Victoria Payne on Agile Product Delivery

Anand Verma: Products need to have flexibility to adapt, to change in marketplace and technology landscape, and of course the user. Victoria, how has the product delivery landscape changed since you started your career?

Victoria Payne: Yeah. I think you very much already hit the nail on the head with your introduction there. So, in the last 10 years that I've been in the industry, we've noticed more and more the need to adapt to change in the marketplace. To adapt to the ever changing habits of our customers. And we no longer want to work in these very long bloated phased delivery projects, where we start discovery work, and we spend a lot of time perfecting our design and really getting into lots of detail around potentially what we might start working on in six months, a year, two years time.

Victoria Payne: And we want to be able to start building products, working together with other specialists to craft beautiful products quickly and get them to the market in a timely fashion. And be able to learn from what we're building. And learn from the user, how they feel about what we're building, how they interact with their product, and really learn how to improve our products as we go. We don't want to necessarily think that we had all the answers last January sometime, and we're now about to start building them and then get them out. We want our products in the user's hands, and we want to start learning to improve our products, every time we release.

Anand Verma: Brilliant. Welcome to the Knowledge Institute podcast, the Brilliant Basics edition, where we talk about digital disruption, design and future work. And in line with future work this topic today is about Agile Product Delivery. The world has changed, the market has changed because of COVID-19, Coronavirus issues that we are facing. We have been in this lockdown for the last 60 plus days. Also clients are looking for digitization at speed. They're looking for radical ways of delivering products and services. They're looking for employee and people experience. And we're going to dig deep into these topics and talk about how the tide's going to become more agile. The listeners who are listening to this podcast can learn from the ways we are looking at working as well.

Anand Verma: My name is Anand Verma, I'm the European head of digital services for Emphasis and founder and CEO of Brilliant Basics. I'm so happy to be joined by one of my favorite people at Brilliant Basics, Victoria Payne, who's a scrum master at BB, and also recently taken a bigger role, which is the Agile coach at Brilliant Basics. Victoria, thanks for joining us. Victoria, just before we get started on the topic of Agile Product Delivery, which is a very timely topic actually. The listeners would love to know a little bit about your backstory. How did you get to where you are right now? And also some of the bits about your background, where you grew up and all that kind of stuff.

Victoria Payne: Well, I've actually been in the industry quite a long time, and I'm not going to lie, I haven't been this agile in this... Had this mindset for the whole time. I worked in these very different traditional product delivery worlds. This is where we really delayed our delivery because for the strive of perfection. So we wanted everything to be very thought out. We wrote detailed specification documents, 100, 200 pages thick. We made wire frames, we've delivered lots and lots of specifications and detail, and we want to do a lot of discovery. But we, on the pursuit of perfection, we really delayed our release to market. I mean, I'm pretty sure earlier in my career, I worked on a lot of things that never, ever ended up really seeing the light of day, and it was quite a sad sort of scenario to be in.

Victoria Payne: And I would put all these project plans together. I was actually a project manager back in the day. We put together all these detailed project plans about where we predicted we needed to go, and what we wanted to build exactly. And we stuck to these, or we attempted to stick to these, but we noticed straight away that these plans that we were producing went out of date the second we pressed print on our MS project Gantt chart or whatever we were using at the time. And we couldn't stay on track. We would always come up against a complexity that we hadn't thought about, or a learning or something that would really change our environment of the products we were creating. I couldn't work it out. I was very much... I looked to other project managers who used what I would call the stick over the carrot to try and get their employees working quickly, to get things delivered.

Victoria Payne: And we found that that put the pressure... Maybe you did get delivered projects. Maybe you did, but what did you get? You got a lot of people cutting corners, potentially not producing the right thing. And it took me a while to... I heard about this Agile concept, and I thought, yeah, well, what is this? And that I never really truly got it for quite some time. It suddenly occurred to me, an epiphany one day, that oh, okay, I get it. And I'll talk to you a little bit more today about what that meant and what that journey was. But, yeah. That's my background. But I haven't really spoken to you about where I grew up and where I came from.

Anand Verma: Yeah. Where are you from? And your love for... At least I know that I love Indian food and Indian culture as well.

Victoria Payne: I was convinced that maybe there was some sort of Indian background. I love Indian culture. I have a lot of friends and family who are from India, and I just assumed for a long time that I was potentially part Indian. I did a DNA test recently, found out I'm really not. But, yeah. I grew up in the west country, down near Bath. Very idyllic, very beautiful, probably somewhere I'd love to be in self-isolation right now. But I moved to London, to the big city when I went to university. I studied broadcast operations actually, and production and did a new media subject. Anand is laughing. I could see you laugh.

Anand Verma: I love these stories, these journeys. And it's so exciting.

Victoria Payne: So, yeah. I really enjoyed it. I was actually quite... I was more into video editing at the time, than digital products, but I always had a penchant for both. Yeah. So I actually ended up working... Actually worked client side almost, as you would call it. So I worked at a global travel operation company, and I was basically their content editor, their CMS content creator. I was their junior designer, their junior developer. I did everything basically, apart from the big backend CMS delivery. So then I just moved to a digital agency and I've been in quite a few different digital agencies over the years. And each time, as I mentioned before, trying to work out what the magic is for great product delivery, and each time getting a little bit closer and closer. And now I feel like we're finally at this point where we get it. We know what we need to do, and we want to deliver great products for ourself and for our clients.

Anand Verma: That's brilliant. And I think that sets the scene nicely for the next topic or the question, Vic. We talk a lot about this definition of T-shaped people at Brilliant Basics, right? And hybrid skill sets, also cross functional skill sets, cross functional teams. And that's one of the core things for making something far more agile than having this siloed approach of... Skillset side of approach of department and working. I think it's quite nice to hear that your career has been a story of learning new things, and adapting and adopting and all this great stuff. Which brings me to the point that I would love to hear from you about, what is the value of a cross functional team, right? What does this mean for you in terms of your approach, your clients, your teams, and all those kinds of good stuff?

Victoria Payne: This is really one of the things that is at the heart of Agile. I'm not going to go through and tell you all the Agile values and principles. They are easy to know, most of us all know them. But it's that one about individuals and interactions over processes. So as we talked a little bit before about the more traditional product life cycles and project building, we talked about these big phased approaches. This would be where you'd often have lots of different skills, designers early on or strategists, or you'd have a UX phase and then a UI phase and then a development phase, and then a test phase, and then a UAP phase, and then a testing of the test phase. And then realizing we haven't got quite the product we designed ages ago, and then re-testing it and then redoing it.

Victoria Payne: And another change request here, et cetera, et cetera. What we were missing, one of the biggest things you're missing in that idea is the collaborative side of product development. We work in teams where we pull in every skill set needed to create a product from start to finish. And we actually work in small increments where these teams, that have all these different skill sets, will work together to produce small product increments that are potentially shippable to the public. What does that mean? Why is that important? Why don't we want to spend a lot of time researching it, doing it? We talked about change and the adaption to change, but also we also don't realize about how good having all these amazing skillsets together, as a meeting of brains to produce the quality of design or work that we need. A designer or a UX specialist or whatever specialism you have, your work isn't done the second you deliver your wire frame.

Victoria Payne: Or the second you've done a nice presentation of a future idea of a design, or made a great document. You're really... All the work that you're doing is in place to eventually feed that knowledge into the person whose going to be crafting that with you. And the idea that you can design something and then step away and move on to the next thing, you miss the magic of what a good product team can do together. It doesn't mean to say you have each person with a different discipline. We talk about T-shape because it's real. I don't want someone to come in and tell me, join my product team and tell me, "Hi, I'm a UX designer. I design [inaudible 00:10:32] That's what I'll do.

Victoria Payne: It's like, no... We need your brains and your power to help us with our product management, to help us think strategically about how to engage with our users. To sit down with the developers and help them understand how to craft something and why they're crafting it. And to even just sometimes craft together. When you actually get the product in your hands and you made an assumption back six months ago, when they're actually building it maybe your assumption could have learned a lot more by actually working with the developer, looking at what the latest technology is doing, and actually craft things together. So it's about that speed, but it's also about that cross functional team.

Anand Verma: Yeah. And just to paraphrase that a little bit. I think what you're saying is, cross functional teams are much more strategically aligned to the vision of the product. And also it's... In a positive way, it also gives you the speed to release things in an iterative basis to the public, get the feedback, iterate again. And I think it must be a really rewarding experience for the team to learn new skills as well. I spoke to one of your colleagues the other day as part of a buddy program, and she was like, this yearning for new knowledge was a QA manager and now she's moved into business analysis. Now she wants to learn more about strategy. So I think it's good for people, growth, grateful client, and you're making some strategic decisions, right?

Anand Verma: Vic, this wouldn't be successful without management playing the role and coming on the journey as well. And we've seen the success that you and your team have created on the clients that you focus on. There has to be roles for management in adapting to this change. And adopting this new ways of working. Any views from you in terms of how to take people on the journey? And I think, I guess that blends into my next question as well. The role that you play as well. In terms of taking management on the journey, but also the role you play for the team and for the fight.

Victoria Payne: Basically, when we talk about management, it has that really negative connotation of somebody micromanaging, commanding and controlling things. And maybe in traditional product delivery, there were a lot of people making a lot of decisions, who were quite far away from the actual detail of the domain and the product. And they were guiding and telling, making those decisions, but potentially not based on a lot of knowledge. The roles of great managers today and the great managers that I've been lucky enough to work with at BB, is the managers which are leaders, the managers which come forward to lead people. And by leading, I mean they're mentoring and they're coaching maybe a skillset. Maybe a way of doing things. We have an amazing leader at one of the products that we have at BB, and he is someone that people can go to, to seek advice or get some knowledge from. But ultimately the people closest to the problem are the ones making the final decisions. The best thing that leaders and managers can do, and this is the most important thing, is creating really great environments that promote transparency and collaboration for their team.

Anand Verma: I think what you're saying is spot on. Managers managing versus leading is what makes the huge difference. And I think especially in the Agile Product Management, in terms of iteratives way of releasing product managers, have a far bigger role to play than trying to micromanage a team. That's because the trust part is a big aspect of this, isn't it?

Victoria Payne: It's the biggest aspect. So to have really quick moving teams, you need to be confident to surface any impediments or issues that you have. So we want people to not sit on any issues that they have. They want to have the confidence and the courage to rely on team members, and rely on people that they look up to, to help them with their issues. We talk a lot about organizational impediments in Agile, and these are some of the decisions or top down usually decisions, which could potentially impede the progress of a team. At the moment a big impediment that we're dealing with obviously is COVID-19, that's one of my large impediments that has obviously taken a lot of focus at the moment, because you're trying to build these really great environments where teams can collaborate, trust each other, move quickly.

Victoria Payne: And when something disrupts the team or moves the equilibrium off track, you'll actually end up with this scenario where you ruin the creative environment that people are working in. They are unable to achieve what they need to, they maybe have some fear or some worry about a big change happening, and it distracts them from their sprint goals or their product goals. And what great managers do is we will work together, usually in a little bit. We talk about trust and transparency, but we work in a way so that a lot of noise doesn't hit the team unnecessarily. They don't want to know about our financial discussions and all the really boring things that might... That potentially could worry them. But we want to be open and transparent when things are really going to impact the team, and we need different paths.

Anand Verma: Yeah. Financial is important, but it's not for everyone. I think it's about releasing the information to add value is far more important for the team, than trying to tell them everything at every point. And the other thing that when we had Annelore on the podcast, a while back when the offices were open and before the COVID-19, she talked a lot about... And she was your client at Telenet. We talked a lot about the trust part. And my question to you, because we had the story from her side in terms of the trust, right? The story is, it's not easy to build trust with the client, who are ready to give you ability to operate in an iterative, agile environment. And I would love for you to talk about, how did you actually build this trust over the period of the last two and a half years? It didn't happen overnight. It's a lot of hard work, a lot of education that's gone into this. So, if you can cite some examples of how you did it, it will be really beneficial for our listeners.

Victoria Payne: Yes. Fantastic. We talk about trust a lot and we talk about the transparency, but, yeah. What does that really mean? So, we're working in a world where we have this concept of client and vendor. So you're the client, I'm the vendor. I have to do everything perfectly before I show you anything, before I collaborate with you. When you're working in product delivery you don't have time, you don't have the option to be able to do that. What you want to do is you want to build that openness and transparency so that everyone is focused on trying to do the best to get the product where it needs to be. So, my job as an Agile coach or a scrum master, is to essentially break down those walls between the client and the vendor, so to speak. And have that one team mentality.

Victoria Payne: So, we look at the most successful product teams. They have a mix of people with the domain knowledge from the client side as we speak, and they have a mixture of the people with the skill sets that we need. And they have a product owner from the client that can ultimately make decisions, with the information from everyone around them, make those ultimate decisions. And to do that, you need to build trust and transparency. And to do that, you need to be honest. So I would adopt an extreme honesty policy with clients. And so far, it's never let me down, to the extent that... We're not going to talk about how much margin anyone's making or anything like that. We're going to tell you problems when they arise. We're not going to dance over them.

Victoria Payne: We're not going to put a veil of loveliness for something that's tough, that we need to deal with because we want to make sure that everyone's aware and acting the best they can to deal with the problems. Problems come, change comes. You get a curve ball every now and again. But to try and gloss over it, to make yourself look good is what we just can't be doing in this day and age. So, I've had scenarios where I've had a very awkward developer down tools and walk out of an office because they didn't like an environment that we're in. And they weren't potentially a very good team player.

Victoria Payne: However, in a traditional scenario you might try and cover that up and be like, oh no, we've got someone very important leading the team, we need to cover this up. But what we really want to do is we actually want to go, hold on a minute, this is what's happening. This is... We can't... We couldn't have done anything about it. We haven't been able to do anything to prevent this, but it's happened. And what we want to do is work together with you. And this is our solution and these are the steps we're going to take to improve. We talk about the main key is continual improvement or agile, we're flexible, we're adaptable. But we're always looking at how to improve and better our ourselves.

Anand Verma: Victoria, thank you for that. Stay with us listeners. Once again, you're listening to the Knowledge Institute, the Brilliant Basics edition, where we talk about product delivery in an agile way. I'm delighted to be joined by Victoria Payne, scrum master and Agile coach at Brilliant Basics. Victoria, we're going to talk about failure a little bit. And we see a lot of agile, fragile, the many terms used to define the Agile project. We see a lot of failed Agile with... I'm making double quotes, Agile projects failing. What's really happening here from your perspective?

Victoria Payne: For me... So sometimes Agile can be a double edged sword because if you really, truly look at what Agile is, it's obviously more of a mindset and a way of working, rather than a set of rules that you need to follow. Where a lot of people will thinly veil very old fashioned and traditional project management ways of working by using... Littering their products and their projects with Agile terminologies like, oh, we're working in sprints, so we're agile. We have a standup, so we're agile. And you're like, that's fine. You're working towards your thinking. You don't want to bash these people down and say, you might think you're working in an agile fashion, but you've taken six months for your design scrum team to then produce six months more work for the development team.

Victoria Payne: They're actually very, very thinly veiling the old bloated, heavy ways of working of yesteryear. They're not looking at continual improvement. They're not looking... What you do with Agile is you start with a light framework. Sometimes we choose scrum at BB. I mean, sometimes we look at more of a [inaudible 00:21:14] mode. We have lots of different light frameworks that we use. But all they're doing is they're basically helping you surface issues as soon as possible, by giving you processes that help you inspect and adapt where you're going, and then obviously make decisions to improve in the future. But to me, it's sometimes, the word agile, gets overused to thinly veil bad product practices. So these are practices where we have too many requirements frozen up front. Really long, very costly design phases that limit the possibility of emergent design based learning and monitoring of users and their behaviors to adapt and change in the market place.

Victoria Payne: We are just looking at these big waterfall projects. We have scrum masters that get placed on projects, who are our mini command and control. They're asking their teams to work quickly, work for the deadline that they've made. And what happens here? Well, you lose quality. You have issues with quality. When people are feeling under pressure, they tend to cut corners. They tend to build what we call debt into their products. Whether it's design debt, whether it's technical debt, there's a fear that we need to do something by a certain date, regardless of what we learn, regardless of the complexities we face. And that's the sign of success or failure, when actually we're very wrong.

Victoria Payne: The idea is that the value that we're adding to our product is what's important. We need to prioritize what we think is the most important at the time, based on our learnings. And we need to always adapt our priorities based on what we learn as we go. So if you're working in a project where you find yourself that you're in a seven, eight months design phase, before you've even started to pick up a product and start working on a product, then you're in one of these scenarios that we call potentially fragile.

Anand Verma: Even from BB and Emphasis perspective, we see clients saying, "Hey, we want to run this as an Agile project," but all the manifesto of Agile is missing. And you talk about trust. You talk about transparency. A lot of clients are not ready for it. They are, from their procurement, from their leaders, they are under pressure to deliver certain things within certain dates. And they want all the requirements to be delivered within that date, not knowing which is the most valuable thing versus non valuable thing. But I think with COVID-19 and with the change in environment, when the radical shift, in terms of innovation, built speed, I think the only way to get this right in my view, my personal view, is to focus on what is the most valuable thing.

Anand Verma: And for that to happen, it's about just choosing your priorities really well together and being aligned to the strategy and transparency part you talked about. I'm going to shift gear a little bit Vic, and talk about your experience of dealing with one of the largest telecommunications company in Belgium. And of course we have had Annelore on the podcast, but I think just from Infosys, BB perspective, what do you think some of the major obstacles clients are facing, companies are facing, when it comes to product delivery?

Victoria Payne: One of the biggest obstacles that they face is the idea that a lot of people have in their heads about, what am I going to get, and when am I going to get it? Battling your in a question to, what am I going to put in my contract? What do I get from you? What are you telling me? If you're not telling me that you're going to give me X, Y, Z, P, Q, R feature, then how do I know that we are making the right decision to be agile? And in my mind, when I get those questions, I want to ask, why do you feel that it's important to know exactly what you're getting in six months time? What opportunities are you missing by defining that so far in advance? If you're spending a lot of time looking at lines in a contract, and whether you've delivered this feature and this feature two years later, you've missed so many opportunities.

Victoria Payne: But when your product hits the market, what is it? Is it even relevant in today's market? Our consumption and our user trends are changing so much. Is it relevant anymore? If you feel like, my product, my project is successful because I ticked these boxes that my manager asked me to tick. And I've got the product that I said I wanted back then. I thought this is successful, then that's a very sad situation to be in. And do we really want to be working on these kinds of products? In my mind, the answer is no. We want to produce the best product possible, and you can't do that if you don't change to the environment that we're in today.

Anand Verma: Yeah. And we've seen that across at least a few clients. And in terms of the Agile majority of our clients and some of the companies that we work with, it depends on how they're embracing this change internally. How they're organizing their team members. What does cost particularly mean for them? It requires a rewiring of organization supported by the CEO and the leadership team, which allows companies to become agile. Again, it goes back to the point that you're mentioning around trust, transparency and the value creation. And the contrarian stance to this is, a lot of misconceptions about product delivery as you're alluding to as well. And I think our listeners will be delighted to hear from you, what are some of the recommendations? So let's say you meet a CEO of a company in the lift, and you want to say... And he said, "Hey, Vic. What do you do?" And you say, "I'm an Agile coach at Brilliant Basics." He says, "Tell me more, tell me more what I should be thinking about, tell me more about what I should be doing." Some recommendations from your site will be really valuable.

Victoria Payne: I think we've touched on a lot of the environments that we want to create for our teams. I can talk again about the relevance of adapting to change in the market place and the change to user behaviors. But also we've got to think about our companies and our teams. We are working on products where we start with a very, what we call, immature team. We start with a brand new team. We have, as you mentioned before, all different levels of understanding of what makes a good product team around the trust and the transparency and the collaboration. I think it's really important that CEOs look to recognize the happy, motivated individuals that are passionate about the products they are delivering, are going to produce great products. It's a real no brainer in my eyes. Why do you... Do you think that shouting at a team to get something brilliant created is going to produce a good product?

Victoria Payne: Has it ever worked? Does it ever work? No, it doesn't ever work. We really have teams of skilled individuals, and that's what's really important. We don't want to look at the outdated factory modeling where you throw anyone that seems to hit to, on paper, fulfill a need that we have. 70 developers, 20 UX designers, et cetera, et cetera. We're looking at these skilled individuals that can really add value to your teams. And we want companies that nurture these people, and want to grow these people. And you want to put them in your specialist teams, working on these great products. And CEOs... CEOs that really recognize the importance of specialism and skill to work quickly and make great products. That's the key to me.

Anand Verma: Absolutely. I think you're just going to add to that, just being a CEO for Brilliant Basics, and working very closely with you. I also think that we have to change our own ways of working. So we are looking at what has gone really well with one or two projects or products. How do we take the best of that and start to apply that within Brilliant Basics ecosystem? And it is a journey of evolution. Because I always said that Brilliant Basics is a product. We have to evolve.

Anand Verma: And to evolve we have to take people on that journey. And you're working closely with me and some of the team members, in terms of how does Brilliant Basics look at the ways of approaching Agile Product Delivery by themselves? And some clients, some companies in our ecosystem will be ahead of the curve. Other clients might not be. But what we have realized is unless we start to practice what we preach, we cannot actually make it happen for our clients, our brands, our company. So, yeah. I don't know if you want to add a few insights in terms of what you're doing with regards to taking Brilliant Basics on this journey.

Victoria Payne: Completely, very valid. What we need to think about is, it's very disruptive essentially to change your way of working and your mindset. And it's a process, as you talked about. Adopting these good practices and these good ways of working and thinking, it's not easy, and you will get people who are too scared to challenge the status quo. They're too nervous to change. It's got that, this is how I've always been doing it. This is how we've always done it, so this is what I do. And these people are on their own journey as well. They haven't yet realized, or come to the epiphany almost, of what it means to move quickly, be flexible and always strive for continuous improvement.

Victoria Payne: With every product or project you start off, you do end up with that, with so many people. And having great Agile coaches and scrum masters and team members that can work with them and build that trust and collaboration with them, can actually show the best way forward. Adopting new practices is scary, but if you don't change, what do you do? If you don't change you die. That's really the sentiment we need to do. We can't be stuck in the dark ages. We need to be progressive.

Anand Verma: I agree. And I agree with you. Change is the only constant, as you're leading as well. So, Victoria, thank you so much for talking about Agile Product Delivery. I'm going to make a little bit of a fun thing now around what is your favorite book that you've read, or you want to talk about? Or you might be currently reading. And also why?

Victoria Payne: Okay. It's a bit of an embarrassing one, but my favorite book is Stephen King's, It. I love the colloquial writing style of Stephen King. I think he's absolutely excellent, and he really takes you on a journey when you're listening, reading. I say listening, I do a lot of Audible now. I've actually seem to listen to more audible books than I read now. A lot of things get brought to life when you're listening.

Anand Verma: No. And I can see on Zoom as well, that there are books behind you. And Dishoom is clearly shining through which... And because you're a food lover and we've talked a lot about restaurants, and one of my favorite restaurants is Dishoom without promoting Dishoom on this podcast. But it's a fantastic book. It's not sponsored. And the podcast, to the listeners I want to mention that, a lot of people have taken books like Dishoom to their kitchens, and they're creating and crafting from Dishoom chai. I made Dishoom chai last week for my family, my mother in law. So I think there's a lot of that happening, and I think, clearly I can see that... It just reminded me that we should mention that.

Victoria Payne: Yeah. We're in my kitchen. This is all my cookery books. I have a lot. I like to invent recipes. So I mostly use them for inspiration. Sometimes I learn from friends who have different skillsets, different cuisines. So I often... I'm very good at following recipes there. But I just use them a lot for inspiration. I think Dishoom is a great one. I got it for Christmas. I've got [inaudible 00:33:03] Indian Kitchen and... Yeah. Lots of... Some Meera Sodha books. Lots of Madhur Jeffery. I have a wide range of cookery books.

Anand Verma: Amazing. How can people find you online?

Victoria Payne: I'm on LinkedIn. It's just Victoria Payne on LinkedIn. You'll find me on the Agile Coach. Actually, there's a great community of people who really love Agile Product Delivery. LinkedIn is a great place to connect to all these people, so definitely look me up on there.

Anand Verma: Great. Thank you so much. And also can find the details on our show notes and transcripts at emphasis.com/iki in our podcast section. Victoria, delighted to have you on the podcast, and thank you for your valuable time and very interesting and timely discussions as well. Everyone, you've been listening to the Knowledge Institute, the Brilliant Basics edition, where we talk about digital disruption, design and future work. This topic was Agile Product Delivery with my guest, Victoria Payne. Thank you to our lovely producer. You'll get a barring, and then tie knowledge and students, Brilliant Basics teams. Until next time, keep learning and keep sharing, and stay safe.