Many consider agile a process to implement within an existing organization. A set of rules to follow that will produce some useful outcomes. This approach can provide improvements in many different structures of organizations. As agile maturity improves, however, the benefits can become limited by the structure and culture of the organization itself. Agile is more than a framework for organizing tasks for a team. Agile is a culture, a mindset and a structure for improving the velocity of innovation and providing real business value to customers. To gain the most benefit from Agile it must be considered as part of a more extensive system that incorporates organizational structure, software architecture, and company culture. This talk considers the interactions between how the work, the software, and the people are organized in high performing agile organizations. Using my own experiences at companies large and small, I will share what I have learned and some best practices I use. These lessons will help you as you improve and scale your Agile teams. I will discuss: How to structure your organization to remove the bottlenecks in coordination and decision-making that can slow velocity to a crawl How to take advantage of modern systems architectures to allow teams to move faster Using data to provide accountability for autonomous teams without creating more process By the end, you will have concrete examples and ideas that you can bring back to your team to help you improve and scale agile within your organization. This talk was the opening keynote of the Agile Israel 2019 conference.

1. Onfido - Confidential & Proprietary
Kevin Goldsmith
Chief Technology Officer
Organization,
Architecture,
Autonomy and
Accountability

2. @KevinGoldsmith
Some principles

3. @KevinGoldsmith
Data beats opinion
Everyone has opinions. How do you know which
one is correct? Is it the opinion of the most senior
person? Data is how you decide. Understand your
customer, your business, the environments you
operate it. Make a decision based on reality.

4. @KevinGoldsmith
“I never guess. It is a capital mistake to
theorize before one has data. Insensibly one
begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead
of theories to suit facts.”
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal In Bohemia (1891)

5. @KevinGoldsmith
Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration
Optimizing for speed leads to faster learning,
including from failures. Faster learning leads to
higher quality. Optimizing for quality is an obstacle
to speed, which undermines learning and slows
down improvements to quality.

6. @KevinGoldsmith
Speed without data means
you aren’t learning

7. @KevinGoldsmith
Data without speed means
you aren’t learning fast
enough

8. @KevinGoldsmith
DATA
VISION
EXPERIM
ENTS
LEARNING
PRODUCT
INFORMS
GUIDES
GENERATES
DRIVES
PROVIDES

9. @KevinGoldsmith
Achieving Speed
of Learning
Through
Organization

10. @KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous teams go faster.

11. @KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous teams learn
faster.

12. @KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous
adjective
au·ton·o·mous - ȯ-ˈtä-nə-məs
• (of a country or region) having the freedom to govern itself or control its own
affairs.
• having the freedom to act independently.
synonyms: self-governing, independent, sovereign, free, self-ruling, self-
determining, autarchic; self-sufficient

13. @KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous Teams
Fully empowered and resourced to fulfill their
mission and their commitments.

14. @KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous Teams
Fully empowered and resourced to fulfill their
mission and their commitments.
UX Prod Mgr Dev Lead Back End Front End Test Mobile Data Eng

15. @KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous Teams
Generate their own experiments.

16. @KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous Teams NOT
Autonomous Individuals

18. @KevinGoldsmith
Individuals on autonomous
teams are accountable to
each other.

19. @KevinGoldsmith
Requirements of
Autonomy

20. @KevinGoldsmith
Autonomy needs communication

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Autonomy needs context

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Autonomy needs transparency

23. @KevinGoldsmith
Autonomy needs trust

24. @KevinGoldsmith
If you can’t trust the people
you hire, you are bad at hiring
people.

25. @KevinGoldsmith
By giving teams context and trust

26. @KevinGoldsmith
By giving teams context and trust
and reducing dependencies
on other teams

27. @KevinGoldsmith
By giving teams context and trust
and reducing dependencies
on other teams
they can make decisions on
their own

28. @KevinGoldsmith
By giving teams context and trust
and reducing dependencies
on other teams
they can make decisions on
their own
and they can execute on their
decisions

29. @KevinGoldsmith
By giving teams context and trust
and reducing dependencies
on other teams
they can make decisions on
their own
They become AUTONOMOUS!
and they can execute on their
decisions

30. @KevinGoldsmith
Autonomy Anarchy=

31. @KevinGoldsmith
Autonomy Anarchy=

32. @KevinGoldsmith

33. @KevinGoldsmith

34. @KevinGoldsmith
Where are we going?

35. @KevinGoldsmith
• Product Vision
Where are we going?

36. @KevinGoldsmith
• Product Vision
• Company Goals
Where are we going?

37. @KevinGoldsmith
How do we get there together?

38. @KevinGoldsmith
• KPIs
How do we get there together?

39. @KevinGoldsmith
• KPIs
• Best Practices
How do we get there together?

40. @KevinGoldsmith
• KPIs
• Best Practices
• Leadership
How do we get there together?

41. @KevinGoldsmith
What/Why
How

42. @KevinGoldsmith
Grow in market <X>
Get all documents for the market

43. @KevinGoldsmith
Software
Architecture for
Autonomous
Teams

44. @KevinGoldsmith
MICROSERVICES!!!!!
Four Blair Services Pvt. Ltd. [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

45. @KevinGoldsmith
“Organizations which design
systems... are constrained
to produce designs which
are copies of the
communication structures
of these organizations.”
Melvin Conway

46. @KevinGoldsmith
“We find strong evidence to support the
mirroring hypothesis. In all of the pairs we
examine, the product developed by the
loosely-coupled organization is
significantly more modular than the
product from the tightly-coupled
organization.”
Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the
“Mirroring” Hypothesis MacCormack, Baldwin, Rusnak - Harvard Business School, 2008

47. @KevinGoldsmith
How Microservices Enable Autonomy
delivery schedules
teams coordination on architecture
Decouple

48. @KevinGoldsmith
How Microservices Enable Accountability
Ownership of deliverables
Fast delivery of value
Ability to experiment
Operational Responsibility
Support

49. @KevinGoldsmith
Composable platforms require
a lot of tooling to work.

50. @KevinGoldsmith
The Role of
Devops

51. @KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous Teams Require
Devops Support

52. @KevinGoldsmith
• KPIs
• Best Practices
• Leadership
How do we get there together?

53. @KevinGoldsmith
• KPIs
• Best Practices
• Leadership
How do we get there together?

54. @KevinGoldsmith
Devops
Supports teams so they can be autonomous.
Provides the tools they use to build and deliver
quickly
Create the path of least resistance for teams to
follow the best practices

55. @KevinGoldsmith
Being Opinionated

56. @KevinGoldsmith
Being Opinionated
Make the best practices the path of least
resistance, but don’t prevent other choices.
Let the new ideas in.

57. @KevinGoldsmith
Being Opinionated
When the new becomes the commonplace, make
it a new path of least resistance.

58. Organization,
Architecture,
Autonomy and
Accountability

59. @KevinGoldsmith
Data > Opinion

60. @KevinGoldsmith
Speed of iteration >
Quality of iteration

61. @KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous teams can
iterate faster

62. @KevinGoldsmith
For teams to be autonomous,
they need context, direction
and guardrails

63. @KevinGoldsmith
For autonomous teams to be
accountable, they need
mutually agreed upon KPIs to
measure their performance.

64. @KevinGoldsmith
Microservice architectures
support autonomous teams,
by reducing dependencies

65. @KevinGoldsmith
Devops teams support
autonomy by making it easy to
follow best practices without
preventing innovation.

66. @KevinGoldsmith
!‫רבה‬ ‫תודה‬