Moving to a Product Operating Model – The environment for maximizing flow and value in the digital age (With Dave West): Scrum Day London 2024

Scrum Day London is our second conference of the year, and we’re thrilled to bring you more exciting episodes from this renowned event!

As we continue our TalkInTen series, we have a special episode featuring Dave West, CEO of Scrum.org, who discusses the transition to a product operating model and its significance in the digital age.

Dave on LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/3xrMdvU

Here is the synopsis of Dave's Talk:

Agile is a response to the problem that digital opportunities cannot be easily realized with traditional, industrial project management and delivery approaches, because delivering digital value requires a different approach. As digital becomes a fundamental part of most business opportunities, agile approaches must better align with the whole organization, not just the software teams. That requires a change. Over the last ten years, organizations have wrestled with what that change embodies. Should it focus on structure, process, strategy, people, or rewards? And the answer is yes. But even when considered holistically, something is missing. “The what”.

In this talk, Dave West, CEO of Scrum.org, discusses the impact of the product operating model and how, when combined with a holistic, systemic approach to organizational change, it provides the true north to enterprise agility. Dave will discuss the product operating model and introduce an approach to getting its introduction. 

Episode Highlights:

- Product Operating Model: Understand the concept and importance of a product operating model in achieving enterprise agility.

- Holistic Approach: Learn how a systemic approach to organisational change can drive better alignment and value delivery.

- Practical Insights: Gain insights into real-world applications and strategies for implementing a product operating model in your organization.

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review!

Use code PRODUCTAGILITY24 for 15% off training courses at Sheev.

Sheev - https://www.sheev.co.uk

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Ben Maynard

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Product Agility Podcast

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Transcript

0:00

Hello and welcome to the Product Agility Podcast. I'm your host Ben Maynard and for the next few days, we have extra special episodes coming to you from Scrum Day London 2024. This event is a beacon for agile enthusiasts and professionals, and I'm thrilled to bring you insights and new ideas from some of the brightest minds in the agile and product community. For those of you who are new to the podcast, the Product Agility Podcast is your go -to resource for practical tips, strategies, and stories from world -class product and agile thought leaders. Our goal is to increase your knowledge and motivation to experiment, so together we can create ever more successful products. Before we dive in, I'd like to thank our sponsor for this episode, Sheave. Sheave is my company, and we specialize in helping organizations simplify, focus, and align through embracing a product mindset. and using Agile as a means to drive success. Whatever your product or Agile challenge, learn about how Sheave can help your organisation thrive or extend out your own Agile journey at www .sheave .co .uk. That's S -H -E -E -V. And to get a whopping 15 % off of all of our courses, use the code PRODUCTAGILITY24 at the checkout. Now we have an exciting line of speakers from Scrum Day London 2024 who will be sharing valuable insights and practical tips for you to experiment with. So grab a pen and paper, perhaps a hot drink, and let's dive into a talk in 10. We are still at Scrum Day London 2024, and I am joined by the CEO of Scrum .org, no less, Dave West. Dave, welcome to the Product Agility podcast. thank you. And thanks for inviting me. thank you for booking the time. It's brilliant to have this conversation with you, a name which I've been aware of for many years through his work in the large scale Scrum community, but also Scrum .org is, I think, the... Can I say maybe there's a couple of options when it comes to Scrum and I really admire what Scrum .org have done over the last few years in regards to how they're just pushing things in a really, in a particular direction. I think it's been really refreshing to see some of the courses that you offer and the way that you're driving as well as the future of Scrum, which I think is really well received and much needed. So yeah, thank you and Scrum .org for doing that. You're here at Scrum Day London 2024 with a talk on product operator model. So could you give our listeners an overview of maybe yourself and what your talk will be about? OK, yeah. I mean, I'll start with me. So I'm Dave West, CEO at Scrum .org, based in Boston, Massachusetts, as you can tell from my accent. So it's interesting to be Scrum Day London. This is actually the ninth time I've been here. I was there at the start when we kicked off this event and have been back every single year, not just because it's a free trip to. London to see the family, et cetera. Honestly, it really isn't. It's actually a great conference with lots of really interesting people. So I run Scrum .org and I'm the product owner for, I guess, the products that we create at Scrum .org, which are training and certification. But my real bent or my real focus, as it were, is product. I'm a product guy. I was the product manager of the Rationify process under Dean Leffingwell. Boo -hiss, yeah, I know. And then I became, I worked for Eva Jakobsson on this thing called Essential, which now has moved into things called Hexi with Dave Snowden. I was an analyst at Forrester looking at Agile and the world of product. And recently I was at Tasktop as the chief product officer, trying to build a platform to really help integrating the flow of information around product development. So I'm a product person. So it is a sort of natural evolution of my belief and desire to start talking more openly about product, where Scrum is a great mechanism to effectively deliver that understanding, that value to customers in the most effective way possible. So today I'm talking about the agile product operating model. I'm talking about how organizations can frame agility in the context of product. And what that means, you know, in terms of there's a unique operating model for each product inside an organization. So one size does not fit all the elements of a product operating model. Some of the things that people have to think about to keep agility when delivering product, because it's so easy to become a little bit sequential or waterfall in the way in which you approach product, if you're not careful. Hierarchy is always there, ready to jump on us at the quickest opportunity. And really what are the ways in which practitioners can take that thinking and really apply it in their organization to become more value centric and less work centric. So that's what I'm going to be talking about today in the keynote later. It's nice to see the blending of product and agile. Hence, obviously my podcast is called Product Agility. So I'm always trying to kind of bring the two worlds together. Why do you think, and I know this is maybe slightly tangential, but why do you think if I was going to be... controversial of it, right? Why is Agile seems to be coming to the product party late in some respects? Why do you think that is? So it is interesting. Remember that Scrum, it's 20 something years old, right? And product has always been a fundamental part of it. It's called a product backlog. It's called a product owner. It's called, you know, it's about product, right? So I'm not sure coming that late. However, there is definitely a divide between the Scrum practitioners and the product practitioners in the world. And I think it's because ultimately Scrum is being applied in large organizations that are traditionally IT -centric. They're building product in support of a product. So product's sort of like quite distant to them. They're basically maintaining systems and working in a project kind of culture. Because Scrum has been so popular in those situations, I think that that has been our focus really. And I think the product people have taken many of the ideas of Scrum, the concept of sprints or iterations, the idea of dailies, daily scrums, the idea of reviews, the idea of retrospective. They've done all of those things, but they haven't called it Scrum. Though there was a show in the US on HBO called Silicon Valley. Yeah, and they actually did have an entire episode where they were talking about Scrum, et cetera. So maybe they haven't completely ignored it. There's a very good episode about having getting a product vision. I'm not sure if you saw that one. Yeah, I did. It's actually, it's funny how humor can somehow teach us lots of things. Ted Lasso is another great example of how humor can make us challenge how we approach people and leadership, et cetera, as well. So I think that ultimately that these two worlds kind of diverged. And I'm hoping that we can bring them back together. Not because I'm worried about my mortgage, though I am obviously always worried about my mortgage, who isn't? But I'm more worried that the value that both communities can get from each other. I think there's a lot to be learned from the work we've done with Scrum and Agile over the last 30 years. And I think that that, whether it's self-organization, whether it's what an increment is, how do you facilitate events, you know, what... What does a daily really, how can you run a daily in a more effective way? Those sort of elements can really help the product world who are thinking about outcomes that are very much focused on experiments, hypothesis, that they're very much thinking about validation and discovery. Those things are really important as well to the Scrum world. So I'm hoping these two worlds can come together. And it disappoints me greatly when Ivercamp starts throwing stones at each other. and saying, well, you don't understand product development. And the scrum people say, well, you don't understand how to build things, how to deliver things. When I think it's super important that they come together. And there's one area, and I'm sorry, I'm going on. There's one area that really gets me a little grumpy. And that's around product owner versus product manager. You know, obviously, SAFE has sort of marginalized the role of product owner and elevated the position of product manager. And a lot of product managers love that. You know, I don't think the debate, the argument is almost secondary to the important concept that product people, managers, owners, leaders, whatever they're called, need to work very closely with delivery people. And the best experiments are ones that actually are used by real human beings. The best experiments both experiment not just in terms of the outcomes that we're experimenting with, but how we're building it so we learn about it. so that that refines our understanding of the product that we're developing. The relationship between delivery and outcome and understanding is very messy. And we need to basically get teams involved earlier in the process. And delivery is a fundamental part of that. And so that debate, product owner versus product manager, is sort of irrelevant. What we need to be focused on is ensuring that product people can can effectively work with delivery people and to do that in the most effective way possible. And that requires delegation of responsibility. It requires people to work together more effectively. It requires clear vision. It requires lots of things. But I think that's the important point. I love what you're saying. I mean, just keeping on the time. We're not going to squeeze in maybe all the questions I'd like to ask. But in what you're saying about product and agile, the way that I've always spoke about it was, I guess, a cut. and your car has a chassis and an engine and I see Agile as the core element of your car that's going to make you forward and backwards and help you stay on the road and actually drive you where you need to be. What the product board has brought to the party are things like lane assist and cruise control and sat -nav because there was never ever really in the Agile world explicitly which dealt with some of those navigational issues. And so I like to think of, yeah, you want to have a nice comfortable drive, you want to make sure you get to... wherever you need to be and take the right diversions along the way, you kind of need products and agile to be working together to achieve that. I think that's exactly what the Scrum Guide was updated in 2020 and it was updated for lots of reasons. And sometimes less community isn't necessarily super friendly with some of that. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to bring up too many wounds, but one good thing I think was the focus on outcomes, value, product goal, those things. because ultimately Scrum is a really good way of delivering stuff. I don't think anybody could argue with that. It's how you would work. It's just sensible, right? Break things down, focus on delivery, you know, one, two weeks of real focused effort, review it with people that actually care, get some feedback, learn from that, go for the next thing, deliver continuously throughout, get that feedback built into the system, et cetera. However, delivering the right thing. doing the most economic thing to understand whether it's the right thing and not things that historically Scrum has been particularly good at. About six years ago, we brought lean UX guys, Jeff and Josh, into the professional Scrum community and built a product called Professional Scrum with UX. Unfortunately, because of positioning, it hasn't been the most popular thing, but what it did do was it brought all of the 370 or so professional Scrum trainers, into that world of thinking about outcomes. And it highlighted things like, what does a definition of done look like when you've got that discovery elements in it? What does a sprint review really look like? What does an increment look like? How do we have that when you're working on both Horizon 1, Horizon 2, and Horizon 3 work, and you're discovering that in parallel? And I think those things we can definitely learn from the product community. And I hope that we can come together to deliver amazing products for our customers, because we've got a huge opportunity to do that now. I think it'd be a crying shame if we can't find a way to all get along. But I think there's a mountain to climb when there are some people who are quite intent on driving a wedge between the two worlds, you know? But I don't think it's insurmountable, and I don't think it needs to be everyone. But I do hope that we can find a way. And I think the people that are trying to drive a red, you have to ask, what are they, why are they doing it? Like the cynics on listening to this podcast probably say, well, it's because you want to stay relevant, Dave. And, and there's some truth there. I'm not going to, not going to lie there, but it, the wedges are only good first thought leader types, right? To position our brand and to differentiate who we are and why you need to come and talk to us in the actual building, great products. The wedges are completely irrelevant. You need to. Use every tool at your disposal to deliver the best product possible. And you need to look at many different points of view. The product mindset, the product lens is a fantastic way of looking at the things that you're trying to deliver, as is the agile lens, as is the Kanban lens and the lean and that very different, the idea of flow, et cetera. OKRs are useful. You know, EBM, evidence -based management and thinking is incredibly powerful. Design thinking is incredibly valuable. All of these lenses need to be applied to the stuff that you're doing. And we can take something from all of these places and we can build amazing product, hopefully in an incremental way, delivering frequently, learning as we're going and empowering teams to do it. This isn't the province of a few. This is the province of everybody. Dave, I can, I can. Fill your passion for the topic, which is fantastic. And it's so nice to speak to you, particularly on this topic, which is very close to my own heart. I wish we could speak for longer. Maybe we can get you on for a longer episode. And I keep teasing that we're going to get a few people together and do something I don't know in many different perspectives. But I've tried to bring a product and agile world together. So maybe we can talk, and we can find a way for you to come on with a suitable guest in addition. so we can have a little round table, I'm not sure. But thank you so much for giving up your time this morning. If people want to find out more information about you, you can find listeners, they're linked to Dave's LinkedIn profile in the show notes. And of course, head to www .scrum .org to look at all of the fantastic courses that they offer and how they really are kind of pushing things much farther forward in a much healthier direction than some of the other alternatives out there. So thank you, Eretzion, for listening. Dave, thank you for coming on. thank you for inviting me. I look forward to continuing this dialogue and I really would love to do that round table and you'll be a lot of fun. Brilliant. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Dave.