Slides from the talk at Agile Cambridge 2018, with Paul Taylor, "Agile@ASOS - Building an outstanding agile delivery community"

1. Agile @ ASOS
Building an outstanding
Agile Delivery
community
Paul Taylor & Carlo Beschi

2. Paul
Started writing code in 1998
Spent time at places like Conchango,
Detica, Microsoft, Nationwide, Credit
Suisse, McLaren, Lloyds of London
Realised after a while that he had a
knack of running engineering teams
and coaching people
Now working at ASOS as their
Engineering Competency Lead

3. Carlo
Started in 2001 as a web developer.
Worked as a team leader, IT manager,
co-founder, Program Manager and,
since 2011, Agile Coach.
Employers include REA Group, YOOX,
4finance and ASOS - since 2017.

4. THE
NUMBER
ONE
FASHION
DESTINATIO
N FOR
TWENTY-
SOMETHING
S
16M+ACTIVE
CUSTOMERS
FROM
AROUND THE
WORLD
WE SELL
OVER 85,000
PRODUCTS
£3 BILLION
TURNOVER
IN 2017/18
10M+ACTIVE
MOBILEAPP
DOWNLOADS
20.1M+ SOCIAL
MEDIA
FOLLOWERS

5. Here and now
a personal journey to create an outstanding community
Maturity times
Early years and
growth
What we learned

6. 3 things
The right peopleHealthy community Be patient
Paramount for
sharing and
learning
Do everything
you can to
keep them
Good things
come to those
that wait
to take away

7. Agile Delivery at ASOS: early
days and growth (2015 – 2016)

8. Hello ASOS
• Time to start your new job as Principal Development Manager
• You are dotted line to a group without line management
• You are new, you don’t understand history or context

9. “To organise them properly”

10. So what were they up to?
• There are 12 or so “development manager” people
• They manage teams to deliver a lot of value
• They are in fact a very nice group of people
• However, they appear to have a weekly “moan”
So what would you do?

11. First things first…

12. Trust with your crew
• Why this matters
• Relationships are fragile if trust not there
• People don’t tell you the truth; what the real problems are
• How you can behave
• Being you
• Being open and transparent
• Sticking to your commitments
• Showing your own vulnerabilities
• Ideas for making this happen
• Spending dedicated time with people
• Sharing personal objectives
• Get the elephant in the room

13. On with the day job…

14. The Development Manager
What was the problem?
• Role was not clear
• Responsibilities not clear either
• Expectation from others not consistent
• A part of me died when I read the job spec

15. The Agile Delivery Manager
• New title
• New role description
• Clear competency
matrix
• Sold it to all of the
team (plus decision
makers)

16. What does an ADM do?

17. Any mistakes so far?

18. Recruitment
We needed more, that meant a lot of recruitment
Fix the process Be successful
Clearly defined 3 stage interview
process
Shared telephone and 1st stage
interviews across other ADMs
Introduction of retrospective ensure we
see them in action
Focused recruitment into target platform
Getting in front of the right people at the
right time
Get your on-boarding right
2015 we had 14 Dev Managers
2016 we grew to 24 ADMs and 1
Agile Coach
PS: we now have 40 + ADMs

19. Community of Practice
Shared vision
A community to collaborate,
share experiences, learn
from each other, increase
effectiveness and improve
delivery approach in a
supportive environment

20. "A community of practice can exist as long as
the members believe they have something to
contribute to it, or gain from it.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice

21. Getting it right
Focus
• Rebirth
• Stability
• Continuity
• Mix it up
Become
• the anchor
• a knowledge manager
• Encourager
Create
• Community of practice
• Active Workplace community
• Lunch and learn sessions
• Initiatives community
• Nights out!
Community

22. Learning with internal & external
events
• Scrum Master certification
and Lean Kanban
Foundation
• Soft skills training
• Lunch and Learn sessions
• External Speakers
• Hosting external meetups
• Take advantage of what
your company already
offers

23. Don’t forget the Lego

24. Measuring, the first initiative
• How do we know we are succeeding?
• We need some data points right?
• No on likes to be measured
• Conversations such as “why should I measure this?
• What do you measure?
• Start with a simple template

25. Initiatives
Continuous improvement
• Create some
• Drive them
• Get others to own them
• Change them
Get them going, get traction, but
you can end up with lots of them….

26. We need more help…

27. Agile Delivery at ASOS:
maturity times (2017)

28. Initiatives
Choose 3. Together.
• Treat this as a backlog: visualize,
refine, score (value/effort),
prioritize.
• Be transparent and inclusive – let
ADMs co-lead this exercise, let
them all know reasons why,
progress and outcome.

29. Team Health checks: Host Leadership
• Customized version of Spotify Health Check,
been around for 2 years, lost momentum
• Mission: revamp it!
• My approach:
• Assess
• Inject energy & hands-on help
• Work with the existing team
• Try things …

30. Working as a coaching team
• Lightweight process, simple tools
• Openness. Share what you do, share
what you know, share how you feel
• Trust. Believe that the others are
honest & open with you. Believe that
they are the right people, and that they
know what they are doing
• Respect. approaches different from
yours can work as well (or better!)

31. Serving the ADM crew

32. Beyond Agile Delivery (2018)

33. Time to reflect
• The people you work with have your support and coaching,
however, “who is taking care of you?”
• Find others to help and coach you (e.g. executive mentors)
• Things get big and broad, take time out to stop, think and go
again
• Don’t do this on your own, always encourage others
• Keep a healthy personal life

34. This is a success story
Because we have been asked to do more,
broader
Be careful what you wish for J

35. Get someone better than you
to do your job

36. 3 things to take away
The right peopleHealthy community Be patient
Paramount for
sharing and
learning
Do everything
you can to
keep them
Good things
come to those
that wait

37. paul.taylor@asos.com
carlo.beschi@asos.com