My talk from Devoxx Belgium 2022 https://youtu.be/6a55nWtbsdE

1. Agile Agency - Trusting
People to Get Things Done
Dr Andy Piper
VP Engineering, Diffblue

3. What You Will Learn
• What makes engineering smooth?
• Theoretical underpinnings to motivation
• Turn the Ship Around!
• Practical guidance from Diffblue

4. Dr Andy Piper
• PhD @Cambridge - Map-Reduce
• Senior Staff Engineer @BEA –
WebLogic Server
• Manager @Oracle – WebLogic
Event Server
• CTO @Push Technology - Real-
time streaming
• Global head valuations tech
@CBRE
• VP Engineering @Diffblue

5. Agile Agency is
Staff want to be empowered but need a
framework to do this safely
Control
Competence
Clarity

6. Steve Jobs is the Counter-Example
• Micro-management and feedback
• Purposely withheld context
• Charm followed by humiliation
• Top-down decision making
https://allaboutstevejobs.com/persona/steve_at_work
It might achieve excellence but who wants to live or work like
that?

7. “Diffblue is made of people who are
extremely passionate, care deeply about the
mission, put customers first and get stuff
done - without unnecessary drama”
Mathew Lodge, CEO Diffblue Ltd
People are important

8. The Engineering Sausage Factory

9. The Engineering Sausage Factory
• Making sausages is a continuous process
• Team needs to operate at sustainable cadence
• Muscle memory is hugely important to efficiency
• The ingredients need to be well prepared and supplied
• Need high quality groomed tickets going into the sprint
• Must be constantly monitored for quality
• Operational efficiency needs to be measured/improved through ceremonies and statistics
• Delivery impact needs to be continuously fed back into the process
This is how we hit deadlines

10. Killing the Engineering Sausage Factory
• Poor quality ingredients
• Poor product input
• Changing the production line
• Team/Management/Company churn
• Dirt in the component parts
• Lack of team cohesion and problem solving
• Manual intervention
• Sprint crashing
• Not providing timely input or output
• Too little / much planning

11. … But Agile Implies Change
• Agile is predicated on change
• Responding quickly to changing requirements
• Encountering problems early in order to micro-pivot
• Delivering value early to align priorities and enable planning of the next increment
• Process improvement

12. Agile Agency is
Control
Competence
Clarity
Staff want to be empowered but need a
framework to do this safely and efficiently

13. Theoretical
Interlude This problem has been analyzed for a
long time based on two philosophical
views of human nature
• People are lazy and self-interested
and need to be controlled (Hobbes)
• People are creative and generous but
societal inequalities (control) distort
this (Rousseau)

14. The MBA View
• Theory X – the idea of scientific
management
• Break down tasks to reduce
required skills
• Predictability and Control
• Assembly lines
People are Bad
• Theory Y – Neo-Human Relations
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
• Hygiene factors
• Self-actualisation
• Job enrichment/satisfaction and
autonomy
People are Good

15. So which is Agile?
Are people good or bad?

16. Agile Agency is
Control
Competence
Clarity
Staff want to be empowered but need a
framework to do this safely and efficiently

17. It’s Both!
People are good and bad

18. How do we provide
Empowerment and a
Framework?

20. Turn the Ship Around!
• L. David Marquet inherited a poorly functioning
team running USS Santa Fe
• Mistakes being made all the time
• No promotions
• High staff turnover
• Trying to follow impossible orders
• Leading in a culture of followers
Developed a new culture based on mutual trust

21. Turn the Ship Around!
• Competence
• Know what we’re doing – training, experience
• Control
• Ownership and empowerment
• Clarity
• Know where we’re going
• Know why we are doing things
Leader-leader not leader-follower
Devolved responsibility

22. Meeting Deadlines through Trust
• Meeting deadlines is easy in leader-leader
• But requires trust
• Missed deadlines often a symptom of inefficient
top-down control
• Poor communication
• Poor motivation
• Long cycle times
Localised decision making is fast and efficient

23. Leader - Leader at Diffblue

24. Competence at Diffblue
• Competence is much easier to achieve with the right people
• Get the right people on the bus with effective hiring
• We determined early on what skills we needed and who had them
• Competence is much easier using people’s strengths
• Get the right people in the right seats
• We reorganized engineering to leverage people’s strengths
• Competence requires experience and muscle memory
• We hired in experience we lacked
• We wrote down and practised our processes
• We didn’t change too quickly

25. Control at Diffblue
• Ironically effective Leader-Leader control starts at the top
• Leaders need to emphasize autonomy and provide opportunities for
independent thought
• Don’t ask for options – ask for a proposed solution based on informed opinion
• Emphasize the need for structured communication
• Write things down rather than just using Slack
• Leader-Leader requires Product buy-in
• Product must be comfortable also devolving decisions
• Comfort comes from visible Competence
• Teams and individuals need appropriate Context and Opportunity
• Product needs effective communication

26. Clarity at Diffblue
• Lucky to have CEO who has a Product background
• Value delivery and feedback runs through everything we do
• Vision and strategy set at the top and cascaded through the organization
• OKRs used at all levels to provide a framework for direction
• Clarity requires that you Do Your Job
• Clarity is lost when we try to do other people’s jobs
• Trust other people to do theirs
• Clarity requires focus and questioning
• Question everything but disagree and commit (or agree)
• At Diffblue this is most evident in the handoff between Product and Engineering

27. Summary
Engineering can be smooth or rough –
the way you do it is all important
People are the key – the right people
working on the right things with a high
degree of autonomy and trust
At Diffblue we have made mistakes but
the Product, Culture and Customers
speak volumes

28. Copilot to Cover:
Why AI can’t replace
developers with robots, but
can make life better
Thursday 11.50 Room 7

29. Learn More About Diffblue Cover
• Talk to us at stand 16
• Visit www.diffblue.com
• Try Cover plug-in & CLI
• www.diffblue.com/try-cover

30. Thank you
Thank you
Any questions?