Transformation-as-a-Capability

Austin Bagley

All right. Welcome to the first episode of Transformation. I'm excited to introduce David Farah, our newest member of the Flow team. David joins us as our field CTO and has built a career around transforming software engineering teams, most recently at Bank of New York Mellon, where he was responsible for driving the agile adoption over 10,000 practitioners around the globe. So thank you for coming.

 

Austin Bagley

Super glad to have you, David.

 

David Farah

Thank you Austin. Happy to be here.

 

Austin Bagley

All right, let's jump into it. Most important questions start us off favorite video game.

 

David Farah

So I do believe you are referencing the Zelda Sword over in my corner here. I don't know if we can see on the broadcast. OK, yes, so there's a long list, especially things I'm into right now. But in terms of best, I have to put Zelda, Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild at the top.

 

Austin Bagley

I love it. That's awesome. OK, let's start with the first real question. We entitled this episode Transformation as a Capability. What does that mean?

 

David Farah

Yeah. So things are changing rapidly and I have to go back to this, even though we're a couple of years out. But the global pandemic impacted everyone and forced all businesses to change in a way that they hadn't before. And it made everyone adapt to a new, a new way of working, a new environment, all kinds of things that changed. So everyone was trying new things.

 

David Farah

We're we're solving different problems. We're solving new things that are coming up. But. We have a lot of things that we know already work. We've been doing this for a while.

 

David Farah

We've been at change for multiple decades now. So we have a catalogue of things that we can leverage and Dr. Change with. So it's kind of at the point is like why aren't we doing that? Why hasn't everyone jumped at this opportunity?

 

David Farah

Why haven't? Why isn't this a capability that we're leveraging in our organizations and leveraging these things off the shelf to make a difference?

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah, I love what you call out there where as we move from transformation to transformation, whether that be cloud or AI or or name the next thing that there is a set of repeatable things that you can carry with you from change to change. Absolutely. I love this idea of catalog. So tell me, how did you build this catalog?

 

David Farah

How I built the catalogue A lot of reading, a lot of experiencing and a lot of just going through this, right? So I've been through a lot of different changes, different leaders coming and going, different environmental factors or economic factors forcing us to change in one way or another. But over time, like I said, certain things just work and you can work with other practitioners in the industry. They just work for them too.

 

Austin Bagley

So it's a lot of that practical experience and leveraging, you know, the best of what's in the industry with others saying, hey, this worked for us too, OK, so let's, let's dive in, let's get specific here. What, what are the methods that are in your catalog? How would you kind of classify those?

 

David Farah

Well, number one, I have to start with a no surprise in my recent career choice, but metrics is always at the front of it to being objective as possible with what you're doing and and measuring so that you can take as much bias out of the equation as possible. Then we have other things like having stable teams and organizing around products, focusing on our customer, creating environments of psychological safety, getting back to what sounds like kind of the old guard of Agile and DevOps, right like. All these things just work and we've seen it work. So we we tend to always try to look for that new thing. But these ones that have been tried and true, there are ways to leverage them, maybe not in whole, but the pieces of them, we absolutely should be leveraging them.

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah. So I'm going to go off script here because I think you mentioned a couple of really cool methods here. You know, one of them is this idea of like stable teams organizing around products. Can you tell me more about how that has gone for you?

 

David Farah

So it's a it's a hard thing to do, especially if your organization may have been organized around projects or maybe if you're going through different mergers and acquisitions or you're changing in the marketplace. What happens is often we have to react quickly and maybe we have we bring in different contract teams or we have people jumping around to different areas. What happens is when you're moving that quickly you start to lose some of the the knowledge that you get behind that product. And what we see is that when we have these these stable teams, we invest in that product. Not only do we get a really strong understanding of what is, what does that product cost us, how, what is it doing for us in the marketplace, what's our TCO.

 

David Farah

But we start to build a really strong knowledge base and a really strong team behind it. That leads to. Sustainable success over a long period of time. So it's really hard to do, especially as you've been through a lot. But it's really worth investing in saying, hey, look, how can we keep these teams as kind of secure as possible.

 

David Farah

Now accounting for obviously changing a little bit here and there and even borrowing resources and knowledge, but when you focus on that. Product and your customer there's.

 

Austin Bagley

Huge value in it long term, Yeah, there's like this interesting kind of juxtaposition a little bit. Here we're talking about the word transformation and you and this. Also this word stable is coming up a lot. So I think that's a really interesting kind of. Concept that that may come as surprising.

 

Austin Bagley

And so I think, hey, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

 

David Farah

No, I mean that's it's so interesting you say that because so much of transformation is about creating a sustainable, stable organization. You want to get to the place where you're not always reacting to everything. So what are the things that we can do to to, to help us get to there. So that's. A lot of the things in the catalogue actually help with that.

 

David Farah

They, you know they point us towards that predictability, that stability that's going to actually lead to higher productivity and outputs.

 

Austin Bagley

Speaking of productivity outputs, you mentioned you know a key thing that you're doing is obviously using metrics to be objective about you know, managing and measuring change. How are you doing that? Like what are what are the metrics of choice to help you cut through the noise?

 

David Farah

Well. Obviously I started with flow and the interesting thing was coming from an agile background, there are some agile flow metrics that that that we we see in the marketplace. We use all of those. And then Pluralsight Flow the product with our, with our Git metrics and where we're developing, watching our tickets, all those things tie perfectly together and then on top of that. We also have our Dora metrics.

 

David Farah

So basically what I'm saying is that again in the industry we've proven a lot of these things work right. We know what is helpful for our teams, not punitive and what is going to help build us up. So I like to focus on things like basics like our coding days. You know, are we getting to write code more days a week? And actually collaborate with our teams then are we actually collaborating with our teams, How many of our our pull requests are going unreviewed.

 

David Farah

Then we jump into some time based stuff. How quickly are we responding to each other? How quickly are we getting product out the door, our lead time, how quickly are we going from idea all the way to delivery. So all of these things. Oh, and obviously with the Dora, how healthy.

 

David Farah

Is our overall delivery right? Are we introducing failures into production? Are we deploying frequently in small batches? All of these things are really important, all kind of based in Agile and DevOps metrics. Now that's just the basics for delivery.

 

Austin Bagley

There are many, many others we we could talk about as well. So interesting thing about the metrics side is you mentioned quite a bit. Is it common for you to to measure that many at once? Do you picking a few at a time, like tell me more about how you deploy that across the team?

 

David Farah

Great question. So it depends on the persona and what you're using it for, right. So the the main personas that I look at, we have our individual contributors, we have our our managers whether it be engineering manager or just team managers, sometimes product managers. And then we get into kind of that like that middle management tier and and our like our executive persona. Each one is going to be looking at different things and is going to be try to understand their teams in a different way.

 

David Farah

So you have to respond to that. So you have to say, like, OK, here's where we are with this team. Here are the things that we're trying to invest in to make a difference. Are we working on the right things? Have we set a clear strategy?

 

David Farah

From the top then at our team level. Are we getting the most out of our pipelines? Are we following good development practices? All of these things? It's going to depend on where you look and how you respond to these metrics.

 

Austin Bagley

You know, many of us experienced these typical levers employed by executives when it comes to change. We've all had the new executive that comes in. We're going to make a reorg here. We're going to adjust some costs, may reduce the workforce. As your parent to this talk, you describe those as the easy levers.

 

Austin Bagley

Why?

 

David Farah

Yeah. So because these these actions typically receive the the immediate financial impact and a lot of times they look good on paper but. When you jump at things like this, especially like quick expense reductions and you know, bringing in new leadership like this, they can sometimes be the most damaging to the culture and your own long term strategy for where you want to go. So I'm not saying that you don't want to do these things, because a lot of times you do, but you think long and hard about why you're doing it and what step you're going to take next and what the implications are because you could be severely undercutting yourself.

 

Austin Bagley

When you're, you know, pulling these easy levers in inside of short financial gain, yeah. So the idea that there's easy levers also implies that they're harder level, you know, levers. Tell me more about this.

 

David Farah

Yeah. So the hard levers I think gets into what we talked about, if we're saying what transformation of a capability as a capability really is. So when I think about it, the first one, probably the hardest, is developing. A clear strategy of communicating it and then most importantly sticking to it. So often we create these strategies and we diverge from them at the first sign of weakness or or failure.

 

David Farah

And it's fine to pivot, but when you set a long term strategy that's informed and you know where you're going with this, it's important to stick to that and see it through, adapt where necessary but hold to that strategy. So there there's. There's also other. Other hard levers that I would say like making sure that direction is clear, improving communications in your organization, especially large organizations, very, very hard setting basic standards, right. Sometimes our teams just don't know exactly what's expected of them from us, right?

 

David Farah

We may be measuring certain things and maybe they don't know that. So make that clear, right, and then create that culture of accountability, right. You hired great people. You got to let them do that work, create that environment where they're going to be productive and they're going to get things done. And then sometimes, you know, reorganizing, you know, reorganizing around value, shaking off old silos, focusing on your products, your customers and and getting the right things out the door.

 

David Farah

It's hard to make those changes right. Some people been in leadership positions for a long time and they haven't, you know, they're not ready for that change. But sometimes you got to do that, You got to shake that off and you got to get the right people in the right roles. And I I just can't say it enough, but sticking to those decisions, having the fortitude to deal with that throughout the tough times and saying, hey, this is the direction we're going and it's going to benefit all of us is really, really critical. But those things are really hard to do and they take a long time to see the benefit of them.

 

David Farah

That's why they're hard. You don't see the financial impact and the reward right away. You see it after you know potentially the months or years of really driving that new, that new strategy.

 

Austin Bagley

So I am going to go off script again because this is such a great conversation here. Let's say that you're getting, you know you're making progress on this big change, you're you're using all these methods, you're keeping stable teams, you're you're communicating well, but things start to get shaky. You know it gets takes longer or it's more costly. How do you, if you're this kind of in this leader where you have both stakeholders as well as a team relying on you, how do you stay the course? How do you, you know, calm kind of the waters, if you will, when it comes to people questioning the strategy.

 

David Farah

Ask the question back, Ask why? Why is it shaky? Like what is going wrong that's that's that's causing us to have issues? Getting close, closer to the delivery and working with your teams, getting that insight from the ground, seeing where maybe they just might need more support from you. And that you know that arbitrary date we put in the sky is actually not real.

 

David Farah

And that we have a little bit more time to make the right decisions to get things done, whatever it is, work with them, work with your teams, work with your organization and see why it's creating that that unstable ground, right. And then, as leaders, it's our responsibility to help right that ship again. Help keep it, you know, going in the right direction. And sometimes what you'll find is that part of your strategy, you know, really doesn't work right. You tried it with the teams.

 

David Farah

There's a piece of it that we need to readjust for and realign. That's OK, right? But it's important to get that feedback from the team, to work with them and make it a transparent and open conversation.

 

Austin Bagley

I love it, all right? So we've kind of we've laid the groundwork of things that do work, and I love these principles we've established. Let's talk about what doesn't work, because I think this is just as valuable for for those who are who are listening in.

 

David Farah

The big thing for me, what doesn't work is trying to do it all at once, like setting that top down mandate and say, hey, we're going to do all this tomorrow, right? There's a very big difference between having a strategy and sticking to it and making a mandate that we're going to be inflexible with and we're going to say, look, everybody's going to do this. And everybody's going to do this. By you know. The end of the day, the end of the week, the end of the month, whatever it is, it's really important to put together a change strategy and kind of gauge the amount of change that you think your organization can go through it.

 

David Farah

And again, one time you will break things anytime you're going through a massive change. So trying to do it all once, you're going to break even more and just create a ton, a ton of risk. So if you break it down into smaller batches and say, hey, we're going to do this and we're going to do this, then we're going to do this. Obviously sometimes there's pain in stretching it out, but you're de risking a lot of that transformation that you're going to go through. So it's really critical to think about how can we do that so that we come out the end of this.

 

David Farah

We're going to be far more successful than we would have if we just would have done some of these things quickly.

 

Austin Bagley

You know something I think I hear a lot when it comes to change is definitely fatigue around what we would call these this idea that you brought up of top down mandates you kind of you kind of mentioned that you know but at the same time I also understand the position that our leaders are in because they are exposed to a certain amount of context and and obviously are typically under the most pressure of any of us to deliver. How do how do we balance this like need to move the organization without getting into this thing where we're like top down mandates that that inherently like turn off those who are doing the work.

 

David Farah

Yeah. So I think the main thing is having the the conversation as an open conversation, right? As long as it's not closed off and we're saying, hey, thou shalt must do this and you must do it tomorrow. If you're having a conversation with all levels of your leadership team, making sure that everyone believes in that message and is working to to to help the organization changing that direction, you're going to be better off. That's what the key's all about, right?

 

David Farah

Like just having it, you know, with a couple people in the room and saying, OK, everybody's going to do this tomorrow. You're not going to get the things that that that are that are going to be troublesome, right? You create that feedback loop within your own organization. Realize that everyone's trying to go the same direction, and take the good with the bad. And flexes you need to go.

 

David Farah

It's going to pay off.

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah. I mean, that actually leads us really well into the next question. You know, we've kind of covered all these principles. But yeah, I think it matters a lot to dive into like, what is this, How does this actually work in practice? Right.

 

Austin Bagley

So I think one of the most successful changes you've been a part of is, you know, implementing what I would call the art and science of DevOps. So tell me more about, like all these principles, but let's use this particular project that you're on to kind of illustrate those.

 

David Farah

When I got into DevOps and I started understanding why do we need to do this, I had a great leader that introduced me to it and then had more engineers work with me and saying like, OK, this is what we got to do. So I came into it sideways, but then I helped a lot of people get through it. So there were three things that we that that we had to focus on. So there's a cultural shift that comes with DevOps, there's a tooling shift and then there is a a practices or principle shift. All of them are hard and if you try to do them all at the same time again, it'd be really hard to get done.

 

David Farah

So my favorite way of looking at this is how we talked about people, what you're going to go through when you go through these changes. Regardless of what you decide to do first, you're going to one, phase one and you're going to set the foundations. Phase two, you're going to start to improve your mechanics and phase three, you're going to start to improve your commercials. So I I worked on that that that that framing and and how we are going to go through that transformation with a, with a with a great colleague Abhi Shua and that really resonate with a lot of people.

 

Austin Bagley

If if you look at those phases, I love that. So foundations, mechanics, commercials in that order. That's great. So let me let's go back to some of those principles you were talking about above like how do they apply as you were, you know breaking this down. Tell me how those will event.

 

David Farah

So the first thing that we did when we started rolling out DeVos practices was it was actually during the pandemic. So we had a little bit different focus. We said, OK, look, if we have to streamline this, we have to get things out the door as quickly as possible and improve this. Let's get our developers the right tooling so that they can work together in this new remote context. And then we can remove as many bottlenecks as possible.

 

David Farah

So we just centralized our repositories into one, one tool so that we could easily collaborate and see those things there and then we built on it. So from there, once we had everything in a central place and we had more standard pipelines that everyone could leverage and we said, OK, what are now, what are some basic practices that we're all going to follow as an organization, We came up with 7. And then we communicated like crazy to everybody to make sure everybody knew this is what we were looking at. And then we measured and then everyone was on the same playing field who said, OK, here are the things that that we're going to focus on and here's how we're going to measure to make sure that we are doing well.

 

Austin Bagley

So I love this focus on standards you have. You were working with a massive organization. How on earth did you come down to seven standards that worked across that large of a group that everyone actually would agree on? Like that's. I think we need to like spend some time on this because this is not a simple problem to solve.

 

David Farah

We did it with a lot of negotiation, but it was negotiation with a really good group. So we had multiple business units. So what we did was we brought senior engineers like I think a distinguished engineer type category. We brought them together from every business unit we talked about. OK guys, here's some of the basics that we want to help the organization with.

 

David Farah

What if we make these statements? Does this apply to this business, to this tech stack, to this thing? Like can we get to a point where we all agree that this this will work and people aren't going to go nuts for this, but instead they can get on board with it? The interesting thing was I thought that we were going to come in with simpler statements because it would be hard to genericize across that many people. We actually got more specific with a couple things.

 

David Farah

We were able to dive down and say, like, yeah, look, maybe people aren't doing this today, but they absolutely should be. And this is something that we need to build in. So we got deeper with it than I expected, which was really surprising to me and it was met really well across the organization. Now we had to communicate, like I said, like crazy to make sure everybody knew it was out there and that's what we were measuring. But by bringing, you know, the practitioners to the table and saying like, look, how can we improve, we got really, really good results.

 

Austin Bagley

You know, and this really Harkins back to almost the beginning of our conversation a bit, David, where you were talking about to really transform you have to build it. You know, with you know, long running, stable teams you have to make it something that you're willing to stick to. And I love how that actually came into play with this particular project where. You actually thought, oh, maybe we have to keep it simpler. We have to like get a be a little more, maybe gentle or tiptoe a bit because we want to make sure it's going to work for everybody and end result by actually bringing everyone in.

 

Austin Bagley

By using those stable teams as a foundation, we were able to actually make something that was a lot more actionable because it was more specific, which I think that is a really interesting kind of result from using your own principles, which I love.

 

David Farah

Yeah, you realized I use my own principles in that situation, but way to go dude.

 

Austin Bagley

I think there's like, I mean, you're also going to hit on something else too, which I think is really important because I think with every change you have individuals who are like, you know what, I'm ready. Let's do this. I'm down. I've been thinking about it for a while. Like, sign me up.

 

Austin Bagley

You have others that don't, and for probably a lot of valid reasons. So how do you help those who are resistant to change embrace transformation?

 

David Farah

Yeah. And I have an interesting response to this after what I've observed over the years and I've changed my perspective on this and I am much quicker nowadays to move on. What I find is that the path of least resistance actually gets you better results. There are always people who are going to be kind of the the innovators, the forefront of things that are going to want to adopt. Things are going to want to jump on board with you.

 

David Farah

The more of those that you can hook and get interested in what you're doing and carry the torch for you is going to get more people to follow. So I I don't spend as much time with detractors as I used to. I I spend more time with the you know, getting those champions on board building that network. And then it's incredible to see the power of that because when it's you as as you know a transformation leader or any kind of leader not carrying that message anymore and it's the rest of your organization carrying it forward. It it just it's exponential effect and it's it's almost always going to be successful that way.

 

Austin Bagley

That is so interesting because I think it definitely, I mean, I am myself guilty of potentially playing the role of a peaser as it comes to leading teams rather than, you know, pushing and committing to change. And so I think, yeah, it's really interesting hearing this from you. Like, hey, actually don't focus on your detractors. 0 in on the people who are, are, are behind the change. That'll actually give you more momentum and more bang for your buck.

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah, that's great. Love that. OK, so. We've talked about a bunch of things. If you've been through many, many changes and transformations, if you could go back and change anything in the past, what would you change?

 

David Farah

I would do everything a lot earlier and I'd speed up the process. So joking. The funny thing is, is that so much of these things work like there are sometimes that I wanted to shake myself and the people around me is like, just try it right? Like, stop trying to design it and get the strategy perfect. Just try it and it's back to the path of least resistance.

 

David Farah

So I said it's not just people but approaches is the same way. Like what? Like your strategy or how you're going to get things done by just trying things you can like you can honestly get so much more done. There were times where I would focus on having the right strategy, getting the right funding, having the right team in place so that we can execute perfectly and every now and then that breaks through. But the likelihood that you're going to get that perfect situation is so low.

 

David Farah

What works better is saying, like, OK, what do we have available today? What can we start running with to start having an impact for more and more people if we just did this and this and this and that? Snowball starts to create way more momentum than trying to get that boulder moving.

 

Austin Bagley

OK. I like that a lot. I'm going to move on to another thing as well because I I want to spend more time on. That is the concept of transparency. Yeah, you implied that you kind of land on this, maybe the hard way.

 

Austin Bagley

Well, tell me more about why this is so important to you.

 

David Farah

I I'm a very open person in general. I I like sharing things. I I the the concept of locking things down was foreign to me when I started, even as an intern. So I came into an environment where everything was supposed to be locked down and I didn't understand it. I was like, why, like, why can't we share these things?

 

David Farah

When you start from an environment where everything is hidden or locked down, more is hidden and locked down than it needs to be. We start from the perspective of, hey, we need to share as much as possible. We need to create these, these dialogues, these feedback loops, these things. If you have that that culture, then you're going to get way more impact just through basic knowledge sharing in ways you wouldn't even know or to happen. And so I worked to create more transparent organizations really hard with one of the things Confluence.

 

David Farah

Who a lot of people use it's it starts out by saying, you know, everything is inherently open and you choose when to lock it down, right? Then the next thing I did was like, hey, we're going to flip our JIRA. Everything's going to start open. You have to choose to lock it down. And then we did the same thing.

 

David Farah

The biggest impact we had was then we said, hey, here's Pluralsight flow. This is going to be open to everyone. Everyone's going to see your metrics, you can talk about them, you can see who's improving, you know what practices are working and we can look at it in a transparent way. And we saw huge shifts after we had started to change the culture, say like, look, the more we share, the more we collaborate, the better off we're going to be. Now obviously some things need to stay confidential, but coming from hey, we want to share at least internally first, but be deliberate about when we are confidential or lock things down.

 

David Farah

Really important topic.

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah, I think we've all worked for leaders who are very good at this and it certainly makes a huge difference in how we come and and work every day. So this has been a great interview. I've loved everything we've talked about. I feel like we could go into hours on each of these topics and maybe we're going to write a book here.

 

David Farah

But I I do want to end. I feel like we started, we started with a train of thought and then we went all over the place. So it's just that maybe we will, yeah.

 

Austin Bagley

That's all on me. So thanks again, David. This has been great. We're excited to have you as our first guest for Transformation. We're excited to have the rest of our guests come on every two weeks.

 

Austin Bagley

We're super excited to have up next doctor Kat Hicks, who leads our developer Success Lab talk about the myths of productivity. After her we have amazing people like Carol Lee, Tim Adrian. And Avid, Sahid, Melissa, Davey all talking to us about very specific components of transformation that will help you on your journey. So with that quick preview, love to keep David on and we'll move over to Q&A and ask and answer your questions. Thanks again.

 

Austin Bagley

OK. Well, I'll start kind. Of going through some of the questions here. Appreciate all the. Questions.

 

Austin Bagley

If you have more questions, we have a few like We have time to do a few more, and so feel free to click on the Q&A button at the bottom. And we'll go through those as as they pop up. So first question for David from this is a great question. So how do qualitative and quantitative metrics work together? Like how do you blend those two?

 

David Farah

Oh, because context is key. So the the the quantitative is going to give you the indicator. It's going to tell you, you know. Where do I have to react to something? What's working?

 

David Farah

What's not? You know, where is there something that I can take action on the qualitative is then going to back that up and say like hey was this actually you know what I thought it was Now this is can be as simple as. That you know who's on vacation this week, right? Or you know, who is out this day or maybe, hey, we didn't have, you know, a good enough understanding of what we should be building. We need, you know to work on our design level.

 

David Farah

We need a little bit more research. So pairing that that qualitative information, that context with the quantitative, it's how you how you solve anything. So that's how you tell the how you can how you can take action.

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah, I definitely like pairing. That is really important. You can't do one without the. Other which makes complete sense, right? There's definitely some questions around the standards you mentioned during your DevOps.

 

Austin Bagley

You know question, you know, like if you can, I'm not sure what what you can share, but like are they any of those standards that you felt like were more more impactful than others and how did you arrive at those standards?

 

David Farah

I don't remember all of them because we built basics and then we built more and then we changed and then teams built more. And the more teams I work with, the more standards and basics I see. That, that that teams put out there. So what I would and I'll give an example in a second, but what I would encourage you to think about depending on where you are in your organization, I think there are kind of global standards that you can set and then there are team level standards that they should own as well. So team level ones are ones that are going to vary in flex so that you have that flexibility at that team level.

 

David Farah

But then there's global ones that say like, hey, as this organization, here's how we're going to drive quality, so. The first standard, my favorite that I talk about is we said we're going to commit code, commit functioning code every day that it's written right. So just that statement in itself is like, hey, look, we are not going to work in our ID all week and put a large commit in at the end of the week. Every day that's working or multiple times a day when it's working, we're going to get into the repository. That opens up so much collaboration, so many different things.

 

David Farah

Then we did other basics like you know we're going to make sure that every commit is linked to a JIRA so that then again we're quantitatively tracking our our project based work right, so we can get way better insights into what into what's happening. Then you can get into things like making sure that all new code has automated unit tests right, or you know that you're. You know, running the pipelines every time, right, and making sure that the your automation is working for you. So a lot of different things you do a lot of different directions that you can go, but they're just basic Agile and DevOps principles that I think globally you can set. But then again, remember at that team level leaves some of that flexibility for the teams to to decide on what practices they're going to implement as well.

 

Austin Bagley

Right. Yeah, similar question kind of on the same front. You know, I've seen this a couple times where. We've got people who have implemented DevOps, but it's a bit disjointed, you know, So it's like how do you actually like, you know, bring it back together and and unite the company again? Kind of a a relaunch if you will, some of these things that I think we've been doing for a little while now.

 

David Farah

So. Some of the things are going to be disjointed by design. So again it comes back to having flexibility at the team level versus having you know global standards you want everyone to follow. So one of the biggest ones that that I that I think globally you can talk about is tooling, right. There's a.

 

David Farah

Really great tooling out there for a lot of things. We can just say, hey, if everyone uses this then we get a really clean view in our into our portfolio and you get the benefit of all the added, you know, features and different things that teams will be able to use together, right. So tooling's a simple one that you can do globally, whereas you know different levels of say testing or automation, sometimes you can flex at that team level. I had another really good example and it just escaped of course what I was going to say, yeah. I'll come back to it.

 

David Farah

It'll.

 

Austin Bagley

Come back, It'll come back. Yeah. We've got a great question. So we're going to move on from DevOps. We're going to talk more about some principles here, questions around the three principles you share.

 

Austin Bagley

It's basically around this idea of of commercials. So first question, I'm going to kind of break it down into multiple questions. Appreciate this is a great question. First on, can you just kind of elaborate a little more about what you mean by commercials for everyone here?

 

David Farah

Yes. So the difference between mechanics and commercials is more like the mechanics is the day-to-day we're improving what we do as a team. We're improving how we can get you know software out the door features outdoor, how we can improve our product overall, how is the team working, how are we functioning that builds your machine for that kind of long term sustainability that I talked about, right. The commercials are where we start to see those mechanics translate into actual business value. Right.

 

David Farah

So, hey, we're getting more features out the door. We're winning more customers. We're we're expanding in new markets. We're, you know, sometimes cutting away from competitors because we've got new features out the door before them. This is typically measured with the OK R framework saying like, hey, here's some of the objectives we're going after in the market.

 

David Farah

Here's the big, you know, honk and things we want to get and here's how it's translating into dollars. So that's where you make the shift, right. So set those foundations, get the basics. In place for how you want to run, start to improve the mechanics, build your machine with your teams and then see that translate into your commercial success based on the targets and the things that you are going after with your strategy.

 

Austin Bagley

Great. Not like that. I'm going to keep kind of going on this question and.

 

David Farah

I remember the DevOps 1 by the way back to that the the the flexibilities between the the practices. And and the culture, the cultural bit is where you have to, you know, kind of massage it and say, hey, we're going to focus more on this as a dev team. Some of the practices and principles of saying like here's some things we have to do, right. So there there's a nuance between setting a practice and a standard versus changing the culture. That's where that that's where some of that nuances.

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah. OK. And this is great. Actually I Scott is is who asks this question about commercials is clarifying to. You know, I think so he, he clarified a bit.

 

Austin Bagley

He also has asked this question around, you know, how do we communicate success across the organization? Yeah, and across levels. You know, how do you do that for if you're the VP of Engineering, if you're leading a big transformation, what what do you how do you do that you know, most effectively?

 

David Farah

It's really easy to communicate success when it's quantitative success And one thing, right, you can just say like, hey, look at these massive wins we got. So one of the the things that I like to do when talking about successes is that I'd like to go end to end with them. So they're so often in in our teams and our organizations where we have our developers here, then maybe we have product here, then we have our sales team, then we have our executives. Everyone's kind of in their bucket right looking and get their own thing. But when we can get to tell that message to say like hey this is hey, we grabbed you know 20 million of new revenue in the market because of developers, what you did and product how you pitched it in sales, this new marketing campaign and you can tie that together to show that as one organization this is what we did in the market.

 

David Farah

That's where you can be the most successful. Sometimes it's just elevating the stories and even saying like, hey, look, this is the new customer we want, this is the new feature we got out there and showing the impact that everyone involved had. That's the real trick. Unbelievably hard, especially as complicated as organizations get more complex, but as you organize around your products, as you build those stable teams, you know, communicate those wins, that there's a trick in there, but you'll get it. That was the more transparent you are, you'll get there.

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah I I think it's actually a really it's a great question because it's on the on face value it's pretty simple and straightforward. Of course like it's really back to the teams that the things that they were working on made an impact and and it's it's benefiting the company. But to your point it's actually not that easy. There is a trick to it and it's actually easy to gloss over and or assume. I think the other the thing, the big thing that we get trapped in is this assumption that.

 

Austin Bagley

You know, people are connecting the dots. It's likely that they're not. And so I like that you've talked about, you know, being elevating the stories, being very clear and articulate about. Hey, we've we've put a. Ton of work into this big change and.

 

Austin Bagley

We're starting to see, you know, the green shoots come from that.

 

David Farah

We're talking about this example from the commercial lens as well, right from like that the end result point I think we also. Can do a better job and a lot of ways to elevate what's happening on the ground that may not directly turn into commercials, right? So like when we're writing down our tech debt, right when we're, you know, making our applications as secure as possible so we don't have vulnerabilities, right? All of those things may not directly turn into those commercial type of impacts, but it's still worth celebrating and you'd be amazed when. The impact that you can have on product and sales and people like that when they understand more what's happening with our with our applications and what's going on in the environment.

 

David Farah

So my point is, the more end to end you can be with your communications and your wins and what's going on, the better off you're going to be.

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah, you play the role as a teacher often times with your stakeholders. Yes you should be caring about this. You may not know what this means but it's important and and that's kind of a a vital part of your role as an engineering leader or an operations leader. This is like a big part of that is is translating the tech to the to the non tech which.

 

David Farah

What ends up happening is it makes it easier to plan over time too, because everyone starts to get more informed about what's happening and what some things take to get things done. It makes it way easier over. Time to plan, collaborate, and, you know, go forward.

 

Austin Bagley

Right, which goes back, I mean to the very reason that flow exists is for this problem, right. Yes. It's extremely hard to articulate and advocate for your teams you know with without the objective data that that holds so. OK. We've got time for one last question.

 

Austin Bagley

We're at the 40 minute mark, appreciate everyone who've attended. We love having this conversations. Once again a reminder we're having one in two weeks time with doctor Kat Hicks, which will be a a wonderful conversation around the myths of productivity which I hope you'll all enjoy. But last question, is a parting kind of shot any any like books or or research you recommend diving into for those who are really interested in in doing this well.

 

David Farah

I have a lot of books, thanks to my good friend Jenny Green. She had me reading everything. There's a couple that I like right off the bat. If you haven't read Measure what Matters around OK Rs How to set a successful OK Rs Really inspirational book. Really good stuff.

 

David Farah

I like the book called Doing Agile right? It was from the The Bain and Company. Really good one. And then? What can you do Agile?

 

Austin Bagley

Wrong. I wasn't aware of this.

 

David Farah

I, I oh, most, most of us do it wrong. But the the the. Reason I recommend that book is because it's not a textbook, it's not super boring. It talks about actionable examples of how you can implement these things and you'll see like even like the metrics you talk about, how you implement, how you can do that right in your organization and not create, you know, culture of fear or completely break everything. So that one runs through some really practical examples and things that we talk about every day when we're doing things like implementing flow or Pluralsight skills.

 

David Farah

I I use a a lot of those things. Than those two books in particular, I have more. Maybe I'll I'll send them out as as an extra reading list and after.

 

Austin Bagley

That was just.

 

David Farah

Cool, Austin. Oh, I oh.

 

Austin Bagley

You you came back so you you were, you kind of got cut off halfway through talking about, you know, agile, doing agile, right. So those are the two books you're talking about?

 

David Farah

Those are the two books I'm talking about. That with the point I was making is that I use these practices and principles from doing agile right all the time, every day, right. Like it. It's it gives you ways, practical examples, to not create a culture of fear, not create or not, you know, measure in the wrong way and destroy your company's culture, but instead do it in the right way every time. We're rolling out Pluralsight Flow, working with the customer and Pluralsight skills and use the principles in those books.

 

David Farah

So I but I what I was saying I have even more that maybe I'll I'll add an extra reading list I can send out after this, but those are two great examples with things that I use every day when I work with customers.

 

Austin Bagley

Sounds great. Cool. Everyone will get a copy of the recording of this webinar. You should also have a link to the following kind of sessions we'll be having over the next 12 weeks. And then if you reply, I'm sure we can get you a a list of the books Dave was talking about.

 

David Farah

So thanks again for attending and I hope you have a wonderful Thursday, no?