This is a true story of one SaaS company's journey to gain alignment across business and technical teams by changing how four important factors were viewed: customer demand, work prioritization, team metrics, and communication etiquette.

1. From Divided to United –
Aligning Technical & Business Teams
@dominicad
ddegrandis.com
@dominicad
Dominica DeGrandis
Director, Learning
& Development
www.leankit.com

2. Alignment: a position of agreement/alliance
@dominicad

3. improving alignment with clarity
@dominicad
Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure/measures?
Communication effective?

4. Nashville, TN August 2015
@dominicad
Katie
Sr. Product Marketing Manager
What do you do
when you are unable
to do what you were hired to do?

5. system limits + delayed delivery =
@dominicad
high demand on
application impacts
architecture
and
features not delivered
as expected,
results in sad panda

6. @dominicad
a move closer to the core changes the game

7. Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure & measures ok?
Communication effective?

8. @dominicad
Customers determine business goals
After innovation
of a new tool,
what are the
priorities based
on customer
demand?

9. @dominicad
capacity limits provoked priority convo
collective
agreement by
leadership
reached after
energetic
discussion
✔ prioritize top
3 features

10. @dominicad
large customer affirms good experience
“you were a
huge part of
moving >
90% of our
projects from
waterfall to
agile.”

11. Not everyone was happy
@dominicad
more please
• ux enhancements
• new features
• better integrations
• faster loading

12. tech stack
@dominicad
.net webservers and SQL DB Servers
Docker hosts node services
Redis for caching and volatile storage
Rabbit MQ for messaging hosted off linux
Puppet for managing infrastructure configuration
automation
Tableau for Analytics

13. yes - relational data model limits, but
@dominicad
does the way the
code consumes
the data
factor in?
strangler pattern
in play to tackle
architecture

14. @dominicad
internal customers determine biz goals

15. @dominicad
marketing coordination cost is high
Will product feature
be released in
the timeframe
Marketing team
expects?

16. @dominicad
the need for change was self-evident
Become more
predictable
Allow Sales &
Marketing to
influence the
roadmap

17. @dominicad
Ops team sacrifices go unoticed
Business exec
investigates
new
technology
promising zero
impact on tech
teams, but
guess what
happens?

18. @dominicad
Let’s talk about IT like it’s part of the business
Apologies only
go so far.
need actions
to improve
the mindset

19. Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure & measures ok?
Communication effective?

20. @dominicad
transparency is the necessary factor

21. done
next
up
work-­‐in-­‐progress
theme

23. Optimize your workflow –
avoid starting new work
until done with current work

24. All team boards roll up to the roadmap
Each team has a team board
where work is broken down into smaller chunks.
roadmap team board

25. From theme to working software
A3
the most valuable thing that fits within a
sweep
(≤ 5 weeks)
DIV: Deployed, Iterative, Value
(≤ 5 days)
Task
DIV
Task Task
Task
A3
DIV
Task
DIV
Task Task
Task

26. Sequence of DIVs add up to A3 value
DIVs deployed
to prod
done
in
produc4on

27. @dominicad
Ops Team board Current DIVs

28. MKT MKTFIN
UXMKT
MKT MKT
SLS DEVUXUX
SLS CSS
QAUX
DEVOPS SLS
SLS
1
2
3
4
6
5
DEV
DEV
OPS
How the A3 is populated
Cost of Delay?
Impact to users?What benefits who?
What does feature do?
Sustainability impact? fine print /misc?

30. What? So what? What now?
Demo DIV – Each squad has 5 min to demo their DIV*
*DIV – Deployable Iterative Value

31. Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure & measures ok?
Communication effective?

32. @dominicad
team organization & measures

33. Web DevCore DevOperations Mobile
Product Development team structure 2015
Tightly coupled

34. FSGD as a company wide thinking tool

35. Web2 - Rocket
Web1 - Groot
Platform Ops
A3
Mobile
Product Development team structure 2016
Analytics
A3
A3
A3
A3
Automation & Tools
Business Enablement
A3
A3
Loosely coupled

36. @dominicad
metrics on individuals avoided

37. @dominicad
conversation on
number of
deployments
metric
• What does it mean to deploy to prod?
• concerns with this measurement?
• What was learned during experiment?
• What counts?
• What doesn’t count?

38. @dominicad
Vanity metric?
Does metric pass “so what?" test?
Does it:
1) Matter to my customer?
2) Help me make a decision?

39. @dominicad
Number of deployments
is easy to game?
Not so easy when
the qualification of a
deployment is that it
must be related to a DIV*,
on the roadmap.
DIV – Deployable Iterative Value

40. Team metric morphed to dept metric
Deployments this Sweep

41. @dominicad
Cycle Time metrics

42. @dominicad
Prod issues impacting cycle time on feature work

43. @dominicad
“Be approximately right
instead of exactly wrong”
~John Tukey

44. Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure & measures ok?
Communication effective?

45. @dominicad
team communication protocols

46. @dominicad
Demo DIV feedback from Biz teams
* DIV - deployed iterative value
“I just want to learn about the things I can sell.
“I don’t want to listen to the technical stuff.”

48. @dominicad
Forum for discussing A3’s
A3 reviews
A3 Wall
• all invited
• context provided
• user perspective
• why’s addressed
• goals explained
• concerns heard
• opinions aired
• feedback
welcome

49. @dominicad http://leancoffee.org
Forum for retrospectives

50. @dominicad
Forum for raising & solving problems

51. @dominicad
What makes a great team?
Google two year study results:
Who is on a team matters less than
how team members interact.
The willingness to talk about errors is
by far the most important factor for a team
Amy Edmonson TED talk:
h5ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhoLuui9gX8

52. Alignment requires absolute clarity
@dominicad
Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure/measures?
Communication effective?

53. @dominicad
For the innovators
Generate ideas to
increase transparency

54. @dominicad
For the doers
Investigate and study customer recommendation levels
Net Promoter Score = % promoters - detractors

55. @dominicad
For those with budgets
Offer teams the
tools and training
they need to do
their job well.

56. @dominicad
For the influencers
Acknowledge
perceptions
- then shift
incentives
toward
transparency,
safe measures,
& listening.
Wired article - The science of why no one agrees on the color of this dress

57. @dominicad www.ddegrandis.com Dominica DeGrandis www.leankit.com

58. Questions
@dominicad
www.ddegrandis.com
Dominica
DeGrandis
www.leankit.com