Lindsay Velecina: 0:03

Welcome to the scrum.org community podcast, a podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast we feature professional scrum trainers and other scrum practitioners sharing their stories and experiences to help learn from the experience of others. We hope you enjoy this episode. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the scrum.org community podcast. This is Lindsay Ville, CNET and scrum.org just wanted to give a little bit of a recap for this episode. This is a part two of an episode focused on strobo an HR software company and in the last episode, Leslie Morse from scrum.org interviewed Bert nails, Michael for Han, and Steven Denair, about a transformation story. And strobo adopted scrum to help accelerate their go to market. They also created a learning culture fostered lots of transparency, and they built some great trust based leadership. It is a really great story. So please go back and listen to the first episode. If you haven't listened to that one already. This episode will kind of recap everything. And Leslie asks some thought provoking questions to Steven, Michael and Bert. And they also share some really great tips for your Scrum teams, and really good leadership advice. So we hope you enjoy this episode. There's

Leslie Morse: 1:46

two things that I'm exceptionally curious about. And then we'll get into a little bit of lightning round wrap up questions. One of them Bert directly involves you around this idea that sort of, I'll call it as agile purists or as scrum purists. We would say we never advocate for the person holding scrum master accountabilities to have positional authority within the organization or have HR type relationships with the people on the Scrum teams. As a co founder. That was something that y'all chose not to do. You are holding those scrum master accountabilities for those teams. And given the story that we're hearing about today, and what's outlined in the paper like it worked for y'all. So what was the motivation for that? And what was there anything specific done to alleviate a lot of those risks that go into what often happens if scrum master accountabilities are intermingled with some of those other organizational elements?

Bert Neels: 2:50

Yep. Yeah, so I understand the people who are skeptical about it. But I think it has a really lot to do with trust, that I built along the way. What I did to prevent, mingling, the both of them was actually really indicating. Sometimes that when someone felt like I was going in the wrong direction, that they should really stop me. I also had a few people within the team, including Michael, for example, who really had the courage to stop me think that's of course important if you're the only strong figure in the team and you have no one is, has the guts to stop you when you need to, then then you have a big issue. But I think Michael, you had to stop me quite a few times in the beginning. And after that, of course, the team picks it up and they know how to stop me with the Elmo, by the way is a great way to do it. To stop when we need we still use it in every every meeting, but just showing that it's acceptable to do it. And just proving that it's acceptable. They believe it when they see it, I guess

Leslie Morse: 4:30

it shows a great integrity within you to enable that to happen as well. The anything else to add on that?

Bert Neels: 4:42

No, no, no. I just wanted to admit that it that it hurts sometimes. If you're stopped, then you think you know that you're the right goal, but just let it go.

Leslie Morse: 4:58

Yeah, we all think we're the smartest person in The room sometimes. Yep. Yeah. The. And we become it's easy to become attached to the ideas and opinions we have. I'm one of those people. The The other thing that I was really curious about was the experiment you did around and allowing the teams to sort of restructure themselves on their own. I think a lot of organizations think like, yeah, that's something that can happen in theory, but it wouldn't work here. But you all allow for a level of experimentation around that. So what set up that experiment? What were the guidelines that you put around the teams and like, what worked? What didn't in that portion of the journey?

Bert Neels: 5:46

Yeah, so that's when I still remember quite vividly that a lot of preparation, together with even we really prepared the full day. It was perfectly time boxed and everything. Starting from introduction, forming the themes, setting up the boundaries together, forming the themes, and then even at the end, ritually burning, the old team names and everything was the best. Yeah, and then we started. And then already at the boundaries, you noticed, yeah, there are some people already pushing towards things that I don't like, but just let it, let it go. And I can still remember by noon, we ended up with like, totally being stuck, and not being able to fulfill the boundaries for the themes. I can remember. That's the point where I called Stephen, together with Michael. Because we were like, Yeah, this is this is going totally, totally the wrong direction. We need to stop. But Steven convinced us to just continue and let it play out. And that's, that's actually what we did. We tried to turn the mood like, Yeah, okay. We're stuck here. This is what we are going to try to do for the next two or three sprints. And we'll see how it goes. And I must admit, that work two or three painful sprints, I think, too. After that, the team actually solved it. themselves. It was quite clear, we were having some issues with seniority, and senior people wanting to be together and not wanting to split. To meet the constraints, but yeah, eventually, yeah, the pain was high enough for the team as well. So yeah,

Michael Voorhaen: 7:53

I think it was one of the situations that probably tested us the most to, to just keep faith, and they put it to the team and trust that it worked out in the end. But there was a very big, I think, at some point, we were really thinking like we need to pull back. I'm actually very glad that Steven convinced us not to do it. Because it was a very strong learning moment for the team, for the team, and also for better than me, because I think afterwards, we were, I think, more willing to accept a little bit of risk. If we did an experiment like that, and trust the team that it would work out even if the initial thing was not what we had in mind.

Steven Deneir: 8:40

I want to add to that the constraints are very important if you do that. So you have to think very careful about them, then stick to it. And if the teams do want to deviate, it becomes their problem. And you have to keep them accountable, which I'm very proud you guys did. And you see after a few Sprint's what happens, it works out because they feel the pain

Leslie Morse: 9:02

is really hard to not just want to ask a dozen more questions on this alone and other things that I'm curious about. Because just that that experiment and how the restructuring went, like that could be a whole podcast episode and the whole paper by itself, because there's just I think there's so much important learning in those processes and the leadership courage needed to allow for that to happen. Is I think really important to for people to just think about and focus on. So thank you for giving us kind of an abbreviated version of that. And there are lots of just other questions I'd love to ask but we will wrap up. So I'm curious given sort of like where you all are now. What would you say is on the horizon next in terms of continuous improvement for Strava

Bert Neels: 9:56

you're gonna go now mind blowing. So yeah, I

Michael Voorhaen: 9:59

am I'm thinking This there's such a big list? Well, I think I think for one, I think we, we've come a very long way, we are much more focused on working on smaller, like bite size goals where we can really align one or more teams to really focus on delivering value, we're still very much output focused there. So I think I think there's a lot of work still to be done aligning more with the business and really driving it to have a business impact. So I think that's one of the one of the things that that, that that's going to happen. We're also still, we also still have a lot of plans for international growth. So having having starting to work on those tools, they will help us a lot. And I think, from our point of view, I think it, I think that a lot of the improvements that I have now in mind, I'm really not actively working on them, or pushing them to the teams because there's so much moving from the teams themselves. We do backlog refinements and they're not running that great at the moment. So the team just starts like picking it up, like, Okay, we need to do something with that. Or we want to do more customer context. So how can we tackle that? And it's coming organically from teams and the things that are coming really add value? So there's a lot of stuff that I can answer. But I think the nicest answer, is that that probably better than me don't know. Because, because there's a lot of creative ideas just starting to bubble up. And we are actually equally excited to see what's going to happen in the next couple of months. years. So. So for me, that's the thing, that's a little bit of the takeaway of the situation where we are now. And which is different from where we started at.

Leslie Morse: 12:06

I love that I love that Burpo, what would you add

Bert Neels: 12:11

to it? So no, and we'll just see where we end, I think you're ready to grow even further. And the entrepreneurial mind is still there. So something draws me towards growing or being an average now in a fully. So now have we all come to the office to do the ceremonies. I think if we if we grow further, we will have to revise that again. Because only from the practical sides. We want to involve more customers. And I think we should maybe go in that direction a bit to do it remote. Again. That that will be a big one for me. But still, yeah, I think we're just ready to grow. So yeah, let's grow.

Leslie Morse: 13:00

That's cool. When we think about empiricism, we all often think of like data driven decision making and things. Are there specific business measures or other success indicators that you have looked at and that you are continuing to look at, in order to see if you're like on track and moving in the direction you want to move?

Bert Neels: 13:24

Yeah, that's that's always a hard one.

Steven Deneir: 13:27

Maybe, but maybe better one installed user base.

Bert Neels: 13:34

Yeah, of course, installed user base, we are monitoring lots. But this Michael sets with monitoring a lot of outputs. At this point, we want to shift towards outcome. I think output is a lot better than nothing. But still, we want to shift towards outcome. Yeah. All the measures that are very important for me, of course, the team satisfaction. Even though it's not that easy to measure, you see that we still everyone who was here last year is still here. That's an important thing. Of course, the team atmosphere, very important for me. Yeah, but we also need to shift a little bit more towards concrete data. And in that point, I think going to outcome measurement, really measuring how much time or users gain by using a product is the next step. That's

Leslie Morse: 14:39

cool. And it sounds like you've got a environment in place where putting a challenge like that in front of the teams is something that they'll be able to creatively innovate towards, versus waiting for y'all to bring them the solution for how to do that and serve it up on a platter, which is really awesome. So to two last things, the or Just one last thing before some final thoughts. So this has been sort of the story about right trust based leadership shifting trust into the team, so they can be more self managing other organizations that are desiring for that same shift. What are a couple tips or tricks or recommendations that you have for them?

Bert Neels: 15:20

Yep, I think the most important one is that they really go to a learning culture by experimenting. And there's a site that's, in my opinion, forgotten a lot of times, when you experiment and it's not good, then you should be able to revert to the previous situation. Think that's a big thing that everyone was here. We're trying a lot. And but yeah, what if it doesn't work? They were the point where we really set if it doesn't work, we go back. And the point where we really did that. That's the point where people were like, okay, yeah, we can try here. We are allowed to fail, and also see failing as learning of course, that's, that's a big mind shift. And you went on your lonesome. So whole different thing, then you win some and you lose some price. Yeah, those are the most important takeaways from my side.

Leslie Morse: 16:26

Michael, what about yours?

Michael Voorhaen: 16:28

Yeah, I think it agree. One of the biggest challenges that we had was that we had a very young team, with a lot of people just coming fresh out of school, were very motivated, but still had a lot to learn. And I think I think as as far as leadership, you need to look at it, you need them to give the opportunities to kind of self organize. But and I think it's it kind of relates to the thing that Steven was saying about the constraints, different constraints, but you should be able to kind of give your team's challenges that they can handle maybe a little bit further than than what they are able to handle at that point in time. So they, they can still fail or overcome the challenge. I think if you're if you're working with teams, as from a leadership point of view, you really need to look at, at understanding what your teams are capable of understanding the current situation, and then working together with them on those kinds of challenges. And if you can do that, you can build trust, again, you build trust with the team, but you also build the trust of the team. And then it starts compounding after a while, the more trust they have, the more willing that they are able to just do a real experiment or take a bigger challenge. So for me that that was a very big learning that that I took away from that. And that I initially, I have to admit, I forgot that it was something that I really had to learn, like, what can we do now? Without really pushing the team too far, and just being able to build build on top of that? Yeah,

Leslie Morse: 18:19

the belief they can I think of the at least as popular in the United States, the TED lassos show, right? And believe, was sort of the motto that rallied them. And that's, that's what I'm hearing and what you're saying there, Michael? Yeah, I think

Michael Voorhaen: 18:31

I think that's actually a very good thing. I think I think you really need to believe that your team can do it. But on the other hand, it's your job to create the environment where they can do it. And where were those two things start working in tandem? Then Then after a while you see it, you see it really catching on speed. And that's the moment that you're like, oh, wow, this is this is amazing. This is great. So

Steven Deneir: 18:59

that is awesome. Guys, I might want to add, practice patience, as managers, because it will be tough. Be patient, it pays off in the end.

Michael Voorhaen: 19:11

It's true, Steven, I think I think both of them are very action driven people who really want to start tackling problems. And sometimes we also have to like, Okay, wait, we can't do everything at once. And so patience is indeed something very important there as well.

Leslie Morse: 19:30

I love it. Guys. Thank you so much for joining me today. This is your last chance anything important. Do you feel like you need to share final thoughts before we close out today? Maybe

Michael Voorhaen: 19:41

one one thing from my point of view, if I look back at my journey as product owners, so if anybody would be listening who is developer who was thinking about that thing, it is worth the step for me and it was worth the step for me. I am laughs for myself very amazed that I am not going, I'm not really thinking about going back to development. Because I'm so enthusiastic by by doing the work that I'm doing now being able to work on a product, but with the teams together, that it gives me so much energy. And to be honest, it's really not what I thought that would be at the beginning. It's much better if you do it in the way that we do it with the empower teams. Being a product owner can actually be fun. It's not always fun, but it can be really fun. A lot of the time.

Leslie Morse: 20:38

I love it. I love it. Any other closing thoughts, guys?

Bert Neels: 20:42

I had some time to think now. So maybe think to think of as a developer, maybe try to step out of your normal, go to for learnings maybe go a bit broader, like the scrum trainings. I also did the training for the product owner, management, the earnings, all those things, I think they add a lot to you as a as a developer as well as a team member, potentially.

Leslie Morse: 21:15

Yeah, it's like somebody from the kitchen doing a stint in the front of the house of the restaurant to build that greater shared understanding of how it all works together to create that guest experience. So I think that's a fantastic recommendation. I really do. Alright, Steven, going once, twice. Final thoughts.

Steven Deneir: 21:36

So okay, I'm very happy that the guy has trouble have progressed so much. have declined. Have you seen? Yeah,

Leslie Morse: 21:44

and thank you, Steven for bringing this story into the scrum.org family and allowing us to suitcase it. Thanks to the three of you for being with me again today. But Michael and Steven, we really appreciate it. And thank you listeners for tuning into this episode of the scrum.org community podcast. We appreciate you all