Episode 11: Deep Dive - Is Agile Worth It?
In this Surfacing deep dive, hosts, Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale, talk about the world of Agile software development.
They explore what it is, what it's meant to be, and the strengths and weaknesses of working with agility. Andy speaks about his hands-on experience with Agile and Lisa wonders about the role executives and other leaders play in pushing their teams to work faster.
Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to Surfacing. In this Surfacing deep dive, hosts, Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale, talk about the world of Agile software development. They explore what it is, what it's meant to be, and the strengths and weaknesses of working with agility. Andy speaks about his hands-on experience with Agile and Lisa wonders about the role executives and other leaders play in pushing their teams to work faster.
Lisa Welchman:
Our working title for this deep dive was, Is Agile Worth It?
Lisa Welchman:
I don't know if that's actually a good question to ask or not but that's what we said. I've got a little bit of intention around this conversation. But what about you? Where are you with this topic? Because we were like, "Yeah, let's talk about Agile. That's a good one."
Andy Vitale:
I know. I think it's an important topic because it's relevant to our discussions in a lot of different ways. I think we hear Agile and we think it's been around forever. It's literally 20 years-ish old and it's gotten such wide adoption and there's so many different flavors of it and people see it as successful and unsuccessful and it's one of those things that has polarizing opinions about it. To me, it just makes sense to talk about.
Andy Vitale:
I work on teams or have worked on teams that have been Waterfall, have been different flavors of Agile. I've worked with Agile coaches and went through the whole process. I've got a Scrum Master certification that I got just so that I was able to speak the language a little bit better. But ultimately, yeah, I'm just curious. I don't have a strong opinion one way or another because I think those who are diehard Agile by the book that doesn't work. I think the part that I always hear about Agile is you get to form it your own way a little bit and I see that that usually yields the best results.
Lisa Welchman:
I did a little bit of homework on this so I am just old enough, or maybe a little bit more than just old enough to have ... when I started my career in the web using "classical" project management skills. We wrote project plans with dependencies and whatever.
Lisa Welchman:
I want to say that it was Waterfall but I would also say that I am not a PMP certified project manager. But I know... I guess it's just like common sense project planning and I'm rigid in that way that I think. I'm always planning stuff, I'm always making spreadsheets, I'm always thinking about dependencies. My brain just works that way. I project managed a lot of web development projects back in the early days using probably, let's just say it was, Waterfall, but I'm owning the fact that it probably really a wasn't perfect Waterfall but it had that intention around it.
Lisa Welchman:
I've watched no methodology, Agile comes into play, a mixture of the two, there's all these interesting acronyms that pop up every now and then. But I just really wanted to ask you a fundamental question about your opinion about just almost philosophy.
Lisa Welchman:
People compare Scrum. Sorry, sorry. Misspeaking. People compare Agile with Waterfall. I'm wondering whether or not that's actually a fair comparison because what a project plan does, it's more of a container and a Waterfall methodology. It's more of a container for a broader set of objectives than what I feel Agile is. Agile feels like it's a production methodology as opposed to project or even product methodology.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm not saying I'm right. I'm just saying when I look at that I'm like, "Wow, Agile is really about optimizing the way people build stuff."
Andy Vitale:
No, 100%.
Lisa Welchman:
Not necessarily optimizing for a particular broader outcome. And so I just wanted to start there and ask you because you do this all day long. Is that a weird observation? Or what do you think?
Andy Vitale:
No, I think that's 100% on point.
Andy Vitale:
The interesting thing about Agile is it started with a few dudes or a bunch of dudes in Oregon and then I didn't know that part actually, when I first heard about it. I knew there was some sort of conversation in Utah where it was brought on by chaos like everything else, just slow delivery, slow development. So people got together and said, "What can we do to try to make this different? What methodology can we create? Or what way... What process can we improve to make this software get delivered faster?"
Andy Vitale:
They came up with the Agile Manifesto which is always an interesting word.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah, I read that.
Andy Vitale:
It talks about things like individuals and interactions over processes and tools. And you think about that and you almost laugh because how much of that is really true other than words because there really are rigid processes and these Agile flavors like SAFe or as Kevin Hoffman in our episode called SAF little E. That's a process. They talked about working software over comprehensive documentation yet we're writing tons of requirements.
Andy Vitale:
It's interesting, and it's about responding to change over following a plan. But again, in SAFe, you go through this PI planning and you plan a whole quarter out in advance. That doesn't seem like it's following the true intent of Agile. But the truth is, it is a software delivery methodology and pieces of it as a designer design has to wedge their way in.
Andy Vitale:
On the SAFe models, when I first started I think it was SAFe version 4, design was not even on the page, it was off to a corner then we ended up seeing design tied somewhere closer in version 5. I think they're on version six now and finally, design is part of the process.
Andy Vitale:
It's really interesting to see how... Yes, I believe that we build things better when we break them into manageable chunks, of course. But I don't know that it impacts the start to finish time differently than the ways we used to do it because there are a series of things you have to go through. I guess the creation of MVP, a smaller chunked out version that you can build and test and learn from to then add on to it is great when it works well. It doesn't always work well.
Lisa Welchman:
It's interesting because I think what I see missing in the agility in most instances that I've seen, and I've seen it in really large companies, small ones, ones where their whole product is software, it seems to be a cut across the board is the intention tension behind the product.
Lisa Welchman:
We had that episode with Meena where we were talking about qualitative research. Just the outcomes. All of these outcomes that we're seeing in Facebook or we're seeing in Twitter or we're seeing that are just playing out where companies are saying, "We're building quickly and we weren't able to understand what was going to happen."
Lisa Welchman:
I just can't help but believe that those two things are related. It seems probably self-evident to everybody who's listening that if you do something quickly, it's really hard to have the cycles to consider the impact of the work that you're doing. I'm just really stuck in that zone of is it worth it. What did we actually get?
Lisa Welchman:
I think if you are a business owner or a sales person or a stockholder or somebody who's very financially oriented, you can look at the software world universe and product universe and say, "We got all this revenue," or "We got this." If you're in the more aligned with social causes, you can talk about functionality that's actually helped to save people's lives.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm not shallowly saying that we haven't had any upside but I'm just wondering, is it worth the exchange for the harm that we've seen and could we have had the same outcomes a year later or two years later or five years later with less of the downside, less of the harm had we not had so much agility in the first place?
Lisa Welchman:
As I'm saying it, it seems really self-evident that the answer to that is yes. But I guess what I'm wondering is, what conditions do we have to put in place? Or what position should the design community and the digital maker community in general, how should they put their foot down in a way that helps the business slow down enough to consider these things? Is that...
Andy Vitale:
No, that makes total sense.
Andy Vitale:
I think I look at the early days of the web after the .com bubble. This is what was coined as web 2.0, all these platforms and social media platforms and just startups going crazy again. It was like an arms race, companies just trying to be first no matter what because they thought that the first one to the dance was going to win the market and we've learned that that wasn't the case that coming out with a better product, even if it's a little bit longer, ends up being better overall.
Andy Vitale:
I think Apple's a great example of that, them and Android. Android is always first to market with a feature and then Apple waits a little while, builds it a little bit better, and markets the hell out of it like it was their product and their idea and they created it, and people don't know the difference. They're like, "Oh, there's a retina display." Almost every feature on the iPhone started... Android had it first and Apple somehow won the hearts and minds of people because they did it right.
Andy Vitale:
I think about what you're saying and it reminds me of a quote from Jeff Gothelf. He says that Scrum or common Agile practice as it's commonly taught isn't enough to create successful products. In the worst of cases, Scrum can lead smart, well intentioned people into doing stupid things all in the name of building more faster.
Andy Vitale:
To me, like, that's spot on. Everything you just described. We're trying to go fast, we're going stupid fast for no reason, and we're not paying attention to the damage that we're causing. Sometimes, the way we've set up and planned our PIs or our roadmap, there isn't the right time to go back.
Andy Vitale:
I think what designers can do, just like anyone else in an organization that's part of this, is make sure that as we plan out this process that we're truly taking what they intended an Agile process to be and make it flexible and shape it to your team.
Andy Vitale:
As designers, we like to talk a lot about being the advocate for the user. The opportunity is there to say, "Wait, slow down. We don't really know the answer to that. Why are we moving so fast?" But that's only a piece of it. We can learn that but it's only effective when we share those learnings with the people who are partners in building the product because if you're teaching the engineers what the customers want, what your clients want, what the people who use these products or services want, they're understanding, they're gaining that empathy, too.
Andy Vitale:
If there's something on the roadmap that somehow made it to them, maybe it's skipped design, maybe it's just something on the backend that they've noticed, they can say, "Wait a minute. I know about this customer. I know about this client. I know that what this is building isn't solving the right problem. So maybe we should take a look at it." I think that shared understanding and building that within the team is going to help prevent the harm that we create by moving too fast.
Andy Vitale:
But then we have this other problem where in some organizations, it's truly like we're a service and the engineering team is like, "You've got to hit the velocity. You've got to get this out the door," and they don't push back sometimes. It's not just them. It's almost everybody in the organization in those types of companies.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm hearing what you're saying and I'm agreeing with you 100% and I also believe that we need to climb out of the design team, out of the software development team and into management.
Lisa Welchman:
No one at a company is executing except that some senior leader allowed the funds to go towards the execution of that activity. And somehow, there's a disconnect between quality and safety and ethics and that fast Scrum machine.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah, we can talk about agile and how to tactically, when you're in the development process, insert things and slow it down a little bit so that you have room to consider, building better products. But then there's just the pressures of management telling you, "You need to do something and you need to do it now," and understanding why they're that way.
Lisa Welchman:
I spent a fair amount of time thinking about that. Some of it has to do with what I used to call golf course influence. At a very tactical level, it's like, "I was playing golf with so and so the other day and they bought," fill in the blank, "with a large CMS vendor. We should get that, too. Get that."
Lisa Welchman:
That stuff still happens. It used to happen a lot more, but it's still just what they said. It also comes under the guise of a lot of analyst firms. "Gartner said..." "Forrester said..." Blah, blah, blah, and I'm not dissing, I don't know enough about these organizations to know or not I have some opinions about pay for play and that venue that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Lisa Welchman:
But that's not really my point here. My point is they're just keeping up with the Joneses. That isn't a good reason to do anything for a business and I would imagine that the businesses that truly succeed are the ones that aren't just trying to keep up with the Joneses but are actually doing things with some intent and doing them well.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm wondering how to inject, and I have this conversation with people a lot, a different value system or a different sensibility into things like MBA programs.
Lisa Welchman:
When somebody is going to get an MBA and they're going to be the one that might be actually organizing this whole team of people that are doing product development and managing them that they not only understand the design process and the implications but their role in setting the strategy and setting the guiding principles for the organization and for the team such that working at a pace so that important, ethical, and safety considerations are brought into play and inclusiveness is brought into play, tying that understanding, the value of doing work the right way.
Lisa Welchman:
It's interesting because I just got this book that was one of the top business books for last year called Grow the Pie by Alex and I attended this artificial intelligence event and he was a speaker on it. He was really referring to a lot of the research that he's done, basically, under the premise of knowing. He's in London School of Economics, so he's a business head guy. One of the caveats that he said was, "I don't know anything about artificial intelligence," which is probably not true because the dude's a genius. But still that's not his field and a lot of the other people were geeking out on it.
Lisa Welchman:
But his point was... And he did this extensive research and I've gotten this book, I haven't read it yet, that is showing that it's actually business beneficial to do good work, that there's actually an advantage to it, and he quantitatively proved that.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm hoping that work permeates the business school dynamic because it's like... I believe that a bad dynamic or this desperation in the executive suite that we're going to lose our primacy, lose our market share, end up like Blockbuster Video, end up like any other... In the newspaper industry, the folks that just completely went out of business. Same thing, all sorts of media.
Lisa Welchman:
There's this fear driven thing that I think when they see somebody over their shoulder did something that is even moderately successful, the reaction is, "Copy it and do that, too. We got to do that, too. We got to do that too." They're not actually thinking about what is fiscally a good thing for their company, what actually goes with the brand, how might we get to a similar destination while staying true to our own values and true to our own product line.
Lisa Welchman:
The people are just totally stepping out of the box doing stuff they really have no business doing, things they don't really know anything about. And then on top of that, they're doing it fast. They're not even... I would almost say, "Fine. Your industry got disrupted. Go ahead and try the new thing." But going fast, doing something you don't know how to do is like, "Yeah, I'm going to learn how to ride a bike today and then enter the Tour de France." Not that they'd let you in. But it doesn't even make any sense.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm hoping and believe that that more than anything is the first cause of a lot of what we're seeing, a lot of the tragedy that we're seeing online, it exists at the board level and the C suite level. That's not to completely erase the responsibility of an Agile production environment but people are performing based on what their managers are telling them to do and what their business is telling them is priorities for the company.
Lisa Welchman:
I think these people get off the hook a little bit too much, right?
Andy Vitale:
Yeah, 100% yes to everything you just said.
Andy Vitale:
I think that somehow this way of working has turned into this huge ship of a buzzword that everybody's jumping on and it's so hard to turn it around right now. These executives are seeing like, "Oh, Agile, fast. Let's build this thing." And it's buzzwords and buzzwords that they're reading articles in HBR and wherever else they're reading their articles that we have to do this.
Andy Vitale:
What happens is it's going to take that revolution. First of all, these stakeholders, these business folks, these executives, the best way to communicate with them is to translate everything to financial impact. If we can point out that by doing it a little bit slower, it doesn't even have to be slower, it just needs to be more like... I look at it like instead of swirling to get to a destination, you're just marching in one way that's not chaotic. You're just following this path of doing things the right way. And what happens is you can get a better result that doesn't potentially harm your brand, long term trust you could lose with clients, just everything, and be better financially.
Andy Vitale:
But it's going to take someone to step out of this buzzword universe and try something different that we all know and we're all saying is the right thing to do now because we've seen what happens when we try to move too fast and that move fast and break things is so ridiculous when we can move at the right pace without breaking anything.
Andy Vitale:
They have to see the business value once someone takes that risk. People are starting to and then when they start to read it in their articles and it will start to catch on.
Andy Vitale:
It's interesting. The other big buzzword you hear about all the time is digital transformation. Everybody's going through this digital transformation. Companies that didn't do things digital are taking their same processes that were slow and just trying to digitize them without improving them. And what we're seeing is less than 1/3 of these digital transformations actually succeeded in improving the company's performance. Seventy percent of them fail. They spend years trying to do this and then realize, "Oh, shit, I agree. It didn't work. What do we do? Let's try to transform ourselves digitally again."
Andy Vitale:
It's just so frustrating to see. But at the same time, when you're on the inside either in the company or even as you helping these companies set themselves up to succeed. We've got the ability to change that perspective and help them and guide them to do things the right way.
Lisa Welchman:
I agree with you on this. And I'm also just scowling a little bit, really, for no good reason other than part of...
Lisa Welchman:
Two things. One is something that I've said before and I will say many times again which is I believe that everyone, including people at the executive tier, underestimate the impact of the internet and the web on society and business at large. Even within the context of executing on a digital transformation, whatever that may be, and that's actually a conversation I don't want to have because I don't care enough. I know that sounds horrible. But that is not a deep dive that I want to do is what is a digital transformation.
Lisa Welchman:
But I think people are trying to execute on a digital transformation within the confines and constructs of pre-internet and web business values. Business values, business possibilities, they're just really clinging on to these old paradigms and they're trying to force this disruptive technology into this house that they know.
Lisa Welchman:
And I'm like, "You can put it in there. But you better leave and step way back because it's going to blow it up. " Just really... There's that. That's making me scowling and going like... And it's exhausting to see it happening like, "We don't want to change anything, but we want to transform." That's basically the message that you're getting.
Lisa Welchman:
There's that. And then the second component is really around who it is at that level and I think for maybe, at least 10, but probably 15 years, when I give talks to digital makers, I haven't done it in a while, I used to have this call to action which is I want some of the 2000 or 5000 or however many people I'm talking to, people in this room to go away and go get an MBA. "I want you to take your knowledge and expertise, Andy, and I want you to go to business school and I want you to be the CEO. I want the executive suite to be informed by the knowledge of somebody who cut their work teeth actually working in digital spaces."
Lisa Welchman:
Because what we generally tend to have is someone either coming out of a traditional product line or out of sales or someplace else swimming up or out of operations, swimming up into that C suite, which means they actually don't know anything about this big transformative technology. They don't understand it innately.
Lisa Welchman:
It's amazing when I talk to a CEO that really understands their business. I'm not saying everybody needs to grow from the bottom up but just that really informed perspective is really, really helpful.
Lisa Welchman:
I think right now, when we are at this inflection point where large companies need to seriously consider what the existence of the internet and web mean to their market space, how could you not have someone at the executive level who understands what it can and cannot do and what it takes to build it. How could you not have that person in the room? How could you make a decision and then turn back and say, "We've decided this people Oh, and do the digital version of that." It just doesn't make any sense.
Lisa Welchman:
Early on, when people were screaming for chief digital officer, I was arguing that you don't need that. You don't need to invent another C person, another C suite person, and I don't know that I still don't believe that. More people in the room generally doesn't help. We just need the C people who are the CEO, who are the CTO, who are the CMO, or whatever else you've got to know what the heck they're talking about.
Lisa Welchman:
Given that the internet and the web have been around commercially, have been around for almost 30 years, you can find some people who can operate at an executive level and also have this digital expertise and capacity.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm not talking about dragging production all the way up to that level. I'm just saying having an executive mind that is also informed by this capacity, that really needs to happen, it will happen because we are growing those people right now. Some of them are already grown who understand that and I don't want to be an individual contributor anymore. They've decided they're moving into management. But generally those people, "Oh, I'm a design manager," or "I'm a content manager." I'm like, "What about just fricking management? Just business management."
Lisa Welchman:
I think that is the first or second step to the solution is that when key business decisions are made that they're informed and somebody can go, "No, you can't do that. That's not going to work. What are you talking about?" Or better yet, "Here's a better way that you could do that," or "Here's how these technologies could support that."
Lisa Welchman:
Because I think at the end of the day, what digital transformation really is it is the submission of legacy business practices to the capacity of the internet and web. It's all submitting to that. It's becoming the primary driver in a lot of different areas. And it's a tough transformation. That's why it's going to take so long and that's why you can't market your way through a digital transformation and you can't... It is really substantive. But anyhow, that's what I'm thinking on that one.
Andy Vitale:
That makes sense. I do agree.
Andy Vitale:
I'm starting to see that more and more where people that understand digital and technology and business are or at least if they're not at that level they're informing the decisions that CEOs make.
Andy Vitale:
It's funny because a lot of CEOs still are not, to use a term we've talked about often, they're not digital natives. The ones that happen to be have made some of the biggest mistakes so that's interesting. I don't know if we can say that the people at Facebook or Twitter are actually digital natives but they're as close to it as you can get if they're not digital natives. They must have been on some, maybe not the internet, technology from a very early age that I'm curious, why are they the ones that made the biggest mistakes that we can think of in the internet than-
Lisa Welchman:
Because that's not the full package. Being smart about digital is not all you need to do to own a multibillion dollar business that operates across the globe. It helps particularly if you're an all digital business to do that but that's not everything. That's why I always appreciated when some of these .com algorithm guys which is just a really biased way of talking about them but that's what I'll say, that's how I think of them in my head, would realize at a certain juncture, "I can't run this business. Why? Because I don't frickin' know how to run a business. That's a skill set."
Lisa Welchman:
I just think it's harking back to this whole Agile-Scrum thing which is just because you can build a product quickly and put it online and it works. That's not the full package either. What does it do? What's its implication? What's the business model about it? Is it ethical? Are we violating people's privacy? Are we...
Lisa Welchman:
There's all kinds of bad stuff you can build fast and I think the culture of digital is such that it's so focused on build it, put it online, "Oh, look, it's online, it works, it's a thing." And then people are assuming all of this other mature mechanism because it looks so good, it's scaled fine technically, and it's got pretty pictures on it, and it looks good. "Oh, look at this app in my phone. It's working."
Lisa Welchman:
People assume because it is a working product that the people around it or customers assumed that the people around it had some intention and that some of the other trappings that they're used to with mature products like, "You're going to protect my privacy with it." They just go in full force.
Lisa Welchman:
I think the consumer believes that and I think that some of these early .com algorithm guys didn't even know to ask the question that they bought their own stuff. And some of them at a certain point, "You know what? Hmm. Maybe I don't know everything. Maybe we actually have to bring some people in that actually know how to run a business and have an HR department," or whatever that may be.
Lisa Welchman:
You don't want to call it HR. Don't call it that. But that's there's some operational stuff involved and there's some compliance and privacy and regulatory stuff involved and that, yes, we're moving fast and breaking things but maybe we don't want to break certain things, to ask those questions and people who have the experience, maturing and running a business.
Lisa Welchman:
I think that is why some of the biggest mistakes are by people because they don't know what the hell they're doing. That's really what it comes down to.
Andy Vitale:
And the cash that came in made them feel like the business was successful because it was so much money and so fast. They're like, "Oh, I must be a business genius. Look at this business I'm building."
Lisa Welchman:
Right. And everybody validates it. Everybody's like... Particularly in the U.S., everywhere, you make a lot of money, it must be a thing, these resources that come in. And I'm not dissing any of it. But that dynamic persists.
Lisa Welchman:
That's why this book, the Grow the Pie book, that I'm really excited about reading and I'm sure a lot of people already know about and the fact that that Alex Edmans is in a business school, that's the fix because as much as designers lead in product development, they're not making usually the business decision to build a particular product or whether or not it's happening this fiscal year or that fiscal year or it rolls out in this country or that... Those things happen. Until we have better leadership in that area, it's going to be a tough row to hoe, I think.
Andy Vitale:
Right. That reminds me. One of my friends that I worked with that taught me a lot about business and he, as a designer, and then went and got his executive MBA at Brown and as he was going through that program, he was sharing a lot of his learnings and the books that he read and the people that were put in front of them and talked a lot and taught me a lot about innovation and what that looks like and the proper way to build a business model and taught me to read financial statements, things that are important to know.
Andy Vitale:
If you're going to grow in your career in anything, you need to know how the business that you work for makes money and how they operate and what that looks like and how they communicate that so that when you're in these conversations, you can have more informed conversations when you are in a position to talk about, "Wait a minute. We're going through a replatform. What's the right technology? What's the way to build this?"
Andy Vitale:
Because if you just stick to your silo, you don't really have... You're not adding value at that point to your individual discipline which eventually leads to doing things right for the organization. But if you really want to be able to speak that language, you have to do it, you have to be in those conversations to make the change.
Lisa Welchman:
One of the things that is interesting listening to you talk about that is I was once a hands-on webmaster. I am now a management consultant but I was once a hands-on webmaster. Even though that was a long time ago, I still get being a maker. I had a consulting firm that had a bunch of other consultants in it so I've also been a small business owner and so I had to operate a business. That's had its upside and its downside and all that. I have a sensitivity towards what it means to hire staff, to train them, and to operate a business that needs to have a profit in order to pay people.
Lisa Welchman:
Having all of that perspective really makes me better at my job when I step even into a large enterprise. I'm working for these super giant companies usually and I never had a company that big but I do understand the mindset of a business owner so I can appreciate that you have to make money, that this is not a nice to have component of that. Sometimes, that component gets downplayed in design communities. People just pooh-pooh like, "Oh, it's all about profit." And it's like, "Yeah, and that profit pays your salary."
Andy Vitale:
Exactly.
Lisa Welchman:
The back and forth of that and pushing that... Having empathy for the whole business and the role of everyone and understanding that everyone on the team is required but also needs to work in concert, that really drives and gets me excited about the work that I do, which is how can we reengineer this so that the people who build products and services get to do it in a healthy positive environment.
Lisa Welchman:
They feel good about coming to work but also, how can we connect them with this executive decision making mechanism in a way such that what they're building makes sense and from a governance perspective isn't going to cause the company to get sued, is going to create good outcomes for everybody, the customer and the organization.
Lisa Welchman:
I just don't think that Agile methodologies, to circle back to the topic, always promote that. I think it actually promotes more siloing and less of a comprehensive approach because everyone's just focused on this train and the next car and then all this stuff that's going on. What you at least got in a Waterfall methodology was somebody with a very holistic view of the whole thing.
Andy Vitale:
Yep, 100%.
Lisa Welchman:
And the dependencies and also the value of that is they were not embedded in the doing. Their job was to monitor the doing and go, "Oh, wait, that's slowing down here." Whatever. Their job was to see and look at what is going on and to raise risk flags.
Lisa Welchman:
I think we talked about this when we were talking about doing the digital safety book. We talked about whose job would it be to actually monitor for safety and I think at least I came down to... I don't think we ever came to anything definitive, but I thought that it was these bridging people. It had to be people who were not necessarily heads down executing the design and build but somebody who could see everything that was going on and then force people together or invite people together to have conversations about, "You are all doing these things. This might create a problem. Let's talk about that."
Lisa Welchman:
I don't know what you think about that anymore. It's been months, I think, since we had this conversation. If someone is going to be in this Agile development environment and they're going to stay there which I think an element of that is going to be around for a while, and even if they're working a little bit more slowly, that still doesn't address this where's the general oversight to understand how various products and services come together.
Lisa Welchman:
Because I think when we think for example of Facebook, it wasn't one piece of functionality that was a problem. It was that plus global plus extreme scaling. There were all these unintentional outcomes that came as a result of all sorts of types of functionality and its relationship with the public sphere and all these other sorts of things that nobody seemed to have on their radar.
Lisa Welchman:
I can blame the executive suite as well as I just have but I also think there's probably something closer into the production environment, the design and production environment that can happen, and I'm just curious what you think that might look like.
Andy Vitale:
I would say that the real Agile purists would say that that exists. I think there's two flavors of it, much like Agile, there's a flavor for everything.
Lisa Welchman:
Butter pecan.
Andy Vitale:
There's the... Exactly, which would be the... I would call it the conductor. There's someone that oversees the release train that's not a release train engineer and it has different titles in different organizations. But their sole purpose is to identify those cross dependencies so that when they are planning all of those who are affected by the bigger picture strategy on the roadmap or the epics, they're identified and they have the opportunity to collaborate.
Andy Vitale:
That's interesting because when you think of Agile and the way we plan and sprint planning, it's such small chunks that you absolutely lose the big picture. It's just a little sliver of a feature of an epic and it's just wild to see how it gets broken down into such a small piece.
Andy Vitale:
But there's another flavor of Agile called dual-track agile where there are the people that are working in those small chunks and then there's another overarching version that are looking at the bigger picture. They're working at a higher altitude and they're validating ideas that then once they're validated get broken down into those smaller pieces that get built out to delivery and that hardly happens.
Andy Vitale:
It really is a mix of product owners or product managers who have this idea and are talking to stakeholders. What you see is everybody has a different picture of what they're building. People don't realize like, "All right, what does this look like six months from now?" Because they only know what it looks like two weeks from now, one sprint from now.
Andy Vitale:
And then it's like, "Are we going to go back and fix this? Well, how can we do that if we've already got our backlog and our next sprint planned out and everything that we learned that broke?" We're like, "We just have to keep following this trend. You know what you do? Go ahead and put that on the backlog and we'll reprioritize that in two weeks."
Andy Vitale:
And then the answer comes down to, "Is fixing that going to make us more money than adding these three or four more features that we're going to build?" And you just never get to it. It becomes this unstoppable train of getting new things out the door as opposed to spending the time to like, "All right, what did we learn?" We talk about it all the time. "What did we learn? What are the analytics show? What does the data show? Is it quantitative? Is it qualitative? Okay, let's go ahead and try to reprioritize that."
Andy Vitale:
I think the scale of why we reprioritize always tips to, not always, but in some companies, towards business value, financial impact, and they look at it as just new revenue as opposed to like, we talked about it already, the harm that these things can create over time.
Andy Vitale:
It does come down to who in the organization has that big picture and constantly takes what they learn and tweaks that big picture and communicates that to the rest of the team so that they know and understand why they're doing what they're doing rather than just going blindly at the next thing.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm listening to you talking, thinking even in an optimal situation, and I know that you agree with me but I'm just going to say it anyway, you're never going to actually get all of this right.
Andy Vitale:
Right.
Lisa Welchman:
But at least you can have the intention to, so that you're going to, as you mentioned, spiral in the right direction.
Lisa Welchman:
I think that business school values and even design school values lead one to believe that there is a possible world such that you can get exactly what you designed or you can get the exact business outcome that you want. I think those worlds don't exist.
Andy Vitale:
Right. Exactly.
Lisa Welchman:
I think there's a lot of purists on both sides of the fence on the business side and on the design side where everybody's like...
Lisa Welchman:
And that's where I think intention plays a role because you can always temperature check. Are we going in the direction that we intended to? Does this activity going to help us trend in the direction that we intended to? I think a lot of it is that the statement of the intention which in my mind equals a strategy is so weirdly expressed or often unexpressed. Even at an executive level, you see people going straight for the number as opposed to like, "What are we actually trying to be here? What are we trying to do?"
Lisa Welchman:
I think when it comes... I think organizations are so rocked or so immature if you're a big .com. Who knows what they're trending towards because it hasn't been invented yet. But in those cases, it's really even more important, I think, to have a value system around that.
Andy Vitale:
I agree.
Lisa Welchman:
Because we don't know what's going to happen, we don't know what tools we're going to use, we don't know what capacity we're going to engineer, but if at least we understand things like we don't want to kill people, we don't want people to feel sick or bad around our products, things like that, you can at least check for those various dynamics.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm not sure that businesses at this juncture can do any better than that in some instances and I believe that many of them aren't even trying to do that.
Andy Vitale:
Right. I will say because people will listen and say, "What about working agreements?"
Andy Vitale:
The best teams that I've seen work well together, they do have clear working agreements of how they're going to work, what the principles are for the team, what the guidelines are for the team, and they do start to... I am seeing a lot more focusing on not causing harm potentially or making sure that...
Andy Vitale:
The quest to do good by the people that use the product and that's new. I think we've learned that as a community of makers or community of people who build products from seeing all of the recent failures. Before this, if you created physical products, you were more inclined to focus on not killing people-
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah, we've talked about that.
Andy Vitale:
Focus on not creating products that's going to chop somebody's hand off. But in digital, it wasn't the primary thought.
Andy Vitale:
I think there's this really... Companies, designers, engineers, everyone in the organization, product folks, they're all about now doing the right thing. I think I'm seeing more of it for sure. But it took understanding and seeing what happened to some other companies to be like, "I don't want that to happen to me."
Andy Vitale:
Every younger in their career designer that I talked to coming out of design school is all about, "I want to have a positive impact on the people that I design for." And now I think that they're the ones that are, I think we talked about this with Mike Monteiro, stepping up and saying, "Wait. This doesn't seem right." I think that as companies become more and more encouraging of that behavior and creating more of a sense of psychological safety to allow people to speak up not like what just happened with Basecamp where they said, "You're not allowed to have these political decisions or discussions."
Andy Vitale:
The companies that do allow open conversation about making things better and what isn't good, I think that creates better products.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm going to agree with you and add that you and I have had this conversation before not on the podcast but when we were thinking about safety and I've been thinking about this a lot and actually have a whole talk around it, which is all of those consumer products that hard goods that you were talking about that people are creating, when those things were invented, they had the same problems that digital spaces have now.
Lisa Welchman:
There's just a path that any new technology needs to take. If it's a product or service that interacts with human beings in the early stages of organic growth, there's just going to be a lot of tragedy. I'm not saying that you have to lean into it. But that just happens.
Lisa Welchman:
I've talked before about the automobile industry and there are a lot of really early decapitations from automobile accidents which led to safety glass. But it took 80 plus years to get to mandatory seatbelts and that's still not true across the world and it had nothing to do with whether or not seatbelts existed or not, they did, they were invented very early. But consumers didn't want them and business didn't want them. People complained about that kind of stuff.
Lisa Welchman:
I think we're seeing those same sorts of tragedies happening in digital spaces now because it's so early. I think the best that people can do is understand where we are in that lifecycle and take steps to mitigate and maybe learn by that path. It learned...
Lisa Welchman:
Part of the reason why I do governance work is I saw that and I knew that and I knew we would get to a point where we would need policy, where we'd need national and global level policy, and where organizations would need standards about the way that they do work. It was largely the digital community that rejected that stance. "We don't need rules, we need Agile." "We don't need rules. We just..."
Lisa Welchman:
There's no technology that has scaled effectively and is safe that is an operating off of a standards-based protocol including the one that we're using because the W3C is a set of standards that allows us to deal with the world wide web in the first place. Same thing with internet, internet governance, and speeds and feeds and pipes. We're just kidding ourselves to think that we're not resting on a foundation of standards and policy in the first place.
Lisa Welchman:
What's really fascinating about all of this is it's global. Internet policy, and, to a certain extent, worldwide web policy and W3C has to cut across various national silos globally and come to some crazy consensus about how we ought to do this together. There's just larger versions of the same problem that an individual organization will have.
Lisa Welchman:
My area of emphasis is digital governance which is actually looking at an organization and saying, "How do you want to do this in your organization?" And they have the same problems, like geographically, "This country likes to do it this way. That way. We speak different languages. We need a different visual identity because this color means this in this country," or whatever. There's a lot of rationalization that happens in that level.
Lisa Welchman:
I think that when you get to that point where you really are understanding that that needs to happen, that's when you have to understand that some of the agility might have to ramp down a bit for a while so that you can actually say, "What are we doing? What ought we to be doing? And how can we engineer this so that we can be doing the things that we want to do with intent and with the most agility that we can have while getting a good and safe outcome?"
Lisa Welchman:
I think that's hard. I think people-
Andy Vitale:
And I think-
Lisa Welchman:
Don't want to do that because we're all engineer for speed. "Oh, we can't stop." But you're really getting ready to go off the edge of a cliff.
Andy Vitale:
Right. Exactly. I think intent is the key word.
Andy Vitale:
What's interesting to me is there's a piece of learning that I think digitally because again of speed, we look at somebody that's doing something wrong and we say, "I can do that differently." But we don't take the time to understand what actually went wrong. We just try it a different way and sometimes we hit the same problems or cause even bigger problems.
Andy Vitale:
What I think is also interesting is there's been a lot of good that has come with digital and the internet but there's been especially recently a lot of bad things, a lot of opportunity to get even worse if we don't pay attention to it now. We don't have 80 years like physical products had to build these standards. We're moving, we're still moving fast even if we slow down a little bit.
Andy Vitale:
We've got to focus on doing the right thing now because 80 years from now, if we look back on this and 80 years and we didn't slow down and do things the right way, I have no idea what it's going to be like. It's not a world that I'd want to be... I'm glad I won't be here in 80 years.
Lisa Welchman:
You might be. You never know.
Andy Vitale:
You never know.
Lisa Welchman:
Somebody is inventing something digital where that might actually happen. We're already 30 years into the 80 years so it's only 50 and who knows if it's going to be whatever.
Lisa Welchman:
I would also argue that those conversations have already been happening. What I would like to see is digital makers more informed about that fact because people have been talking about this and geographically, it's different.
Lisa Welchman:
To take the example everybody uses but I think makes sense is GDPR in Europe. There are other parts of the world that are trying to take a different approach to certain things. GDPR certainly isn't perfect. I think there are activities that are happening and just like everything else is siloed.
Lisa Welchman:
I think there are a lot of people focused on internet and world wide web governance and people like me who are working in digital governance and have been for a while, but the digital maker community because they've been so influenced by agility and so viscerally impacted by the disruption of market spaces? I have compassion for that. That's a real thing. It's not made up. It's not like people just decided to do that.
Lisa Welchman:
I think there are a few, not great players, but I think for the most part, people were just reacting to this weird environment that they were in or whatever. But I think that community often rejects the type of work that these other people do because they see them as party poopers. What I find really positive, I think, is that the digital maker community is going, "Whoa, okay. Maybe they have a point."
Lisa Welchman:
In other words, there are people that they can join that have already started down this path. We don't have to start from scratch. I think maybe thinking about how to bring those two worlds closer together and speaking similar language and having similar intent is maybe a future goal.
Andy Vitale:
I think GDPR is the greatest example because I witnessed the prioritization of ensuring that we were compliant and it literally was like, "Stop the presses. We've got to prioritize this and get it in now and build this." It was that standard that drove Agile, I'm going to call it a transformation that I saw of we were like, "Wait, pause. Let's get this right. We have to do this." I think that more standards are going to be what gets us to slowing down and doing things the right way.
Lisa Welchman:
In that instance, it was a policy. That's a conversation we're going to have. We're going to talk about policies versus standards versus standard operating procedures and what those things are but without the teeth of that policy, nobody would have done that stuff.
Lisa Welchman:
It's like Regine was talking about on the accessibility episode. People generally don't do things because it's the right thing to do. That sounds cynical but that's usually not the driver. The driver was if we don't do this, we are not legally allowed to operate in Europe. Ding. That's a problem. That's why it's always going to take that to bring some people in.
Lisa Welchman:
And yes, it's a bell curve, you'll have some people who are going to always do the right thing out of the box because that's just the way they engineer, but that's not the vast majority. Most people are just cluelessly operating in the middle zone doing the best that they can. And as you like to say not with malicious intent, but just not paying attention.
Lisa Welchman:
Anyhow, it was an interesting conversation. I think a lot of our conversations we end up in odd places, but I think I'm taking away from this that there's not anything necessarily wrong with operating in an agile manner as long as the products and services that are being built via an Agile development methodology have been designed with good intent. Or I shouldn't say good intent with intent. I won't put any kind of adjective in front of that. With intent. Intentionally is what I mean. Have been designed intentionally as opposed to just reactively.
Lisa Welchman:
That's interesting. I don't think that I thought that before we started talking.
Andy Vitale:
Exactly. I'm walking away from this conversation really excited to have our conversation about policies and standards.
Lisa Welchman:
I would really like to do that too. We've talked a lot about design on this podcast and not so much about governance-related things. As we talk about bringing worlds together which is really why we want to have this podcast in the first place and just cross pollinating so maybe we can do a better job at visiting governance land and we can start with that.
Andy Vitale:
Awesome.
Lisa Welchman:
Okay, groovy.
Andy Vitale:
I love it.
Lisa Welchman:
Take care.
Andy Vitale:
Bye.
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