Becoming agile with Peapod Labs Sr. Product Owner

Editor's Notes

• #11: But before we start, I wanted to share few key figures of Ahold Delhaize because it was my main source of inspiration to start this talk to you all. 370k associates across 11 countries. Total of 21 brands with 6500 stores ! We are currently doing 2.3 billions online sales and growthing every years ! Really exciting ! The digital impact everything on our company: ecommerce, fulfillment, ordering, stock optimization, customer cares, Stores ! And as everyone, we try to progress on every track to help our customer buying better, healthier, faster, cheaper. As you can imagine or already experimented, moving an huge company like AD into the digital world is not an easy affair. The best way i could represent this strong but initially non digital company is
• #12: But before we start, I wanted to share few key figures of Ahold Delhaize because it was my main source of inspiration to start this talk to you all. 370k associates across 11 countries. Total of 21 brands with 6500 stores ! We are currently doing 2.3 billions online sales and growthing every years ! Really exciting ! The digital impact everything on our company: ecommerce, fulfillment, ordering, stock optimization, customer cares, Stores ! And as everyone, we try to progress on every track to help our customer buying better, healthier, faster, cheaper. As you can imagine or already experimented, moving an huge company like AD into the digital world is not an easy affair. The best way i could represent this strong but initially non digital company is
• #13: But before we start, I wanted to share few key figures of Ahold Delhaize because it was my main source of inspiration to start this talk to you all. 370k associates across 11 countries. Total of 21 brands with 6500 stores ! We are currently doing 2.3 billions online sales and growthing every years ! Really exciting ! The digital impact everything on our company: ecommerce, fulfillment, ordering, stock optimization, customer cares, Stores ! And as everyone, we try to progress on every track to help our customer buying better, healthier, faster, cheaper. As you can imagine or already experimented, moving an huge company like AD into the digital world is not an easy affair. The best way i could represent this strong but initially non digital company is
• #14: But before we start, I wanted to share few key figures of Ahold Delhaize because it was my main source of inspiration to start this talk to you all. 370k associates across 11 countries. Total of 21 brands with 6500 stores ! We are currently doing 2.3 billions online sales and growthing every years ! Really exciting ! The digital impact everything on our company: ecommerce, fulfillment, ordering, stock optimization, customer cares, Stores ! And as everyone, we try to progress on every track to help our customer buying better, healthier, faster, cheaper. As you can imagine or already experimented, moving an huge company like AD into the digital world is not an easy affair. The best way i could represent this strong but initially non digital company is
• #15: With an elephant ! (and i take the credit of this photo by the way) We are really strong on several aspects, great stores experiences, an huge high quality assortments, + our localisation. But we have a lot of legacy as well and moving fast on our digital transformation is challenging.
• #16: This place logo with client logo on TP generic gradient.
• #17: Because they don’t know it, they all know that they need to focus time and ressources on their digital transformation but it’s really difficult because It’s not how this kind of companies worked and grown on the past. The first thing I heard from teams that started their transformation on their way of working, was about agile and all the process and tools that they will start to implement.
• #18: This place logo with client logo on TP generic gradient.
• #19: When I was doing my research to prepare this talk, i found this quote and it represents exactly what i am thinking about Agile.
• #20: For me, agile is not a method, it’s a Mindset ! None method will perfectly fit to your company as it’s wrote in a book My first advice on this speak will be first to bring the culture and the mindset on your team and not start directly with buying tools and creating a full process.
• #21: When we just have a look to the 4 values of the Agile manifesto, we easily see that it’s only about mindset and company culture.
• #23: HOW ? Before i start to give some tips to bring an agile mindset to your company, If you really want to transform your company, you should hire agile coach. Fully dedicated to this mission, can be department by department if you are working in a huge company like mine. If it’s the case, 1 agile coach will not be enough, we did the error several times on my IT’s department.. you need at least 1 coach for 8-9 collaborators. Let’s start with 4 statements and i will go deeper on first methodology you could use to start your agile way of thinking transformation.
• #27: We didn’t started because we had my department doing the layer between the local businesses and the IT group department. But the effort was really huge and it was difficult to really onboard them into this new mindset. We started to bring them on our way of thinking and working 1 year after the beginning of our transformation. We saw real improvement on their way of structuring their idea and problematic. Got really easier at this moment of time !
• #28: Topic to explain for business improvement Main objective is to try to get the MVP concept into their mind But getting there can be challenging. You should try to go through this steps: Help them to describe their problem without getting directly to the solution Solution will be think and proposed by teams If getting only the problem is difficult at start, you can use some methodology to help them think out of the box Like Ideation process (maybe dedicated slide for this ? Something that Dawn created ?) Create a clear feedback loop to share progression ⇒ transparency is key Organize meet up with your product teams (I used product and not IT for a reason :)), they will start to understand the product lifecycle and improve their way of explaining their challenges
• #29: Topic to explain for business improvement Main objective is to try to get the MVP concept into their mind But getting there can be challenging. You should try to go through this steps: Help them to describe their problem without getting directly to the solution Solution will be think and proposed by teams If getting only the problem is difficult at start, you can use some methodology to help them think out of the box Like Ideation process (maybe dedicated slide for this ? Something that Dawn created ?) Create a clear feedback loop to share progression ⇒ transparency is key Organize meet up with your product teams (I used product and not IT for a reason :)), they will start to understand the product lifecycle and improve their way of explaining their challenges
• #30: Topic to explain for business improvement Main objective is to try to get the MVP concept into their mind But getting there can be challenging. You should try to go through this steps: Help them to describe their problem without getting directly to the solution Solution will be think and proposed by teams If getting only the problem is difficult at start, you can use some methodology to help them think out of the box Like Ideation process (maybe dedicated slide for this ? Something that Dawn created ?) Create a clear feedback loop to share progression ⇒ transparency is key Organize meet up with your product teams (I used product and not IT for a reason :)), they will start to understand the product lifecycle and improve their way of explaining their challenges
• #31: Topic to explain for business improvement Main objective is to try to get the MVP concept into their mind But getting there can be challenging. You should try to go through this steps: Help them to describe their problem without getting directly to the solution Solution will be think and proposed by teams If getting only the problem is difficult at start, you can use some methodology to help them think out of the box Like Ideation process (maybe dedicated slide for this ? Something that Dawn created ?) Create a clear feedback loop to share progression ⇒ transparency is key Organize meet up with your product teams (I used product and not IT for a reason :)), they will start to understand the product lifecycle and improve their way of explaining their challenges
• #32: Topic to explain for business improvement Main objective is to try to get the MVP concept into their mind But getting there can be challenging. You should try to go through this steps: Help them to describe their problem without getting directly to the solution Solution will be think and proposed by teams If getting only the problem is difficult at start, you can use some methodology to help them think out of the box Like Ideation process (maybe dedicated slide for this ? Something that Dawn created ?) Create a clear feedback loop to share progression ⇒ transparency is key Organize meet up with your product teams (I used product and not IT for a reason :)), they will start to understand the product lifecycle and improve their way of explaining their challenges
• #33: Your IT guys will be the core of your transformation. The time when IT guys where only pissing code and delivering is DONE. They are part of our transformation, and i want to go far, they are the core of our transformation. Agile methodology is based on severals statement but the most important one that i could highlight is SELF ORGANIZED teams. Means that they should be able to take decision that will help our business. And to be able to do that, they should understand our business.
• #35: When I started the agile transformation, some other (mainly from the IT team) were interested to join and implement this Big change. My way of managing is to let people do mistake first and after tell them what was wrong to improve and get the buy in more quickly than just imposing things. Some of this colleagues mixed a bit the concept let’s say .. they directly started to think that agile is like a train, when it’s ready, it’s ready. If it’s not done it will wait the next train … The train was the name for our release and they were planned only every 3 months. I let you imagine my difficulty to explain to my countries that their key requests were not ready on the expected release and they will need to wait 3 more months .. I started to dig a bit and got difficult moment to get my colleagues understand that Agile doesn’t mean total freedom. Agile can and must support a roadmap. And teams should be able to give delivery dates. They finally agreed and understood after few weeks, but the next release was still not ok .. Main issue: A clear roadmap visible and communicated. I printed then the roadmap and posted it everywhere on the office ! And by magie, the following releases were pretty much achieved ! One quick stats on our release frequency since we started agile. the frequency was 3 months when we started, we reached a weekly release now !
• #36: Topic to explain for business improvement Main objective is to try to get the MVP concept into their mind But getting there can be challenging. You should try to go through this steps: Help them to describe their problem without getting directly to the solution Solution will be think and proposed by teams If getting only the problem is difficult at start, you can use some methodology to help them think out of the box Like Ideation process (maybe dedicated slide for this ? Something that Dawn created ?) Create a clear feedback loop to share progression ⇒ transparency is key Organize meet up with your product teams (I used product and not IT for a reason :)), they will start to understand the product lifecycle and improve their way of explaining their challenges
• #37: Your IT guys will be the core of your transformation. The time when IT guys where only pissing code and delivering is DONE. They are part of our transformation, and i want to go far, they are the core of our transformation. Agile methodology is based on severals statement but the most important one that i could highlight is SELF ORGANIZED teams. Means that they should be able to take decision that will help our business. And to be able to do that, they should understand our business.
• #38: I tried to represent 3 key aspect of Agile on this slide. First one is the communication, Agile is based on self organization of the team, means more freedom for the team and less control from the management. It can be scary at start. It’s why a strong communication is require to avoid creating a gap. Secondly, communication will help improving the collaboration, objective is to focus on the “We” instead of “I”. Your team will start to get a common spirit and get more and more productive. I saw some study on the fact that 55% like to work for the team spirit, 27% for the company and 18% for themselves. Means than more than the half are looking for this team synergie ! This 2 main improvements will bring trust, and trust is everything in an organization, it will help you moving much more faster and better. The last aspect is an expression that i particularly love ”Inspect and Adapt”, it can be applied to the collaboration and communication but can be applied to everything else. Working agile is not an easy thing and it’s constantly change and improve. You will need to go through a long way to get a process perfectly in place During your Agile transformation, communication is crucial. Communicate your achievements Teach collaboration: Focus on the “we,” not “I” But not only, Regular communication between your business and team is important, as I mentioned before, transparency is key because it brings Trust. Trust is everything in an organization. This Trust will help your team to continue to improve their method, one statement that I particularly love from agile is Inspect and Adapt. Your agile transformation will straight path. You will have some ups and downs and they could raise some frustration and get push back from your stakeholders.
• #39: Your IT guys will be the core of your transformation. The time when IT guys where only pissing code and delivering is DONE. They are part of our transformation, and i want to go far, they are the core of our transformation. Agile methodology is based on severals statement but the most important one that i could highlight is SELF ORGANIZED teams. Means that they should be able to take decision that will help our business. And to be able to do that, they should understand our business.
• #40: Title slide on TP generic gradient. Use mid measuring block from ‘Measuring blocks’ slide in masters for spacing.