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Hello, dev ops enterprise folks. We get to work we're in the home stretch here. Uh, so usually I, it's funny, usually I speak earlier in the week and I'm really happy. I'm speaking day three, because I had no voice. They wanted to, I have like half of a voice today. So we're going to see how we get through it. Uh, our topic today, very excited about this, uh, project to product transformation. And we're going to talk about a research paper that we produced. I'm going to, I'm going to get into the story here in a minute, uh, that I think is really good guidance for the industry. So, um, before I get into that though, I mean, you talk about who I am and who my, uh, copra center is here. So, uh, I'm Ross Clanton. I've, I've been speaking at this conference, I think since the beginning, uh, really love this community, love this conference, thankful every time I'm up here and get an opportunity to share my story, uh, early on was driving DevOps transformation at target.

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So it was telling a lot of that story with Heather Mickman the last few years driving a transformation at Verizon was here telling those stories, uh, I'm independent now. So now I get to work with different folks and tell those types of stories. Um, beyond that, uh, Amy is someone that I actually had an opportunity to work with at target, and she was very involved in the transformation there as well. And Amy has moved on to us bank and is doing a product transformation work at us bank. Amy, uh, has gotten more and more involved with this community over the last year or so too, which I've been really excited to have her, uh, working closely with on some of this stuff. Um, you might see our red shoes popping here a little bit. There's a story about these and I'm not going to tell you it.

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So for all of you that want to hear it, you have to come back to the U S bank talk at the end of the day. Uh, but it's really cool story. Okay, let's get going. So I want to talk about the DevOps enterprise forum for a minute. This is a, a group of people that get together once a year. It's something that Jean Kim hosts, uh, and it's actually spawns off of the last slide in all of your decks that you, when people are speaking in, they're asking for things they need help with or things that still aren't fully defined in the industry. And so a group of 40 or 50 people is invited every year and we go and try to tackle these problems. And it's super exciting. We work with you get a chance to work with some really smart people and go and create guidance to problems that haven't been maybe fully defined yet in the industry.

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Uh, over the five years of this form has existed. Uh, they've produced, I think up to 25, uh, uh, research papers now, uh, I've had an opportunity to be a country, a direct contributor, and even leading the team for Fiat for some of these, for five of them. Uh, and I've indirectly been able to contribute to a lot of them as well. Uh, the two on the top there, the project to product transformation and getting started with dojo's, uh, just we're, we're just published in September. So they're only about a month old, very excited to be able to work on those this year. And I think it's really helpful information. This talk, we're going to dive into this whole project to product paper because I, it, there's a lot of really good information for folks in there. And, and I'm really excited for people to get to see it.

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So, uh, earlier this year, we came together at the forum and one topic I was extremely passionate about was trying to get deeper guidance for enterprise is trying to do a product transformation. I think there's guidance starting to form in the industry around it. Mixed book, project to product is awesome. I would recommend to everyone reading that, but what has been lacking is, is like real life guidance based on what enterprises have done and like what their experiences have been. And we wanted to draw more of that out so that we could expose it to the community. And so, um, I actually asked Amy to come and join our group this year. It was her first time at the forum because she has so much expertise on this topic. And I knew it'd be really powerful for that paper. And what we did is we interviewed 14 enterprises that are at some stage of doing a product transformation. Uh, and we captured a whole bunch of information about them and they split. They spend 12 different industry verticals. You can see the industry verticals referenced there, and we captured a ton of interesting information. And then we look, we also looked at the expertise we had in the group two in the group that was working on the paper. And we, and with that, we were, we, uh, built this actually it's a a hundred page report that we're synthesizing down to hopefully a relatively simple 30 minute presentation.

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And so with that, I'm going to hand it over to Amy briefly, and she's going to lay out the kind of framework for the paper, and then we're going to get into some details.

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So before we dive into the details, we, uh, wanted to share what we established as a framework for this transformation. So through our research, through our interviews of these different enterprises and based on our own experiences, we discovered that there's typically seven different domains that really have to turn in order for these transformations to take hold. So starting with the top of the wheel there, we have transformation implementation. So this is really how you get started. How do you drive the momentum for this transformation? How do you sustain that momentum over time? Business and technology synchronicity is really about that alignment between business and tech. So how do we bring those worlds closer together? So they're operating just as one entity and not as if there's a wall in between them product. Taxonomy is really about starting to define those technology products, which really sets the basis for how you form that product centric organization, which leads you to workforce and talent.

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So how do you start to form those smaller persistent teams around these products, giving them full ownership, accountability, and autonomy, to really own those products, build them, run them and such things that we've talked about throughout the last three days funding model touches on how do we start to fund the work differently. So it's super important that we fund the teams rather than these large extensive projects that take many months to plan for. We'll talk about that a little bit later. Architecture is really how do we start to enable and more autonomous teams by decoupling large systems, giving them more automation tools and things like that. So either designing architecture for that, if you're just getting started or perhaps redesigning architecture, that's been around for many years and then finally culture and leadership, so super important. So this really focuses on how do you ignite that culture shift, right?

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How do you get that leadership buy-in to help sustain the transformation through all the hard bumps and hurdles that you're going to go through? So there's many pieces to that as well. So continuing on our research, we discovered there's typically a couple of different stages to this transformation. So it typically starts with an incubation stage, right? So you're starting to experiment. You've probably found some grassroots, uh, folks who are passionate about this type of change. And they're willing to do some of these experiments, hopefully that's then leading you to the scaling stage, which is where the rubber really hits the road. The organization is mobilizing around this type of transformation and everybody's leaning into it, uh, scaling it across the organization. And an optimize is really about how do you continuously improve on the transformation that a journey that you've been on. So there you're never done. There's always more to do. There's always more improvements to be made. And then of course there's constraints, right? So we've talked a lot. The last three days in these different talks about how hard these transformations are, there's obstacles, there's hurdles. We highlight some of those constraints and how these 14 different enterprises were able to work through some of those constraints and hurdles. Cool.

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So now that we've said a little bit of a, kind of a framework around how this paper worked, we're going to dive into kind of the insights that we captured around each of the stages in that journey. All right. So with that, let's get started with incubate. This is highly summarized. So I'm going to tell you multiple times during this talk, download the paper, please and read it, uh, cause we're only gonna be able to scratch the surface. So here's the common things we saw when companies were at those early, that early incubation stage where they're building momentum and working to start to drive change across the organization. First of common pattern was they were finding a coalition of change agents. They were finding the small group of people within their company that thought alike about the stuff, wanted to see change happen in the organization and were willing to invest in drive that change.

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And so they banded together as this kind of small group of, of, uh, change agents. They, um, focused on local experimentation. Okay. So they weren't going big, fast. If you think about it, you can't try to tackle the whole organization. So, you know, start with a single line of business or a single portfolio, a few teams get the right leadership involved for those teams and experiment. Because at this point you're still trying to prove what's possible from a product perspective, you're not tackling bigger questions at this point about how do you organize around products and how do you structure the organizations at the most basic level, start to align on what the definition for product actually means for your organization. That's a pretty common thing that people are tackling early on. Now you can start to set the, you know, in this stage, you're also starting to sow the seeds a little bit for future things you need to do.

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So you are starting to look at your existing frameworks, like business capability, frameworks, and such to start thinking about how you're going to anchor around product, but really focus on defining at this stage, figure out there's new roles in these transformations that start to emerge, uh, product management, roles, product owner roles, scrum master roles. Uh, you need to start looking at, and companies are started at the stage to kind of introduce and grow those roles at a small scale. So things like experience, product managers that are maybe more experience-based versus technology based product managers, what's that look like for your organization? Uh, some organizations start to introduce a dojo model early when they're working with this incubation team, but the I'll talk about that more in scaling. I think that's where most companies are really focusing on dojo's from a funding perspective and a governance perspective at this stage, you're working within constraints.

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You're not changing your funding model when you're incubating, um, your, you still have your project based funding model. You still have most of your governance model at an enterprise level in place around, you know, your, your processes for the organization, but for the teams you pull out and put off to the side to test and learn. You figure out how to abstract them away and allow them to work a little bit differently. That could look like the VP of that organization. That's a pilot organization still having annual project based funding, but then they're working to turn it into product funding for the team that the incubation teams that are working on it, but you're not changing the broader organization at this point. And from a architecture perspective, this is largely you're starting to work out, getting the foundation in place, a place you're engaging in aligning those architecture stakeholders in the organization, whether it's enterprise architecture, business architecture teams.

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You're like I said earlier, you're looking at whether there's frameworks that you can start to anchor to when you, when you get into that later stage to start defining your product organizations, and you start thinking about an introducing patterns around, uh, creating a less, uh, lower friction environment for your developers to release software. All right? And at this point you're not doing that at scale. You're figuring it out with these incubation teams. And most importantly, I can't stress this enough. I think this is the most important thing that we saw with the companies that we're, we're having a lot of success with incubation. They were creating a movement in the organization. They were focused on creating a grassroots movement. They were getting there, they were igniting the base and getting them excited. That's only going to get you so far and you'll hear my, uh, Jonathan smart quote here soon, but, um, you got to create a movement at the stage and really focus on the bottom.

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So that's incubation. All right. What are some of the outcomes that companies size they were getting through incubation? You're starting to prove what's possible, right? At this point, you're, you're experimenting and you're proving to the organization. You're not scaling anything. You're not doing thousands of teams. You're doing a few, alright, you're generating excitement for change. Now that excitement's might be just a minority small portion of the organization, but when you generate excitement and you start to build community around that, it starts to fuel change across the organization over the long run and you're building momentum. All right. That those early teams that are working to create this change are working together to show what's possible. And it's starting to prove to others in the organization, what they could expect when you do get to a point that you're scaling this out. All right. So now that we talked about incubator, let's talk about scale. This is a really challenging stage. Um, you know, at this point you've made, you're ready to make a bigger investment. Like you're seriously looking at changing your organization at scale. So what were the common kind of the seven common things that we saw at this level?

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Uh, from a implementation perspective, it's it can't just be about grassroots now. Uh, I am in a quote, John smart, uh, from Deloitte. He used to be at Barclays. He leads the agile practice for Deloitte in the UK. Uh, he had a great quote this, uh, at the London DevOps summit, that grassroots, uh, change is amazing, but the problem with grassroots is only goes as high as the grass ceiling. And he's so true because what happens if you get this bottom up movement going at some point, if they don't have support from the top, they get frustrated and they'll leave. And so you've got to get, make sure that support is getting layered in at the right time so that you can grow these changes and scale them out in your organization. So that's about aligning the right sponsors, getting the right champions. It's about making sure that you can articulate at this stage, how this technology transformation can support your business strategy and aligns to your business strategy.

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I think the, some of the hardest work in these transformations that we saw, uh, from a business and technology alignment now is where the rubber is really hitting the road. Like you're now looking at starting to map teams around products, you're building value streams for your organization. You're grouping products to those value streams. You're starting to structure teams of people around these products that mirror both the business and technology sides of your organization. It's a significant amount of change that you start to introduce across the organization. You start truly building your product taxonomy. And as I was just saying, that's often, um, there's different tactics on how to do it. And by the way, Amy is an expert in this. So please talk to her if you really want to understand. Um, but you actually start to map what the products are going to be around your organization, and you map them to the value streams of your organization.

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You start growing, especially your engineering competency, but also your product and agile competency across your organization. And, uh, yes, a lot of companies are doing training programs and different ways to start learning skills. But this is where a lot of companies are really investing in dojo's as well as a scaling mechanism. So you're scaling, learning through immersive learning centers so that people are learning all these skills in the context of building the products and services that they were already planning to build for the organization. This is where you really start to tackle funding model, which is really hard. And you shifting from project investments that are typically annual to funding long lived teams. So you're funding team capacity instead of funding project investments and your whole model for how you measure the results and the outcomes that you're delivering has to change to support that from an architecture perspective, you're focusing now on how do you start to introduce new architecture, new platforms and changes into your organization that can enable these new product teams to be autonomous and BT coupled, because if they can't actually operate as a product team and they're dependent on 50 other teams in your organization, there's going to be a lot of challenges and you're not going to change the architecture overnight, but the investment needs to start happening here.

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And then really the whole grassroots thing I said in the beginning, this is really where you're linking a bottoms up and tops down change. Like it has to come together at this level. And the, and the leaders are really kind of fostering and growing that change. And so the outcomes you see here, you do have leader champions, you have leaders that are really driving and leading that change across the organization. You've actually started to drive strategy and see results and measures and improve across the organization at scale. And you're organizing around products and you're accelerating. People are actually delivering more value faster, and you can start to measure that. And there's plenty of measures that you're hearing about all week on how to do that. So now let's talk about optimize and I'm gonna speed up a little and optimize cause I want to give Amy A. Little bit of time.

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Um, so if there was a few companies that we interviewed that I would say we're at this state, it was definitely wasn't all 14, but we got some really interesting patterns from them. So first they started to actually expand their ways of working their product practices or agile practices even well beyond the technology organization or even the product teams that had a technology component to them, even deeper into their business. I think business oriented teams that own processes like marketing teams and stuff like that, um, that didn't necessarily have a technology component to what they were doing.

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Convergence was starting to happen. Business and technology was truly, truly starting to come together, organizing more around a team and, and product owners really started to become more of that kind of authoritative source on prioritization, obviously the product team, but they got to a point where we're at that truly wasn't happening through the kind of traditional tops down approaches. The product taxonomy is at this point is continuous improvement. The good news in this model is you're constantly adapting and learning, which products are adding more value, which ones aren't, and you can tweak your model. You're constantly tweaking model.

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The organizational structure starts to really lean out. Um, I know this is a controversial term, but some of these companies started to get rid of their traditional, like PMOs and traditional planning and, and what I would call overhead functions. It didn't mean there wasn't a, a home for those people that were in those roles, but there was investment made into those people so that they could transition to some of the new roles that were needed for the organization. But when you move to this model, you have an opportunity to really lean up some of those traditional practices.

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Uh, the funding model also expanded further into the business for some of these companies. So they were starting to fund non-tech investments more from a product perspective and not a project investment perspective. From a decision perspective, architecture decisions started to become more community-driven. They created models that allowed the engineering community to actually contribute to the decisions are being made so that their voices were being heard and it wasn't tops down. And they truly started to get transformational leaders in place leaders that not only could inspire and continue to lead this change inside their companies, but in some cases were inspiring and leading these changes in the industry.

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So that is our model, uh, some outcomes at this stage, you really start to simplify the organization, uh, making it more highly adaptive and fast. That creates an environment that fosters innovation, where you have more resilient and adaptable organization and innovation flourishes in that scenario. And as I was saying before, some of these companies really can start to influence the industry from that leadership perspective. So that is a a hundred page paper on one slide right there. Uh, those were the 21 things that you just learned, uh, mapped to the framework that Amy laid out. I am not going to walk through this. I will give you five seconds to take your picture. Um, but download the paper please, because you can read about all of that stuff. And with that, we wanted to walk through some case studies that we really think that are also in the paper that we think will really help drive some specifics home on this. I'm going to hand it back to Amy.

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Um, yeah. So as we mentioned, we interviewed 14 different companies. And so we really took the learnings from all of those interviews to compile the guts of the paper, walking through all of these domains. But then we, we took the time to create three case studies. So we wanted to go a little deeper with each really tell a more robust story about how they work through each of these domains. And so we have three case studies in the paper that span the three stages, incubate scale and optimize. And the theme three case studies that you see there span these three different industries, industries, excuse me. So apparel sports were enterprise, a global media service provider and a retail enterprise. So let's get into it. We're going to give you just a little sneak peek to each cause we don't have a lot of time to go deep on these, but we wanted to share a couple of nuggets or highlights around a couple of the domains for each of these.

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So this is a case study around the apparel and sports wear company. They were, uh, had some success with their incubation stage that really helped them, uh, move into that scaling stage, which is what they're currently in. So they started incubating their transformation, the digital and customer facing portfolios. They had a leader that was really passionate about this way of working and had previous experience in a product model. So she started to champion this, this way of working. Uh, she really prioritized lean value stream mapping and a continuous improvement model. She did a really good job of creating some strong relationships with the business who were also passionate about similar types of outcomes. And so they came together. She knew she had to be bold and act fast because there was a scaled agile framework and military implementation happening across the organization. And she felt strongly that this product model would be a better way to go in, would show more value.

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So she found some teams that were willing to experiment, uh, take on this lean value stream mapping way of working and the continuous improvement model. And they tried some things and they kept going. And so ultimately this built momentum into their scaling stage. And so ultimately their scaling strategy was to treat the transformation as continuous small consecutive experiments, always improving, communicating across the broader organization, not just within it. We don't want this just to be an it secret or transformation. We got to bring our business folks along, um, and then align those business and technology strategies driving that transformation forward.

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The second one is pretty fun, I think. Uh, so this is, uh, an example of a company that was really in the midst of that scaling stage. And they really focused on are, we are focusing on how they attacked that funding model, right? So how did they start to shift to funding the work of the team instead of these large huge projects? So, uh, they had to shift away from funding those projects and start to fund the teams. So how do you do that? Has anyone seen the show shark tank? Yeah, so it was pretty cool. They actually took the opportunity to treat their funding model much like the show shark tank. So they formed a common product backlog for these product teams, all the new epics that came into that backlog had to have a compelling business case. And so with that every Friday for about 90 minutes, the technology and the business leaders came together to pitch their idea of this epic to this committee, the shark tank committee.

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And so based on the value and the compelling business case, they were awarded funding for the work that they wanted to do within those teams. Not all work was approved. There was some competition, there's some politics. Can you imagine? I would love to be a fly on the wall of a shark tank meeting every Friday. Um, and so it was really based on the business case that they, they pitched and the business value that they were articulating. Pretty cool. I think, so this last one is a retail enterprise that really scaled through all of the stages. And they're very much in the optimized stage. They're continuously improving. They're coming up with new ways to improve their transformation all the time. But this one touches just a little bit on how they leverage that product taxonomy to form their organization and really Excel. So they took the time to draft their taxonomy.

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So the technology leaders did some iterations once they had that set well enough, they started to form these persistent sticky product teams. If you will, that are cross skilled. They started to replace the more traditional roles of project managers and business analysts, and started to, uh, put in product owners and scrum masters, and then really increased the amount of engineers that they had growing that engineering talent. They had a dojo, they leveraged that heavily to accelerate these teams, teach them their new roles and help them to, or allow them, excuse me, to refine the definition of those products. So further maturing that product taxonomy soon, these technology product teams were moving faster than ever. They were no longer the dark black box of it. The business teams were being brought into these sprint reviews and demos, and they were hearing words like scrum and sprint and dev ops and agile.

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And what the heck is going on. We're we're not giving you our requirements anymore, and then not hearing from you for a year we're we're being brought into the conversation all the time. So the dojo was a pretty well-known concept at this point. So they knew where to get help. They reached out to the dojo coaches, the business teams that is, and they started asking for help. They were interested in working in this way, adopting agile ways of working, acting like more product centric teams. And so they came into the dojo, went through these similar workshops that the technology teams did to build those skills, adopt new ways of working. And the coach has really took that opportunity to bring the technology teams to the table. So they had for the first time, a new way of working together technology and business, sitting at the same table, collaborating towards common outcomes that they were working towards. Pretty cool.

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So with that, please download the paper because you'll learn all whole, much more about all of these companies and the three case studies, but we would be remiss if we didn't say thank you to all the beautiful faces you see on this slide. So this is the team that came together to write this paper. Um, it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of work. There's a lot of expertise, as you can see from the experience that's on the slide. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you to all of them. Thank you to it, revolution and last but not least, we need your help. We need you to download the paper and why do we need that? We want you to use it. We want you to read it. We want to continue to expand on this topic. So give us feedback, give us your stories. We want to continue to expand on this so that others can learn from it as well. So thank you. All right.