Has your team lost WHY they are doing what they’re doing? Are they listless, going through the motions, turned into a feature factory? We need to remember that no amount of DOING or even BEING Scrum is going to help a team if they have lost the greater WHY.
Principle 8 of the Agile Manifesto speaks of Sustainable development. Sustainability starts with a strong purpose. While Dan Pink’s Autonomy and Mastery are built into Scrum, purpose is often lacking for the team. We need a way to connect the leadership vision to the team’s work. To create team purpose.
Recorded live on April 27 2023 Joel Bancroft-Connors and Kim Poremski will show in this webinar how practicing better profit sustainability will connect the work of the team to the larger vision of the company, and get your employees motivated again.
They will connect Dan Pink’s Autonomy, Master, and Purpose to the Scrum framework and Software Profit Streams along with their own experiences to show you how practicing better profit sustainability will connect the work of the team to the larger vision, leading to re-engaged, re-energized, and refocused teams.
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Transcript
* Transcribed using AI, Please excuse grammar and spelling errors.
Laura Caldie 00:08
Welcome, everybody. I’m happy to host today’s webinar with Joel Bancroft-Connors and Kim Poremski. They’re going to be talking about a topic that I think we’re all pretty interested in. It’s about motivation and the science behind it. I think the context that they’re going to use to go into a little bit deeper. They’ll talk about some strategies and some frameworks to specifically help Scrum teams stay motivated and engaged. So I think this is going to be a really great topic for us to all talk about. So before we get started, I just wanted to remind everyone we are recording and we will be sharing the recording to everyone who registered so give us a few days. After we finish here, we’ll pull that together and send the email out to everybody. When you have questions, and I’m sure you’ll have some as we go forward, just put them into the q&a and no question is pointless to ants ask because if we don’t get to answer it during the conversation today, we’ll definitely put it into the follow up email. So if you have questions, it’s good to put them in. I think at this point, some quick introductions are helpful. So let me start with Joel. Joel is a principal consultant here at Applied frameworks and a certified scrum coach and a certified scrum trainer. Kim Prensky is also here today and she is a principal consultant as well and a certified scrum trainer. I’ve worked with both of them for many years and so I really appreciate the passion they both bring to helping teams engage helping them enjoy their work, helping them deliver quality and then continuously improve. My name is Laura Caldie. I lead Sales and Marketing here at Applied frameworks. And generally we work with companies to improve profitability for software enabled solutions. So that includes support for building the right solution with the optimal business model for the customers and then building it in the most effective way. So typically, that means we’re supporting product management and the use of agile frameworks like Scrum and the Scaled Agile Framework. So I think that is probably enough of a quick intro and with that, I think we can get started again, I will interrupt them every once in a while. It’s kind of a warning for you, Joel, and you can I probably will interrupt once in a while, because sometimes the questions that people are asking are just best answered in kind of real time. So with that, Joel, I’ll turn it over to you to take over.
Joel BC 08:39
Absolutely. Thank you, Laura. Thank you. Hey, Kim. How you doing?
Kimberly Poremski 08:42
I’m doing great. How are you?
Joel BC 08:44
I’m doing good. I am feeling really jazzed and feeling really energized. That said, I mean, I know you and I as Scrum, Scrum trainers. One of the things we’re always dealing with is great. The team I’m working with is not yet jazzed. It’s not energized. And I’m figuring we probably got a lot of smart people out here also. So why don’t we go and ask everybody? What are reasons that teams are disengaged? Now? Sometimes that can be because they’re just having technology issues, kind of like us. We’re going to do our best here but once you’re all to come to menti.com, and enter in will be 447 96 Zero. And I put that into chat so you can see it. And I’m in the previous screen. So hopefully this will work. But basically we’re having news and backup technology to try and see this. It’s not going to be the greatest view. But go ahead and enter in reasons you think that teams are disengaged. Give it to see a minute second see if the technology actually works.
Joel BC 10:07
would expect to see some results by now so we may we may have to tell tell me to go way, way, way way.
Kimberly Poremski 10:16
There sir. Disengage the gate.
Joel BC 10:20
Yes. Okay. All right. No big picture. Hey, let’s remember that one can no big picture boredom lack of self autonomy. Wow, no clear direction.
Kimberly Poremski 10:36
Too much work to complete. Okay. It’s just a job. Oh, wow.
Joel BC 10:41
Those are really serious words there.
Laura Caldie 10:44
Too many meetings came up as well in the q&a.
Joel BC 10:48
Yeah, I see that a big picture. Right. That’s awesome. I encourage you to enter those because what we will do is when we get when we’ll take this word cloud and we’re going to put it into the slide deck before we send out this post the slide deck and send it out. cyberwar Oh, I wonder if that’s like remote work and how much easier it is to become unengaged and lose purpose when when you’re working remote. Alright, well, if we were gonna step back into the deck, and I want to, yeah, I want to step let’s take a step back. From a team and just ask this at a more holistic level. What motivates people in general? What is the reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way? Why do we get up in the morning? Maybe we could look to an expert to answer this. Hey, Google, what motivates us? I find these results pretty much any type in any variation of motivation, what motivates how to motivate and the top results are bound to include be dominated by Dan Pink’s book drive, or his YouTube video. As the subtitle of the book says The Surprising Truth About What Motivates us tells us that once you take money off the table, when people are no longer worried about the money to pay the bills. In the workplace, there are three intrinsic motivators that ultimately drive us. So let’s really quickly review those autonomy, the ability to be self directed, we just saw that in the word in the word clouds about its lack of self direction, lack of self self organization. I like to think about this you can think about autonomy both in the good and the bad. If we go we step into a fast food restaurant, you walk into the back and there is going to be an instruction list right there next to the grill telling you exactly how to build this burger. There is no variation on that. You will put three pickles on the on the burger, the number shall not be two. The number shall not be one and five is right out three pickles is the number. There’s that however, if you look at really successful, fast food restaurants can such autonomy can flourish there because they they give the employees more organizational control over how would they handle things like customer service or schedules or work allocation. So you can have a ton of autonomy can exist even at that at that level if you create an environment for it. Mastering the urge to get better at stuff. If all you’re ever doing is putting one slice of lettuce and three pickles on top of a hamburger bong and putting a bun over it. You’re not going to get better at making that food. We want to look at things like even we want to look at the ability to get better. Smart companies they offer career tracks I can think of a great example of this long time ago I actually worked work at Starbucks and my manager she was awesome. She was great. And I went back a couple of years later after I’d moved into the high tech industry to say hi to her, and I found out Oh, she was doing so great that she actually got promoted and she’s now helping train managers at the corporate office. So this Starbucks actually had this whole career track where you could go from being a barista all the way to being literally she had moved to Seattle and was working in the Starbucks corporate office so that she had a mastertech she had an ability to get better. Lastly, we have a purpose, that desire to work on towards something that work worthwhile. Do it doesn’t matter. We already saw that in the word cloud. And if we come back over here to the word cloud again, it’s what was it? Lack of interest? No clear. direction. If you don’t have a clear purpose, that driving reason, there’s this wonderful quote that I like to think of that was introduced to me by our founder Luke Hohmann. If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather the wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. That is purpose. So if we look at this, these are intrinsic motivations. These are the things that when you take money off the table, are the things that are going to cause people to want to come to work that don’t want to work in your workplace. One of the things we’ve learned about this as these things have become much more important or I think we’ve become more aware of them since the pandemic, you can no longer just offer somebody a good salary and they’re going to come work for you. There’s so much more people employees have started to go no, this is what I care about. I want to do remote remote work, or I want to work on this kind of stuff. And we’ve already learned that if you don’t provide autonomy, mastery and purpose, you’re going to have trouble retaining good employees. Now, let’s ask ourselves a question though. What does this have to do about agile? Kim? Want to take that?
Kimberly Poremski 15:59
Sure. Well, thanks for sharing that Joel. And obviously, I’m a big fan of Daniel Pink’s work and as an analyst, I’m always trying to connect everything back to agility, and I’m sure we have many other analysts on this webinar. Today as well. So it’s only natural to wonder, well, how does autonomy and mastery and purpose relate to agility? And I do think that there are some strong correlations. You know, let’s take principles five, eight. And 12 for example. They definitely promote autonomy when it comes to trusting the team to get the job done. Creating a sustainable pace, and participating in team retrospectives. And then your let’s let’s take you know these other principles, we’ve got principles 3,7,9 and 11. And the idea of mastery is present in those concepts like delivering value early and often focusing on that technical excellence and good design, relying on self organized teams to develop that emergent architecture the requirements for design, and in fact, when I look at principle 11, I even kind of see autonomy present there. So that one kind of overlaps autonomy and mastery. Then we have this idea of purpose. And that one to me is not so obvious. like kinda like crickets right? Isn’t non existent whatsoever? Well I think you could make a case for principle number one leading into purpose, right? Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software, but it still feels like it’s a little bit lacking the why, why is it our biggest priority to satisfy the customer? And so sometimes, just like we need more cowbell, in this case, I think we need more purpose. And so how do we generate that feeling of purpose that creates more engagement in the team? I’m sure that many of us can relate to having worked on projects that seem directly directionless. Or Or maybe they’re going everywhere at once, which is ultimately taking us nowhere. Many of us have worked on projects that were canceled before they ever saw the light of day I can think of quite a few in my career. And I really like this quote, that we’re showing here from Mark Zuckerberg in “purposes that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves”. The reality is that people want to be on teams that deliver products that customers love, and to develop products that customers love. We have to have this holistic Systems Thinking view to ensure that our products are sustainably profitable. And so when we understand the whole system, that bigger picture are we kind of saw that in some of the the mentee words there, we’re able to see how our efforts contribute to the greater good of the organization. And then are we purpose becomes more clear. So unfortunately, though, as organizations get bigger, the system becomes more and more complex. And then as a result, we kind of find ourselves becoming more and more disconnected from that big picture. And so then we end up with blinders on and we only see portions of the system. Now, some people would say, Well, you know, that’s why we have a product vision, right? And product visions are important. They serve a purpose. But product visions are very broad. They’re often very aspirational, and they don’t address the other aspects of design thinking. And then we have the scrum guy, they introduced us to product goals. And that also helps us drive towards achieving that product vision with those mid to longer term objectives. But that still doesn’t necessarily give us the picture of the full system. So it kind of makes us ask ourselves, well, how do we get to that full systems view of a product? Well, the applied frameworks team has developed a new framework, and it’s known as the profit stream canvas. And it is a way to provide a systems view of a product in a very easily consumable and visual way. So as you can see, the canvas consists of 10 blocks. One of them is the customer dimension, and this is where product teams tend to focus. This is where product vision and product goals are typically found as well in this customer block. And then also, we have another dimension in the canvas. And that’s the solution. And this is generally where the technology teams tend to focus. And part of the reason why your team might not be engaged is because they’re only seeing a small part of this whole picture. Primarily your team is probably seeing a lot on the solution aspect of this canvas. If you’re lucky, they’re seeing a little bit into the customer view of the canvas. A lot of teams don’t even get that right. They’re just so removed from the customer. They don’t even have that solid understanding. But assuming that they do, that’s just two of the blocks. So they don’t generally have an understanding of the other eight dimensions that comprise this whole system. And so when you have this system, you’re connecting not only just those two blocks but all of these other blokes. And the danger about not having a systems thinking approach is that you may not even know you’re wearing blinders. So I’m introducing this canvas. I’m talking about this system and how they’re all interrelated and I realized that might sound a little bit abstract at the moment. So what I want to do now is turn it back over to Joel. And he’s going to walk us through a real world case study that illustrates what I’m talking about here, right how all of these dimensions are interwoven as a system to create a sustainably profitable solution. So Joel, I’m gonna give it back over to you.
Joel BC 22:12
Absolutely. Thank you, Kim. So I want to take you back into the mid 2010s company that was founded by Luke Hohmann, and called Conteneo was originally committed to innovation games continue on they had a product called weave, and it was the mid 2020s And they were actually facing a challenge. Now we got an advantage here is Laura. You were actually the VP of sales at continue, weren’t you? I was
Laura Caldie 22:37
and I know I have to do this at least once to Joel can hold up this little card. Yeah, no, I was it was a good decade of my life. And we learned or I’ve personally learned an awful lot of stuff that I’m realizing, wow, it’s all in this canvas now and at the time, it wasn’t organized in such an elegant way. So yes, I was there.
Joel BC 23:00
So as I understand, I mean, we have the advantage of having somebody firsthand to help us with this. You were facing a problem. Have you had the wrong customers the wrong way at the wrong price. Can you maybe tell us a little bit about what the challenges you were facing that you went to that you then tried to solve?
Laura Caldie 23:19
Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I think it’s true at the end of the day, we would say we ended up pivoting away from the original concept that we had with the platform. So wrong is a little bit of a misnomer, but we found a way better way of of of bringing the product to market. So originally we built this to provide agile teams better access to customer insights and customer data. So the big opportunity was at the time most research most customer research was managed by a research team or super expensive because it would be outsourced. And so the idea was if we could kind of democratize the ability to connect with customers for research, Scrum teams would and agile teams and companies in general would have a better job making decisions about what should we be building for the customer. So at the time we were thinking it was a smaller number of people doing extra research with external people with stakeholders and with market with the market base of the with our customers. And what we discovered as well that was certainly a need and certainly interesting. It opened up a whole new set of of opportunities for us. Because when that data kind of came in and and teams were then figuring out what should we build and how do we build it more effectively. How do we get better with agile, the bigger more important problems to solve were around internal collaboration and alignment inside the company. So yes, external research was interesting, but the bigger problem, the more valuable problem to solve for customers with internal decision making an internal alignment.
Joel BC 24:52
Yeah, that’s fascinating. So I mean, if we look at this, the the problem was the customer wasn’t the the problem the customer had wasn’t the problem. They really needed to be solved. So in some extent, you’re right, Laura. Laura is right. They didn’t have the wrong customer. It was just how was the customer using it? what problems they actually need to have solved. And so they they were looking at that customer that customer aspect. They recognized that they needed to change their value exchange model. So really quickly, a value exchange model is simply how we exchange money with the customer. There are there are several different kinds of value exchange for continual originally that what they were looking at was a meter based approach not unlike a video game you put in the quarter, you played a game, you want to play another game, you got to put in more and more quarters. They wanted to move to a time based access or a subscription based service. It’s like you can use as many of these you can play the games as many times as you want in this month for a fixed fee. Now to change the value of standard if they change the value exchange model, they will then be able to change their pricing model which would allow continue to update and create a more sustainable solution for them because the metering based model. I mean, one of the things you think about it is with metering, it’s okay. I don’t know when somebody’s going to come and put a quarter on my machine. It’s hard to build a sustainable business when you don’t know how many people are going to come and put quarters in machine. Time based time based access. We’ve got these people we’ve got subscription models they sign up for a year service that’s sustainable, that’s predictable. To do that, though, would have to get the customer to agree because they’d have to change their customer license. And that’s a big thing. You can’t just go and make huge changes without changing the customer license. And if you’re an A, B to B type thing, you can’t just say oh, we’re gonna change your terms without having a conversation. Maybe your contract says you can. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a conversation with your customer. A great example of this from earlier in our founders career Luke tells a story about working on a product and they were they written the the customer license agreement to include maintenance for all versions of macOS. Well, they’d written this when Mac OS was at version six. Suddenly we come along to version 10, which is changing to a Unix codebase. Oh my goodness, we can’t do this. They had to go back and have a conversation with the customers. conteneo did this. The good news was that in doing this, the customers actually realized hey, wow, this would actually be a better ROI we can we can sell a subscription model a lot better than this metered based approach. And it’s going to be easier for us to understand and justify for our use and it will better serve the way we want to use this as an internal tool where we’re not having to worry about well, do I have enough quarters to go play the game? No, I got a subscription service. I can use it. I can I can play as many games as I want. Something else that they discovered in doing this and having these conversations with the customers that really mattered to continue on the ones that were really in their growth lineup were in Europe, and Europe was getting ready to implement GDPR and so Okay, wow. Not only we’re going to also have to update update our data policies around all of this no matter what. So that brought us to the question that brought them to the question of well, how would this all impact our solution, the technology that we’re building? I mean, a lot of companies would just say, Oh, it’s just a pricing change, right? We don’t need to worry about when they just send some requirements to engineering and expect it to magically come out. Fortunately, continued didn’t work that way. They practice system thinking from the very beginning. And I mean, I had an opportunity to go to the contenu office at one time, it’s like engineering, leadership sales, they all sat in a common area and they had conversations they looked at the big system. Because of that, they were able to quickly say, well the architecture was billed for metering, and also our data policies and absolutely need an overhaul. To do this. It’s going to require re architecting of the system. To do that, most likely will require us to pick up some new third party technologies that we’re going to have to license which is going to change how much we pay for the product pay for to run the service, which is going to affect what we’re charging. So we’re gonna have to look at that. However, we’re just realizing that in doing this, we actually will open up an opportunity to add to be able to experiment more. This is what we kind of call the profit engines. Part of the canvas the ability to how can we answer questions like how can we expand our offering? How can we attract new customers or expand how much we’re doing with existing customers? So some examples of things that they were able to start exploring was to create an ecosystem where people could create new games and submit them and basically create a monetization that would incentivize people to share the stuff and to build the platform with more and more games or frameworks.
Laura Caldie 29:54
So one of the things that I’ve added here, Joel, is that the reason that I think this was so interesting for the teams who were working on this was, even if there was a story, or a task that needed to happen in a particular sprint in order to make progress against this lofty goal, because we were all discussing it in this way, even what might have seemed like a boring and mundane or a low level thing. Everyone understood why it had to happen in order to create the eventual outcome that we wanted with the platform. So there wasn’t such a thing as unimportant, boring. Work, like every piece of code every quality check that happened every you know, thing that happened during the sprint, people understood where it fit into enabling something that was much bigger and much more exciting, sort of like what I’m doing enables something bigger than myself. The other piece that was super, I think, motivating for people was that they knew which customers needed this and what would happen when they got it, right. Like they were building something that they knew was going to get into the hands of a particular market segment or a particular customer. And so having this understanding of the bigger system meant that that the motivation for kind of rolling up your sleeves and getting it done was really clear for the team on all fronts, regardless of the kind of part of the task or part of the product they were working on.
Joel BC 31:21
Yeah, and so not only was it the system of the canvas and connecting the technology and understanding all that, it also because of that you you brought your imaginary people all the way into the customer box, which meant you literally brought them all the way out to the customer. I mean, you had that person who was writing API code, they knew exactly how their API code was gonna help the customer because they literally were in the conversations with the customers. And that’s something I’m Kim and I talk about all the time when we teach our are CSM classes is Look, don’t be a barrier to the stakeholders talking directly to the developers, you’re going to get a better solution when the developer when they’re brought into the room.
Laura Caldie 32:00
Yeah, and I think as a company gets larger and more complicated, you have to be more intentional about making those opportunities happen. But yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, we don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole. But it’s certainly interesting when I when when companies forget some of the things they might be able to take advantage of, for example, with a sprint review. It’s like who you’re inviting and the conversation you kind of enable to have happen can help to create understanding of the larger system for the stakeholders and for the developers and for the other folks that are in the room. So you have to be more intentional. It’s not like it’s an easy thing to do. I certainly don’t want to hand wave it, but at the same time if you don’t do it, I think getting back to the topic about motivation, you might be missing an opportunity to kind of inject some energy into what motivates the team and connecting them to the bigger picture whenever possible. You know, and this is one systems way of thinking of doing that I think is an energizer to that kind of motivation. part that we’re all talking about here.
Joel BC 33:01
Absolutely. And I think what we what we found was, I’m just gonna see if this works is they started by just thinking about the customer knowing the customer isn’t isn’t getting what they wanted. And then they had to start to see how is that going to change? How could we change basically how we were pricing and so the customer would be more interested, which the translation is how do we change our value exchange model? And then what would be that overall income, but they started here, and as you can see, as they went through the whole conversation, and they created an entire systems view that literally showed them that every part of this all these pieces were fitting together to create that solution and that whole and because they had development involved in those conversations, they didn’t end up with any surprises they didn’t end up with. Oh, well. We’re gonna promise the customer this and then go talk to engineering and engineering going. You promised what that’s going to take us at least 12 months to build. And I mean, come on, who has not had literally had that kind of conversations like, oh, well, we’ve already sold it. Sold it to the customer. You got to have it done in six months. It’s like, Yeah, that’s right. Next, please. All right. So with continue, this was a conversation they have. I mean, we’re looking at a major thing re architecting a platform that is no small task. And it could have been very easy for them to go oh no, no, when the gist of what we need to re architect. They took a systems view though, and they looked at all that and because they did that they adjusted their roadmap. They focused on re architecting the platform which required putting new functionality on hold for a bit of time there right, Laura? Yep, yeah. So I mean, they stopped new functionality. They delivered a new solution to existing customers, they attracted more customers they created a sustainably profitable business model. I went through something similar in the early 2000s When I worked for a company called Veritas and we they were building this new dashboard management tool. And it went gangbusters for two years. The customers loved it. We came out with it in six months. They loved it and for two years was like growth, growth, growth, growth and suddenly sales just fell through the floor. And when the product manager actually went out and started talking to customers like well, quality sucks, it’s not reliable and we went bought this other services does does a quarter of what you do, but at least it doesn’t crash. We were so busy and focused on the next the next the next we didn’t look at that system view and realize that we got out over our skis with conteneo. The end result was that they were eventually acquired by scaled agile as one of the first building blocks in the safe studio ecosystem. You think about that small small company acquire acquired that is a absolute success. That is part of sustainability and scaled agile would not have bought them if they didn’t have a profitable sustainable business model because then there wouldn’t have been there wouldn’t have been a value in making that purchase. Anything any closing thoughts there on this Laura?
Laura Caldie 35:56
No, I mean it’s it’s nothing is nothing is easy. And so when you have motivated teams motivated teams figure out the hard problems. So we certainly had a lot of hard problems to solve. But the motivation level was very high. And yeah, I would definitely attribute it to the fact that people understood the bigger why and the bigger system
Kimberly Poremski 36:16
so yeah, I love this example. And so I’m I appreciate you, Joe and Laura for kind of walking all of us through this because I think it I’m hoping at least that it really will resonate with with folks on the webinar today. I really liked how Joel you started drawing I mean you could have kept drawing, you only drew in a couple of boxes. But I mean, if we had if you had taken and drawn in all of those different boxes, you know, we would have seen just how interconnected everything is. And so just kind of going back to that idea that there’s this risk and not thinking holistically about our products. And and because you know Conteneo was taking that systems view and looking at everything in an interconnected way. You know, they were more successful, but had they not that that could have been very detrimental to the profitability of the product. And therefore to the success of the entire business. And the other thing I want to point out is and I think Laura might have alluded to this a little bit is that we keep saying, Oh, it’s this new canvas right? The profit streams canvas itself is new, but it is the culmination of all of these tried and tested techniques, from years of experience and practice been continuing through this year, like you said in the early early 2010s. And so now that we have all of this, we’ve been able to assemble it into this cohesive framework for the first time and that’s why we’re able to share it with everyone like we are today. So I just think that’s very, very cool. So I guess I kind of want to come full circle though about it. We started off like autonomy mastery purpose and what your purpose in Scrum teams and we’ve talked a lot about the profit streams, Canvas and all of the different components but I want to make it really clear that this isn’t just about profit alone. It’s really all about people. And if we go back to that quote from Mark Zuckerberg that I shared earlier, your purpose is that sense that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, and so when you’re able to connect a product vision, that’s part of the larger view. And then I want to say yes and connect to that broader system, because that’s ultimately what’s going to motivate knowledge workers and give them purpose. And I know Laura was mentioning this, a few slides back but the onus is also very much on product leaders to be really intentional about connecting the team to that greater system, and then therefore to that greater purpose. So that’s how I’d like to kind of bring things full circle and turn it over to Laura I guess. Yeah,
Laura Caldie 38:57
so I’m hoping that people will have questions. If you do, please put them into q&a. But we’ll be sending out some of these links when we send out the recording, but you can go to profit stream profit data streams.com And you’ll learn more about our partner programs. So for those who are looking for or interested in partnering with us on this, there’s a place to learn more about that. The book is amazing. I mean, the cover is really pretty but you know, I have my copy here and it’s, it’s big, but it’s beautiful. It has great stuff in it. So if you want to learn how to apply some of this definitely go there. And there are training courses. There are actually I’m gonna put a link into the chat. We also have many more webinars that are recorded. So if you wanted to dig a little bit deeper into the canvas, or any elements of it, we can do that and the webinars. So I’ll start with this one that we have, what is the profit stream that’s always a good one to start with? So I’m putting that into chat for everybody right there. And if anybody has any questions, put them into q&a. Otherwise, I have one for you.
Kimberly Poremski 40:07
I just wanted to I was I’m laughing because you both held your books up in your car makes me look bad, but the reality is, mine’s on my nightstand so I don’t know if that makes me a little pathetic or what but I actually that was some of my nighttime reading. So just wanted to clarify that so I had to laugh about that
Laura Caldie 40:27
when you verify culture books off like Yeah, well, our CEO Jason Tanner and Luke come in who’s the other founder of the company, they worked incredibly hard on this book and they were very lucky to have Federico to work with as well. So fed a is our designer. And what I like about that is he’s made things visually very appealing and easy to understand. So I think that the system that can really create a lot of energy and excitement around what a solution looks like, that system, you know, can be tapped into for Okay, well let’s actually create the bigger understanding about where the work we do fit in and what that why is and you know, we’re certainly happy to provide other ways of creating that product vision and getting Scrum teams excited about what they’re building. All right, so do you. I actually have a question and last call for questions are coming into the webinar here but the question I have for both of you is, as a put your product owner hat on for a minute. And we think about the product vision and the bigger strategic goals for a product to probably be created and managed by the product manager or the product management team. And then the product owner is actually sitting on a scrum team. What do you think that product owners can do to help bring in some of the system’s thinking that we were just talking about with the profit stream canvas? What can a product owner do to start to bring that understanding into the team to help with things like motivation?
Kimberly Poremski 42:00
I think that’s a great question. So well, it kind of this, this could get into a long winded answer. So I’ll try to keep it a little bit short. But But when we talk about product ownership and product management, product managers, you know, I always describe that relationship as a Venn diagram where you know, they’re doing some of their own separate things, but then they’re also really meeting in the middle. I think it’s really important for a product owner to also not put their blinders on. Right. We talked about the blinders. And sometimes I think that product owners do that as well because they are working with the teams they do tend to be a little bit more execution focused as well. But the product owners on a scrum team also need to be as plugged in and have that whole system’s view as well so that they can better articulate that. I also think that to your point earlier, Laurie, you were mentioning the sprint reviews for example, a bringing in more, more stakeholders and more folks that can also help speak to and represent that systems view I think is really powerful.
Laura Caldie 43:03
So this is a related question, but Dagmar Frank just asked about, hey, autonomy goes closely with a team agreeing that the direction you’re agreeing in the direction that company is going. So how can you lead these discussions sensibly so that the team feels they’re involved and they can have some impact, but you’re not stuck in endless discussion about it? Well,
Joel BC 43:23
part of this is not necessarily I mean, yes, there’s a systems view. And I mean, a container. That’s a great example of the they were asking the jury, well, what do you need to do to make sure this system system works? At the end of the day, though, leadership does have to pick a direction. It’s being clear about that and communicating given. You don’t necessarily have to even have full open discussion. It’s like, look, here’s where we’re going. Here’s why. We’re going there. Do you want to get on board? If you think about the the famous Dan Simon Sinek YouTube talk of the customers don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it. You’re not necessarily getting the customer to go hey, do you think we should be building on iPhone they built an iPhone they gave us gave a compelling why? leadership has to make it very clear what is the purpose and why do you want to go there? Then your employees are going to vote with their feet, if they love your purpose, they’re going to stay? If they don’t like your purpose, they’re going to go Don’t sacrifice your purpose because a couple of individuals don’t agree with it necessarily. It’s more be intentional, and so that everyone knows what it is. I’ve come into companies where that API developer has no idea how their code connects to the big picture, or they even know what we’re building. We worked with one client, we’re literally in the team kickoff, we threw out the regular script. We spent the first half day on what is commercial insurance and why should you care because that hired all these people, and they didn’t even really understand what they were building in the big picture.
Laura Caldie 44:53
Yeah, you know, I think that’s a good point. John, I’m just going to add one other idea in there. I think one of the things that we try to do is to be really practical as well. And so one way that you can make this happen, how do I help my team get have these discussions without getting endlessly stuck into them is, that could actually be one reason to change the central question of a retrospective. Right retrospectives. aren’t always about what are we doing well, and how can we get better? Because honestly, you keep asking that same question every single time and it can become really boring and it just becomes a rote task where the value of doing it kind of loses its punch, right? So right so you could change the question about, you know, the two review kind of the strategic direction of the product and to take a look intentionally at the longer roadmap, not just a sprint planning exercise, but actually have the product owner lead the discussion around hey, here’s the, you know, the six to 12 month view on where we think we’re going with the product and give that kind of roadmap perspective that you might even be sharing with some of your key customers to get feedback on it, and have the team discuss it, right. Make sure that they’re aware of what’s coming and they may end up finding opportunities to kind of really engage in some of that future. That’s coming. They understand what is coming and they may even bring up something that’s pretty important that the product owner would end up feeding back up through the product management function of that product. So it’s a time boxed event, right. That’s how you can ensure it doesn’t end up becoming unhelpful and it’s good to have your teams aligned with a longer term roadmap than just what they might be seen in a sprint planning session.
Joel BC 46:35
Absolutely, I can absolutely see how you tie that into the how does the team become more effective improve its quality, which is the goal of a retrospective. It’s the what, what what do we need as a team to be more effective at meeting this long term product goal? And that means we got to make it very clear. What is the long term product goal?
Kimberly Poremski 46:54
I also see you know, there’s a lot of change management elements in here too. And you know, one of my favorite quotes is like, no people, people aren’t going to want to change or do things if they feel like things are happening. To them. And so autonomy doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re completely making every single decision all the time. A lot of times it just means that you’re you’re coming along in that journey. You’re not being told things and so I think I see a lot of change management aspects of that as well.
Joel BC 47:22
What are our mutual friend, Sean Barra, he has that wonderful thing that people people want to don’t want things done to them. They want to be, have it be involved in a deal. Remember, it’s a great, great way of saying but it’s like people don’t want things done to them. They want to be involved in the process.
Laura Caldie 47:44
Yeah, I’m sure the quote was great, because Sean is super smart, but I can’t remember to save my life. He’s he’s much more clever than I am above stuff like that. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we’re getting close to the end of our time bucks here, but I wanted to give people a couple more minutes if they have any other questions and then give both Joel and Kim both of you a chance to kind of give us some of your parting advice or parting words before we call it a wrap for this webinar. Any last minute thoughts that you have that you would maybe impart on the team or any particular I don’t know any starting condition on if they wanted to get familiar with this canvas? Where do you think they should start?
Joel BC 48:28
Honestly, I think one of these things, I mean, get the book. However, if this is something where you really go wow I this I totally understand this and everything. Learn more. I mean, we’ve started offering classes around this pricing fundamentals class that basically walks through how to use this and frameworks to actually use this canvas because having a canvas is great. Knowing how to use the Canvas. That’s a whole nother nother another layer. And so check out our pricing fundamentals class. We’ve got one in Europe on May 2, and we’ve got one in Pacific timezone on the at the end of May. That’ll be my big plug.
Laura Caldie 49:08
Yeah, I just put the link to the one on May second and Europe into chat in case people want to take a peek at that. Matt, what’s coming up fairly quickly on May 2, and I know it’s gonna be an in person one, right? Yep, that’s in person and that’s in Germany. So if either you’re already there or you’ve been dying to go but if you also have friends and colleagues in Europe, you can share that link with them as well.
Joel BC 49:29
Yeah, and then the one at the end end of the month will be a virtual class. So it’ll be in the Pacific Time Zone, but anybody around the world can join.
Kimberly Poremski 49:36
And I you had already kind of mentioned the webinars earlier, but that that would be my one thing, obviously. I think it’d be great for folks to purchase the book and really get to kind of delve in but that might might feel like a lot for folks. And so we have published so many of these webinars and that’s one of the things I like about doing them is that we make them available even after the fact. And so I think that’s a really great way for folks to start to get indoctrinated into what this canvas really means and what does it mean for me and how I approach my job in my role, because it’s really powerful and it has many different applications. And I think that once folks start to delve in, they’re gonna see that more and more.
Laura Caldie 50:19
Yeah, just put another link in the chat that will aim you at a collection of some of these blocks that that I can just refer to. So if you want to click on that, you can find it easily.
Joel BC 50:31
And cam you should look at question somebody saying hi.
Kimberly Poremski 50:34
Hi, Gary. Actually, it’s funny Gary had reached out to me recently and so Gary, you you’re on my whiteboard to reach out to Sarah and I look forward to reconnecting with you. So I’m really glad you were able to join this webinar today.
Joel BC 50:47
And Vic Bonacci. He’s a fellow CST friend, a friend of mine. Absolutely. That’s for me as a scrum trainer. It was like whole profit stream stuff. It’s like oh my god. This is like a whole new world to learn. But as I got into it and got to read the book more, I saw that connection I saw. Wow, this is the missing piece that I’ve been looking for in my classes. And I’m actually looking I’m currently looking at revamping my CSM and my cspo workshops to use a steel thread of the profit stream Canvas because I think both at the team level and of course at the product owner level, this can be that final way to connect the connect the customer to the individual engineer.
Laura Caldie 51:30
All right, well, I appreciate the questions. Joe and Ken thank you so much for putting this together. I thought it was an interesting way of looking at how can you help Scrum teams stay connected to the bigger vision and you know, everyone knows that happy Scrum teams are more productive and produce higher quality work happy people just focus better. So thank you both and we will share the recording soon and I appreciate everybody’s time on the webinar. Thank you so much and have a great rest of your day.
Kimberly Poremski 52:00
Thank you for joining recordings