14. Safety Is Not A Priority

Rob Fitzpatrick on The Art of Product, Joshua Kerievsky on Being Human, Marty Cagan on Build by Drift, Jutta Eckstein and John Buck on Agile Uprising, and Jocelyn Goldfein on Simple Leadership. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email [email protected]. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting June 24, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ROB FITZPATRICK ON THE ART OF PRODUCT The Art of Product podcast featured Rob Fitzpatrick with hosts Ben Orenstein and Derrick Reimer. They talked about Rob’s book, The Mom Test. He wrote it for “super-introverted techies” like himself but found it resonated with a wider audience. He explained that one of the reasons he self-published the book is because, when he took it to a publisher, they wanted him to increase the word count simply because they believed, with no evidence, that business books below 50,000 words don’t sell. The hosts asked Rob to describe “The Mom Test” in his own words. He described how, just as you shouldn’t ask your mom whether your business is a good idea because she’s biased, you need to be careful when asking anyone whether they think your business is a good idea. This, he says, puts the burden on them to tell you the truth. Instead, he says you should put the burden on yourself of coming up with questions that are immune to bias, so immune that even your mom would give you an unbiased answer. Rob talked about how the value of customer conversations is proportional to how well the problem you are trying to solve is defined. For products like Segway or Uber or a video game, asking customers questions about the problems they want solved is not as effective as it would be when the product is enterprise software. Derrick talked about how, when The Lean Startup started becoming big, it led him to what he calls “idea nihilism” where he started to believe the idea doesn’t matter at all, it is one hundred percent the journey, and the future is unpredictable, so just build something. The next few things he built while in this mindset either did not get off the ground or led him to ask himself why he built a business he hated. Eventually, he concluded that the idea matters a lot. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/90-the-mom-test-with-rob-fitzpatrick/id1243627144?i=1000440137442 Website link: https://artofproductpodcast.com/episode-90 JOSHUA KERIEVSKY ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Joshua Kerievsky with host Richard Atherton. What I loved about this interview is that Joshua described many of the inspirations behind the Modern Agile principles. The first principle, “make people awesome,” was inspired by Kathy Sierra and her focus on making the user awesome. They originally called it “make users awesome” and realized that there is a whole ecosystem besides the end consumers, including colleagues, management, and even shareholders, to make awesome. He clarified that the word “make” is not coercive, but about asking you what you can do to empower others. Regarding the second principle, “make safety a prerequisite,” he talked about being inspired by a story in Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit about Paul O’Neill and his turnaround of the hundred-year-old Alcoa corporation. Just as Amy Edmondson had connected psychological safety to physical safety in a previous podcast, Joshua connected psychological safety to product safety. He clarified that making safety a prerequisite doesn’t mean avoiding risk. Speaking about the third principle, “experiment and learn rapidly,” he told the story of the Gossamer Condor, the human-powered aircraft that was created to win the Kremer prize. The team that built the Condor engineered their work so that they could fail safely. The airplane flew two or three feet from the ground and the materials they used were expected to break and be repaired quickly. This let them do multiple test flights per day while their competitors would go through a waterfall process that led to large times gaps between test flights. Finally, he described the fourth principle, “deliver value continuously,” as finding a way of working where you can get feedback early and learn from it, delivering value each time. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/62-modern-agile-with-joshua-kerievsky/id1369745673?i=1000440221993 Website link: http://media.cdn.shoutengine.com/podcasts/4081235a-554f-4a8f-90c2-77dc3b58051f/audio/303a9472-75ef-4e7f-94e5-414a3018750a.mp3 MARTY CAGAN ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build by Drift podcast featured Marty Cagan with host Maggie Crowley. Marty says that when he shows teams the product discovery techniques he described in his book, Inspired,he finds that they understand the value of the techniques but too often they are not allowed to use them. Instead, their leaders hand them a roadmap and tell them to just build features. When he talks to these leaders, he asks, “Why are you doing this? You know this isn’t how good companies work.” The answer, though not always admitted, is that they don’t trust the teams and, as a result, they don’t empower them. They talked about the defining characteristics of an empowered product team. First among them is for the leadership team to give the product team problems to solve rather than features to build. They also need to staff them appropriately because, if they have been running things the old way long enough, they don’t have the appropriate staff to run things the new way. For example, they may have somebody called a product manager, but they are really a project manager with a fancy title or a backlog administrator. Or they may have designers who are just adding the company color scheme and logo or engineers who are just writing code. Maggie asked what a product leader can tell a stakeholder who is used to thinking in tangible features rather than the problem to be solved. Marty says there is nothing wrong with talking about features, but it is when they get etched into a roadmap that we get into trouble because it becomes a commitment and the time spent on the feature could be better spent on figuring out how to solve the problem. They talked about Objectives and Key Results or OKRs and how they are a complete mess at most companies. The concept is simple and easy if you are already in the empowered team model, but otherwise it is theater because you’re still doing roadmaps while simultaneously trying to tell people the problems to solve. Maggie started describing how they do product discovery and development at Drift and Marty immediately pointed out how the language she used makes the work sound like it occurs in phases as it would in a waterfall project. She explained that they use this notion of phases to communicate out and he pointed out that, even if it is not currently waterfall, there is a slippery slope between speaking about phases and landing in a waterfall mindset. He talked about three things he cares about that distinguish his process from waterfall: 1) tackling the risks upfront, 2) product managers, designers, and engineers literally coming up with prototypes side-by-side instead of having hand-offs, and 3) iterating towards achieving your KPIs rather than having a phase where you’ve declared the design done and have started implementing.  Maggie asked him to enumerate what he thinks product leaders should be doing. First, he said that they need to coach their product managers to get them to competence, which he says should take no more than three months. In the case of hiring product managers straight out of school, the product leader needs to commit to multiple-times-a-week or even daily coaching. Second, he said that product leaders need to take an active role in creating product strategy. This comes back to OKRs where product leaders provide business objectives that product teams translate into problems to solve. The more product teams you have, the less you can expect those teams to be able to see the whole picture on their own, which makes it more important for product leaders to connect the dots for them. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/we-talked-to-product-management-legend-marty-cagan/id1445050691?i=1000440847157 Website link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/da82dbda JUTTA ECKSTEIN AND JOHN BUCK ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Jutta Eckstein and John Buck with host Jay Hrcsko. Jay asked Jutta how she and John came together to produce the ideas described in their book Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy. Jutta and John met at an Agile conference in Atlanta and got the idea to investigate what Sociocracy could bring to Agile. They soon found themselves thinking, “That’s not really all of it,” and immediately agreed to write a book together about it. Jay started going through the book, beginning with four problem statements: Existing concepts cannot be directly applied to company strategy, structure, or process in the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) world. Companies make decisions from the top down but often people at lower levels who are closer to the realities of the product or market have valuable insights that are currently ignored. There is a collision of values underlying shareholder interests in short-term profits and a focus on the needs of the customers. For a company to be agile, all departments must be agile. However, existing agile systems struggle when applied to non-engineering departments. Jutta described Beyond Budgeting. She said that it sounds like it only has relevance to the finance department, but there is a close relationship between how companies deal with finance and how they are managed. In contrast to Agile, which originated from the experiences of consultants, she says, Beyond Budgeting originated in the experiences of CFOs. She gave examples of the problems with traditional budgeting: In the first scenario, a company’s budget is set annually and, at some point during the year, a project team that had been allocated a certain budget determines that the market has changed and they no longer need a budget as large as they originally thought. She’s never seen this situation lead anyone to give the money back. In the second scenario, the market changes such that the budget needed for the company to succeed in the market exceeds the original budget and it’s too late for anything to be done. Jay brought up the distinction made in the book about the three distinct uses of budgets: 1. a target, 2. a forecast, and 3. capacity planning, and the fact that these should not be combined. Next, they discussed Open Space. John talked about the Open Spaces you often see at conferences and how they increase creative thinking and allow people’s passions to emerge. In the same way, Organization Open Space, where you can come up with a project, line up some people, and go to work, gives you passion bounded by responsibility that leads to creative companies.  John pointed out that the combination of the three concepts, as he and Jutta developed the book, started to interact and come together in ways that made it greater than the sum of its parts. That’s why they gave it a name: BOSSA nova.  Jay brought up how he has already benefitted from what he learned about Sociocracy in the book. He was able to help his colleagues learn about the difference between consent and consensus. The participants in a meeting had been locked in an argument over a maturity model when Jay restated the subject of the disagreement in terms of consent, asking if there was anyone who needed to put a stake in the ground for their position or would they all be willing to let an experiment proceed. This quickly unblocked the stalemate. John related a similar story about helping a group of professors make some decisions about forming a professional association. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/bossa-nova-with-jutta-eckstein-and-john-buck/id1163230424?i=1000440982639 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/bossa-nova-with-jutta-eckstein-and-john-buck JOCELYN GOLDFEIN ON SIMPLE LEADERSHIP The Simple Leadership podcast featured Jocelyn Goldfein with host Christian McCarrick. Jocelyn talked about her career, including some time starting her own company, rising in the ranks at VMWare, arriving at Facebook at a critical time in its history, and becoming an angel investor and a venture capitalist. Christian asked about one of Jocelyn’s tweets about motivation as a management superpower. She says that engineers have a lot to offer the discipline of people management because they know how to think about systems problems and most organization problems are systems problems. On the other hand, engineers sometimes lose sight of the fact that human systems are different from programmatic systems in that they have feelings and don’t always behave rationally, but people respond to incentives. Explanations of the importance or urgency of a particular effort and attaching a bonus to it are blunt instruments, but praise and encouragement satisfies people’s needs and engenders long-term loyalty in a way that other incentives don’t. They talked about one of my favorite blog posts of Jocelyn’s on culture. She says that culture is what people do when nobody is looking. It is not people following an order. It is people knowing what to do when they don’t have orders. She says that people often think that culture is a set of traits or qualities and that you can interview for those traits to find someone who is a “culture fit.” She disagrees with this because companies are different from one another and people are obviously portable between companies.  Christian brought up the example of companies that have posters on their walls describing their culture. To Jocelyn, people are less than 10% influenced by the poster on the wall and more than 90% influenced by what successful, powerful people in the company do. When these are in conflict, you get cynicism. She talked about how compensation can be a motivator, but she noted that other people cannot judge your success by your compensation because they don’t know it, so they look for other indicators like title, scope of responsibility, influence, and confidence. So she says you need to be careful when handing out overt status symbols like titles and promotions because people will emulate the recipients of such symbols. The classic example, she says, is the brilliant jerk. When you elevate the brilliant jerk, you’re sending a message that people who succeed in this company and get ahead are jerks. The poster on the wall may not say that, but people will attach more weight to your behavior than what you or the poster say. Jocelyn talked about the undervaluing of soft skills. Engineers are taught early on that their work is fundamentally solo work and she says that is a lie because, if you want to do anything significant, if you’re going to go from rote work to meaningful creative work, the crucial skills are the soft skills we’re taught to disdain or neglect. Regarding recruiting and hiring, she talked about the tendency, at least at Facebook, to treat the phone screen like an on-site interview and create false negative rates that are too high. She did her own test where she brought in for on-site interviews a set of candidates who had previously been rejected at the phone screen stage and found that the same number got hired from her screened-out pool as were hired from the pool of candidates that passed their phone screen. She talked about the benefits and disadvantages of the centralized hiring model. On the plus side, it reduced silos, made teams friendlier to one another, and made employees become citizens of the company first and citizens of the team second. The downside of the centralized model is that there is no hiring manager taking responsibility, so the responsibility passes to the recruiter. Her preference is a blended model that is mostly centralized but with hiring managers taking responsibility and receiving rewards and praise for taking that responsibility. I loved what Jocelyn had to say about diversity and inclusion. She said that when we’re working at these high-growth companies, we’re desperately seeking to hire, we’re interviewing everybody, and we’re hiring everybody who is above our bar. When we look at the result and it is only 5% or 10% female and single digit percentages black or hispanic, some part of us is thinking that must reflect the inputs and to get a different population I would have to lower my bar and accept people who are failing. But this assumes a few things: that your interview bar is fair and that the population who applies to work at your company is the population who could apply to work at your company. If you really value having a more diverse environment, you will go looking for them. If you just sat there and only looked at applicants, you would never have hired that one signal processing engineer you needed or that one esoteric role that is not there in your applicant pool. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-improve-your-management-skills-jocelyn-goldfein/id1260241682?i=1000440957474 Website link: http://simpleleadership.libsyn.com/how-to-improve-your-management-skills-with-jocelyn-goldfein FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing [email protected]. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website: https://www.thekguy.com/ Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus