in and with the teams so teams can solve architecture problems at the point of work
• 21:14 Seeing a slow move in the way technology and teams are funded – moving away from funding projects towards funding capabilities
• 21:56 This funding approach enables accountability for business return around backlog items
• 22:20 The need for honest progress reporting and creating a trusting environment

Mentioned:

• Agile 2018
• Adventures with Agile
• Open Space
• Future Search
• Deep Democracy