51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ

Transcript

Well, hello everyone. It’s your on-demand work front CSM again, Cynthia Boone. And we have a fantastic expert insight interview today, someone that I’m actually really to talk to again. And I really truly enjoy working with, probably because she has the same sense of humor as me, but also she also has an intense love of agile in our work front boards feature. So today we have the brilliant Natalie Mitchell.

And before we get started, I do want to say, we have had a whirlwind of events, basically since April, right? Of things at summit, events with us. And now we have our interview. So, so excited. But for those people that have not seen you, which impossible, right? For those of you that don’t know who Natalie is, who’s Natalie? Hi, I’m Natalie.

I like to say it’s just Natalie, like Cher or Adele or Madonna, take your pick, whatever works best for you. I’ve been in 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ about a year and a half working on our boards tool, among other things. Before that, I actually did some project, some other project management software. So it’s been all in about eight and a half years on that. But I’ve been building product for like 13 years using agile. It’s the only way I know, I love it. I’m obsessed with it. That’s why I’m here talking about it right now, actually. Well, then let’s get started. So since you’re passionate about agile, like what are you asked all the time when it comes to agile? Well, being in product where I develop software tools, when it comes to agile, the most common question I get is, when are you going to have, fill in the blank feature available? And it’s usually followed by something like, because I can’t start doing agile at my company without it.

And the reason, like I totally get, there’s things you want that will make your life a lot easier, we’re working on them. Usually my answer is something like it’s on the backlog coming next time or whatever. But the reason I really struggle with that is that when I started doing agile, it was a poster board and post-it notes. Like that was all we had and it worked really, really well for us. And I firmly believe that like, that’s all you need. Even though I build a tool to support it and I want the tool to help you, I want it to make it easier for you, particularly if you’re not co-located, that kind of thing. Fundamentally, you need the most basic of materials to get started.

And so like, I would love to talk to you about how to get started with what we have and how you can layer on those new features that we continue to add, rather than you feeling like you have to wait for one specific thing to get started. Okay, well, I think there’s a spoiler alert there. So if that’s the case that you’re asked mostly, what do you wish you were asked more often? You’re right, there’s a little bit of a spoiler there. What I wish I was asked more often is how do I get started? How do I start now? How do I get going as quickly as possible? I think a lot of people feel like they need to go through a very significant, especially in a larger organization like implementation and rollout plan. And I don’t mean to suggest that you shouldn’t be doing a lot of planning and a lot of communication with your users but I also feel like Agile is all about continuous improvement and it’s about iterative delivery. And you can approach the way you implement it in the same way. You can start small, start with one person, start with yourself and make sure that you are really familiar with it, even if that means you’re just gonna partner with one other person and do daily stand ups and set goals and track your metrics, just so you know how each of those kind of, those rituals work and what their value is so that you can communicate that kind of to the next person that you’re gonna try to bring on board rather than going through like a really intense kind of rollout across tens or hundreds of people all at once. So I’ve heard you say this before and it’s a follow up question, just throwing a little curve ball at you but if you’ve said that people before process, so with that, are there recommendations or best practices that you think, like how do you identify the people to get started? Like what would you think are the good idea? Yeah, I think the most important thing is that you want people that are really open to improving and doing better and you want people that are really open to change. Like those are the best ones to start with. The ones who want to experiment, who want to try something, even if it means that they might fail the first time because they learned from that. And I think for a lot of people that are rolling out a new process like Agile, the instinct is to go to the rockstar team, like the team that’s just killing it all the time and in reality, I mean there are a lot of factors that go into it but the reality is that that team might not be the one you want to shake up right now. Maybe it’s the team that’s struggling, that’s struggling to mesh with each other, they’re maybe not getting along, they’re not hitting all of their numbers, whatever it is, they might be the ones to approach about being open to a shake up so that they can do better and get really engaged with the process and see very quickly how it can level them up so much faster.

Yeah, and so okay, so we have our team and going to actual features, like what is your favorite feature of boards? Because I feel like those two questions kind of go together too. Yeah, it’s a little bit of a cheat because it’s maybe not like a feature feature but what I love is the flexibility behind it that I can start with three very simple columns of like new, in progress and completed and just get going with like the simplest most basic thing but then maybe I realize pretty quickly that I need something for blocked and I can add that column and there’s nothing saying or stopping me from just adding it when I need it or saying, you know what, that blocked column isn’t working for us, it’s actually causing more problems so I’m gonna take it back out. And you can tie all of this back to what might be a more rigid or maybe policed, I don’t know what the right term is, process that does need to be in place in your organization for data integrity and reporting and that kind of thing but it can still feel more flexible to you and speak to you and your team and how your team works and instead of it being like a one and done, this is how we work, if nothing changes, it’s a tool that can grow with you as your team grows. And I just wanna piggyback, I totally agree with you and I think my favorite part is that flexibility but as a former sysadmin, that flexibility combined with sort of the democratization of Workfront, like we give them access and if somebody does wanna mix it up and they wanna look at their work in a different way, they can do that and it doesn’t mess up with sort of that rigid approach, right? So I mean, I think since it’s early, like I do love working with you because of that passion, I also would like to be on that small special team when that comes to fruition. Okay, so speaking of that, like for those people that wanna get started, like what, like I know that you might have more than one, so what are your favorite resources when it comes to agile? So there are tons of resources out there, a lot of them are free on the internet, I totally recommend those, they show up in a lot of my past presentations that I’ve done but there are actually two that I go back to all of the time.

One of them is called the Lean Product Playbook, I would show it to you but I actually have it on my Kindle, so I can’t really show it to you. It is geared towards product managers but there’s still so much you can get from it and it really kind of takes a step back even from agile and just talks about a lean approach to project management of really any kind, how you can structure sprints, what you should consider measuring to determine your success how to decide if you need to make changes if things are going well or not going well, how do you decide priority? All of those things that can feel, for a lot of people maybe really, really basic set of skills but something I go back to repeatedly, like this thing isn’t working for me, let me go back and remind myself what best practices are and kind of think through it again. The other one I love is specifically for marketing, it is Mastering Marketing Agility, everything I’ve learned about marketing and using agile in the marketing use case, I’ve started with this book and I think it’s phenomenal.

What I will say is that agile was built for software development, it was built by software developers and for software developers. So there are aspects of it that don’t work for like a different use case like marketing and in this book they do a really great job of sort of breaking that down and guiding you through it, maybe you need to adapt or change so that it fits this use case a little bit better and it’s been super helpful for me getting up to speed there. Oh man, I love that, I’m gonna have to look at that one because yeah, just I like the new approach to work and I think that anyone that even wants to just mix up the way they do work, the work front boards plus the resources, like that’s the way to go. So, got two more. I’m a little biased but I totally agree. I mean, so am I because I’ve worked at it like, once you’ve worked in agile, it’s really hard to not work in agile, I’m just gonna say that. Yeah. So two more questions. First question, what are you looking forward to? And there are no wrong answers, the next few months, whatever.

Okay, well, if I haven’t made it obvious, I love talking about this stuff. I think it’s so much fun, I get really kind of like worked up and excited about it. So there’s kind of two big things coming up that I’m really excited about. One is the skill exchange. There’s gonna be a session on boards and agile that I think is gonna be really exciting and will set up a lot of people who are maybe a little scared to approach as well as people who have maybe dipped in, you can learn a few more things. And the other thing, I’ll be hosting with one of my product managers, Patrick. And I think Cynthia is gonna be there with us too at Coffee Talk in August to answer kind of whatever questions you might have about agile or boards that we can for you. So make sure you’re looking for both of those events and registering for them. And then the other thing I would say is that I wanna do more and we’ve covered a few topics, but if there’s more you wanna hear, we’ve covered high level of the different sort of what I refer to as flavors of agile. So if you wanna dive deeper into the different rituals and what purpose they serve, or if there’s another flavor of agile you’ve heard about that you wanna learn more about, like let us know. I would love to find an opportunity to talk more about that. Cynthia, I think you can tell people how to tell us. Yeah, so this interview, you’ll be watching it on Experience Leak. So reply to that post, hit me up and say, hey, I wanna talk about this or give an idea where you can always reach out to the scale team at csascaleatadobe.com. But let us know because we do love talking and we love talking to Natalie about this.

Okay, this is the big question. We ask everyone in our expert insights. So how do you know when you’re ready for change? Well, the answer is you are, you’re ready for change, just do it. But the real answer is there are two big things for me. One is if you feel like there’s room for improvement, but you’re out of ideas. Like you don’t know what to do next, you don’t know. I highly recommend thinking about agile or thinking about your process change in general in a way that really engages the whole team so that everyone’s engaged with how can we do better? And it’s not about saying you’re doing bad, fix it. It’s about saying we can all always continue to improve and making that really exciting and engaging for the whole team. The other big one that I say that is like my swan song that I repeat over and over and over again is that if you have been considering a change, but you believe the entire organization needs to change in order to do that, just do it. Just start like you don’t need the entire organization. There’s nothing that stops you from maybe changing how you operate, how you maybe your small team operates without and I don’t wanna get in trouble with anyone. Like you don’t have to change the organizational process just to think a little bit differently about how your team delivers that organizational process. Yeah, and it’s freeing. Like look at that change as freedom, right? To do something new.

Natalie, I know I keep saying this and it’s true. Everybody knows me, I’m not lying. I love collaborating with Natalie. And this was amazing. I really appreciate your time and look forward to these events that are coming up. Hit us up. But in the meantime, check us next time on Expert Insights. Thanks everybody. Bye Natalie.