00:00:02

So last year, Levi gainer spoke here at DevOps enterprise summit, and he presented with two of his colleagues back when he was director of engineering at target. And he was sharing the continuation of the DevOps journey there. Since then, he has moved to U S bank where he is now SVP and head of agile technology experience to support a top level strategy around customer obsession, simplicity, and business agility being driven by the senior leadership team. So he and I were talking a couple of months ago to brainstorm about potential topics. And when he brought up the possibility of co-presenting with his leader, Verner, Lutes, EVP of transformation, who comes from a business leadership background, not technology, I almost leaped out of my chair and excitement. They're going to talk about all the amazing things that they've been tasked with and what they've achieved and what they've learned. Levi and Verner.

00:01:00

Hello, everyone. I'm vulnera Aleuts thank you very much, Jean. And it revolution for the invitation and for the opportunity to close this amazing event. And everybody's looking very alert. I'm very impressed. You know, Las Vegas lifestyle. Isn't always conducive to late afternoon productivity, but, uh, this is, this is an impressive scene. Um, I am so excited to be here. Like Jean mentioned, I'm not from a technology background. This is my first dev ops conference. And, uh, you're a, you're an intimidating and impressive audience. You know, there's a lot of substance in this session. I've really enjoyed it. And then there were the lightning talks last night that honestly, they were as strange as they were phenomenal. I will not, we'll never be the same. So, uh, expect to see me back here, I'm really enjoying it. And I feel like what you're grappling with here is really at the heart of the most critical competitive capability that every large incumbent business is trying to build. So it's a, it's a really a big honor for me to learn from you and to be here, share some of my experiences working with Levi and the rest of the team at a us bank. Um, and to hopefully compare notes as we go. So thank you Levi for having me along

00:02:15

Keith burner. So last year I presented on this stage from a different company. I actually started with us bank shortly thereafter. It's been a fun ride. It's been a fast paced transformation. Um, I wanted to thank Jean Courtney and the program committee for the opportunity to share how a healthy business and tech alignment and the lean agile and product principles and practices can have impact while you're working to rebuild your engineering culture and onboard those practices. This is one of the factors for me joining the bank, um, and having come from an enterprise dev ops company, uh, I really want to see dev ops succeed. And so we're definitely trying to foster and encourage these practices at USBank. We love the community and love to give back in any meaningful way, and we hope that we can help. So feel free to reach out.

00:03:08

Thank you, little bit of context on the transformation work. So about us bank. And hopefully there are a lot of people here who are actually from the U S when I present internationally sort of annoying to be a us bank called us bank. It's terribly confusing to explain to people where I work now. And I'm like, no, it is the us bank. So fifth biggest bank in the country. The point is we are big enough. We're not the biggest institution that have shared at this conference, but we're big enough that obviously we're not inherently agile, right? We had to take a very concerted effort to try and figure out how to move an organization of 74,000 people. We are largely domestic in our banking operations, but we have international businesses in our payments processing and trust and treasury services. So it is a large organization and very spread out across the U S and then every organization has a chart with accolades to explain how they're, you know, the, the greatest organization in their industry.

00:04:10

We have one, two, uh, we have a lot of compelling evidence on this. And the point is really as much as I think we are more focused than anything on kind of learning and getting better that, uh, this institution of U S bank has the legacy of real excellence, right? So the ethics and the values and the performance of this bank that has led the industry in the us in return on equity return on assets and efficiency year over year for a decade, right? Highest like global debt rating. It is a very, very well run institution is still extremely focused on building new skills and that, you know, just from the most recent presentation. And so many of the other ones at this conference, that's shared context, right? These are organizations that are coming from a position of strength and really taking very little time to celebrate that and aggressively try and hone new skills.

00:05:03

And that's what we're in the process of doing so a little bit about how transformation then got started, where did it get its energy, right? Like how do you transform an organization that by many relevant metrics continue to outperform the industry year over year? And one of the things that we did is we tried something early on when you as bank last year hosted the super bowl. So we're lucky to have a beautiful view from the offices that we have of us bank stadium, where the Vikings play. And we recognized that the super bowl was quite a big opportunity for us to be on stage and to drive awareness. And we put together a cross functional team to address the fundamentals off that, how ready are we for people attending the super bowl and learning about S bank through that to use our app, to learn more search, get, um, and be served if they're interested in doing business with the bank, and this had pretty heroic impact in our ability to move quickly and make use of a key date on the calendar and saying, how do we quickly make the most of this at hustle and just work in a different way?

00:06:15

And it sort of gave us the idea. We should probably work like this in a lot more of what we do. We don't need this big calendar driven event to force it with this idea. This quote has been attributed to very many different people, but I think we all feel it. And this idea of, you know, we feel like it is so fast, the pace of change at the moment. And we recognize just objectively that it will never be this slow again. So there's this sort of nervousness, I think, a very healthy and productive nervousness in our organization to prepare for a different era where we feel like if we work the way we do today, a couple of years from now, we will be in a bad position. So we are actively working on this great machine that we're trying to accelerate using examples like the, uh, the Superbowl experience and our first foray into agility to try and drive that.

00:07:04

So then the transformation started in the consumer and business bank, which is the point that, uh, we'll make throughout this. This was not initially a technology driven transformation. It was very much driven by the business and it was at the heart of the strategy. So there wasn't a transformation and a move to agility as an initiative, somewhere in the business, and then a strategy somewhere else, like the new leader of the consumer and the business bank came in, developed a strategy for how to build that business and what the next year of the business looked like and right built into that was the transformation. It was effectively. How do we execute the strategy that we have recognizing it, many organizations have pretty similar strategies and in the end, how you execute, it makes all the difference. So the point of the page is just that if you read strategy material about you as bank and about our consumer bank with a started before it went enterprise wide, as we'll describe you, won't miss the relevance of agility and the transformation of what we're doing, because it's actually assumed in the strategy. Those are two separate things. So this idea of powering human potential by becoming central to the financial lives of our customers is attached at the hip with the principles of customer obsession, agility, and simplification, which is what we're trying to make real across the enterprise in transformation.

00:08:28

So this is enter the experience studio. We've talked about a lot of similar concepts. In our case, we called them the experience studio. We have experienced teams in there that breakdown into journey teams. It's just nomenclature. That's slightly different from one organization to the next, but all signifies the same idea that we're putting together, smaller teams around these core components of product engineering and design, and also every other function that is needed to get something out the door and drive customer behavior and saying, we need that in a new environment where we can have a community of teams that work together in a new way and can compare notes on a new way of working. You need something to coach to in order to change you. Can't just say, we're going to change from what we had. We hope that over time, this becomes much, much more natural, but we actually need like a pretty explicit model to coach too. And that's what we set up in the experience studio. So what you're seeing here is, um, our fancy new digs having built out, um, some room for the studio, and we'll give you a glimpse of where we started beforehand.

00:09:34

So one of the things that, um, in retrospect, we look back at the principles of the experience studios, and we noticed that there were some similarities. So on the left, you'll see the U S bank core values and on the right, you'll see the experience studios, uh, values and principles. And they align very well, which is one of the reasons why we feel good and why we think the transformation has done a well job taking root, because we're not telling them a tool or a practice. We're just telling them what do we care about? And it aligns with our core values, and it helps us to gain, uh, uh, agreement or buy-in with our stakeholders and our partner teams. Um,

00:10:24

I think we both hit it. I'll go back a second. So one of the things to know about Levi is that he has an incredible throwing arm. So the picture on the left is the original experience studio, where we just went to a floor that real estate corporate real estate wouldn't even tell us existed because they was so nervous about the condition that the floor was in. It was just an empty floor with seven different types of carpet, and a lot of seventies furniture that we pulled out of various storage holes in this giant building. And it was nice because we're open and we got a little mini tykes kids hoop that we competed, um, to see who could get the ball through the hoop for the furthest and the end. We actually ran out of real estate on this page because it turns out Levi's a relatively gifted athlete and was able to stand against the one wall and sink a hoop on the other side of the building, um, up against the other wall. So that unfortunately the end of that competition for us, because nobody could compete against

00:11:19

Burner quit and went home

00:11:21

And he was very angry. Um, so, you know, you get a little bit of a sense from how we started this, right. There was a, quite a bit of planning on the front end in order to get going, but you can never get everything in place, right? So real estate is just another example, right? The, it really was a relatively horrific space. We had fun in there, but this was what it was. And there was no team. Right. I showed up, I had an assistant where like, we're going to do this. This was January last year.

00:11:47

And I would add that this is kind of the namesake for our talk, right. Just get started. It wasn't like we, you know, had a bunch of money right out of the gate. It was, we were, we were getting scrappy, right. We, we chose a floor, we had a hundred types of chairs. Um, we were having post-it notes, right? We didn't have whiteboards necessarily. And over time we added those things because, uh, the values were in alignment. People wanted change. Um, they wanted to be empowered and these cross-functional teams were really compelling and, uh, empowering to work on. And so, uh, even with that space, the employee sentiment was really high because they had never worked that way in the past at a bank. Yeah.

00:12:28

It's a great call out. One of my favorite ideas. And this comes from a talk that general Stanley McChrystal did at one of our events. And he made the point. You can't steer when you're standing still, right? So you kind of, you have to start moving and make adjustments. Otherwise you'll never get the momentum. And it's such a beautiful, simple idea. And we got going and they truly against any expectation that I could have had. We didn't have a goal to make the studio big. We're not trying to accomplish anything. We just started two teams in wanted to see how it went. And by the end of that year, and at the start of 2019, we had exceeded 20 new teams. We actually created them in five different cities because we're a very spread out organization. And we like to be close to the business leadership for every set of experiences that we're building.

00:13:13

Um, the studio grew to over 600 members that are dedicated and co located in their teams and these five locations, and then many more supporting, um, outside of that. And then what we found interesting as well as just the cultural impact of doing this, the number of people wanted to come see the tour, wanted us to come talk, explain what we're doing. Uh, we created some training. It, it really was enough for a big organization to see as many as like 600 people. It's a fair number of people is definitely relatively hair on fire, but it is not 74,000, but the message that we were able to send to the rest of the organization by moving this quickly, working in a new way was substantial. And as we're standing here now, we're at 32 teams. We have a couple of more locations. We have a thousand people in there, and the work that we're doing at the moment where we'll close with a couple of words and why this is such a timely event for us is going forward.

00:14:11

We don't think we just continue this pace of growth and change. We need to substantially accelerate it. So we are really looking to kind of build a way of working here that we can scale across the enterprise and make sure that we can apply a lot of the disciplines that will make this better going forward. Um, you know, there's the, uh, the idea of nail it and then scale it. I think we nailed some stuff. I wouldn't say we nailed it before we scaled it like crazy. So we've got a lot of work to do to shore this up and then grow it much faster going forward. One other thing to mention as well is we have the studio teams, but part of this positive spillover is many other teams in the organization came to us and said, can you help us to tackle XYZ?

00:14:54

Many of those problems had nothing to do with technology, right? They weren't building anything. They were trying to figure out how to accomplish a particular business goal, enter a new territory, solve an employee problem, but they recognize them. The whole let's bring people together in a room, let's get the right people to actually look at each other in a room and facilitate it in a certain way at that had big power. And they weren't funded to create a dedicated and co-located team, but they still want it to work in this way. And we've had over 60 engagements like that, where we are supporting initiatives across the bank, where people recognize the power of the working style, regardless of whether or not they're actually able to feel the build team.

00:15:34

So this is one of my favorite examples, uh, because of this cross-functional team greatly reduced the amount of information that was requested from our customers and streamlined the process by getting a cross-functional team together, uh, whiteboard sticky notes, and going from, uh, over a hundred data points to just 20 some data points. And they're continually improving that. Um, the other significant of this is a small business owner can now go on and fill out an application and get money in their account in typically less than 15 minutes. Um, recently we had an example where a $50,000, uh, bank loan was deposited in the customer's tracking account in 13 minutes. Uh, seven of those minutes was the data entry on their mobile phone. And one year ago that took 11 days. Uh, so in this studio, many of the agile practices are taking hold. Um, some of them have been delivered with, or without dev ops practices and tooling. Um, some of them with a tightly coupled architecture, but by having a cross-functional team aligned on a shared goal, um, they're able to have significant impact like you see here. Uh, and this is why we're so excited. We look at dev ops is the next step, right? It can only get better as we continue to invest in those practices, as well as the tooling.

00:16:56

Another example is our home mortgage, uh, team. They are the first, we are the first major bank to validate both income and assets and evaluate credit worthiness. At the time the application is submitted. The significance of this one is, again, this is not a technology led initiative. This is a partnership with a vendor, but again, by working together and co-creating in an agile working model in a S in a space in St. Louis, we're able to co-create and have these incredible outcomes, um, that you'll see here. And no digital transformation would be complete without a mobile app, right? Uh, so since our, since the debut, you can see we've had a lot of insights delivered to the new mobile app. This is significant because it was built using or with co-creation with our customers and the direction was not how to do it, but it was, Hey, talk to the customers, every sprint, bring them into the studio. That's the significance of the studio is that we have customers coming in every week. And that wasn't a typical thing that you would have seen at a bank. Um, so again, this is a new concept. Um, we continue to improve our delivery skills, uh, around our mobile app. Uh, the dev ops practices and tooling will come and we'll continue to improve.

00:18:17

There's a couple of things to call out on these. I want to make the link between these three examples of what we've built, but also how we built them and how quickly we grew. So, as we say, like, we started with two teams at the beginning of last year, we have 32 now, and a whole host of them outside the studio, just sort of what happened, right? Like why that really is not characteristic of the tradition of the bank to move that fast on anything. And I think it's a combination of some of the themes that have come out in the sessions that I've attended the last couple of days. Very, very good top-down support on all this. The executive team definitely owns it. There's a lot of trust. The, um, the sort of safety and permission to fail has been demonstrated in very powerful ways and the bottoms-up impact of the teams.

00:19:09

We build good things. So obviously most importantly, the results are good, right? We're building new things that are very different from what we've been able to put out to customers in the past. And that makes us feel good. We have top-down support, but bottom up, I think ultimately was the biggest thing here that people in these teams, it is extraordinary for me as a new person to the bank, to look at how people talk and have these teams be a combination of, you know, vendors, contractors, some new hires, but largely our traditional employee base people have been with the bank for ten, twenty, thirty years and call their time in the studio. The most rewarding professional experience they've had in their careers. I mean, that's incredibly humbling and it is just such a message around powering human potential, which is the mission of the bank that applies to customers and employees, but the Mo motivational impact of working like this is phenomenal.

00:19:57

So this visual is what made me think of it sort of a hand-drawn thing on the left, and then something on the right hand side. What's the significance of that? This audience knows that I just, I was walking in the studio and I talked with our team about this. And they said, yeah, it was great because, you know, we drew the suggested flow on the board. And then five weeks later, we had it live coded user acceptance testing, ready to release from the room. And like, just to hear them, explain to me what that meant. It wasn't that it was simply a breakthrough in terms of how we work. They felt completely different about their work, right? Like it feels very different being a cog in a wheel and a giant machine from, I actually can see my handiwork. Right. I can see within a reasonable amount of time that I can compute what is the link between what I'm doing day to day, any given Wednesday, and what happens to customers? Like what can I talk to my friends and my family about, about what I built this motivational loop has been by far the most powerful fuel for the effort overall.

00:21:00

So, uh, in June, we were able to have a special event for us bank. It was our first what we're calling transformation day, uh, where we brought teams together, as you can see, to educate, collaborate, and celebrate, um, this was important. So we brought all of the studio teams across those five locations together. Um, again, the significance here is we didn't have a super, um, great idea about how we were going to do every specific thing, but just the excitement and the interest it organically happened. And you can see that, uh, we're going to have some positive outcomes to share here in a second, uh, on, on the left, you'll see our friend Courtney Kissler from Nike, who is our closing keynote. Uh, it was, it was very special for us talking about the new role of leadership, how she cares and promotes for a continuous learning culture and the 90 day approach to taking her new job at Nike, uh, Ross Clanton, our friend as well, joined us to talk about the top enterprise transformations lesson learned. And we were joined by Archie Miller, Jeff Patton, Philippe Castro, and Deon Stewart. Um, this is what an event where they came together. They demoed, they learned, and they celebrated at the end of the day. So it was, uh, approximately one year after the studios launched. So it was definitely time to celebrate and have the teams come together. Uh, I'm going to show you pictures in a second, but I'd love to show you a video that shows you a little bit more about how the bank has changed and the embrace around learning, run the video.

00:23:35

So, as you can see, we're very proud of that, uh, event. Um, you'll see some pictures here from the event as well. Um, but what's better than pictures metrics, right? So we'll share with you some, some awesome metrics. So we had 540 people attend across the bank. Uh, very well attended, lots of excitement, many of the leadership teams plan their visits to make sure that they could attend this event. Um, 436 people took part in the, uh, social in the conference application. Uh, there were over 11,000 engagement actions, likes comments, shares pictures, et cetera. Um, uh, 1,400 or excuse me, 1400 contributions. Um, and over 10,000 minutes of app use. So maybe not the most productive thing, but again, we're investing in learning and sharing and collaborating with our friends and our peers. And we're very excited that we're gonna continue to have these. And, uh, we've been talking about potentially doubling in size and we'll see where it goes this year.

00:24:40

Uh, we noticed that it impacted a lot of people outside of the studios and outside of technology. Again, this is a, um, it's starting to change the way the bank operates, right? Including internal conferences and events. We're starting to do demos at all of the other events that are occurring at the bank. Um, so please be on the lookout for an invite to join us in turns, formation, date 2020 at USBank. Uh, so clearly the culture thing is, is taking root. Uh, people are excited. Uh, it was great to see this feedback from Russell, a longtime banker. He was clearly very impressed. So we were very happy to show you this. Um, but again, we, we care about giving back to the community. And so we also host events inside of the studio where we invite industry friends to come and share and collaborate as well. Uh, if you want to hear more about that, please reach out as well.

00:25:33

No, it's fun to share the video. Just a moment of reflection on that. Again, for me, as part of thinking about my first dev ops conference, it was interesting for me to come to this and realize that, you know, I'm going to spend time with this very tech, credible stead of thought leaders and sort of wondering, like, what would the content be? And it was fascinating to see how much of it in the end, as much as there was amazing, uh, guidance, he around real execution and technical expertise, how much of it was about people, right? And just getting organizations to work properly. And like seeing that full circle has really been our finding here as well, which is why, when we talk about, you know, sort of the, um, happier portion of the outcome, um, of transformation and agility, this is what it comes back to to me, you know, if I have a cynical moment in my seven-year-old daughter asked me like, Hey, what, you know, what is work, right? Like, what are you doing? I'm like work is where thousands of dedicated, talented well-meaning professionals get together to frustrate each other. Right.

00:26:38

It's just amazing how hard it is to get a, a big organization to, uh, work and get stuff done for customers and be a fun place to work. Every single function, every department in the business is necessary and required, but that passing the Baton and relitigating things down the line and not being able to stay on the same page and cycling through it, it can be really brutal, right. Even for the most dedicated, uh, professionals. And that's why this has been so fun, right? You kind of see a little bit of the vibe with the transformation. It was so great to kind of go from our federal, start with Levi, throwing a bowls through the net, to hosting our CEO and hosting the board on the floor and being able to talk with them about what they've seen. And our CEO came back from his visit, where again, like per our principals, he just visited the studio team and the developers on the team and the workers got to present and answer questions.

00:27:31

And he came back and I walked him back to our headquarters. And he said, the most amazing thing to me is that was clearly a team. And I have no idea which parts of the organization they're from, right? Like people discovered their colleagues and other functions. They understand for the first time that we're all trying to solve the same thing. It's a, um, like that is really something that's sort of, you see in the vibe and why after the transformation event, our management committee had their regular meeting and had an impromptu debrief on this event. Cause many of them attended. And they're like, have you heard the buzz about this event? What was in my it's fundamentally the positive energy that comes out of like powering the potential of your own people by sort of getting out of the way and allowing them to relate.

00:28:14

So challenges ahead were LPC trying to scale this. As I talk about the demand for this is extraordinary. We really are in a position, a very fortunate position where the organization is reaching out and we are trying to figure out how to make what we've shared here. And I'll grow from two to 32 teams, simply the way of working across the organization easier said than done. But you can imagine the amount of work that goes behind that on how do we scale this model, keep the idea consistent while we have a model that allows many, many more people to step into it and make this the default mode of operation in the bank.

00:28:54

So agile and DevOps versus ways of working. So sometimes people get lost in the words, agile and DevOps. Um, and so we really, we really love Jonathon's smarts take on better value, sooner, safer, happier as kind of a guiding principle to, can you continue to drive our transformation? So we don't get lost up lost in the tooling, in the buzzwords, the things that don't have as much meaning as, as our core values,

00:29:22

People in talent model. We now have people in the studio who are having this amazing experience that we've been touting, but that will work in a studio away from their solid line report for a long period of time. So you could be in your studio team where really that's your reality for years. And we haven't yet adjusted. What is the talent career development model look like for perpetual studio activity? So that's a big item for it,

00:29:51

Governance versus guidance. So last year I spoke about this topic. Uh, it's a little more challenging at a bank than at a retailer. I'm not gonna lie. Uh, but I'm, I'm excited to hear when, uh, when our partners are like, uh, continue to speak in the similar sense where they're looking to move away from their traditional governance roles to help to provide guidance. Um, I was especially excited at this events at this event to have all the insights shared by our partners, uh, John Rez, Topo, Jonathan smart on how we can move towards a continuous compliance model as a way to support our transformation. Uh, and I'm also very excited to share the audit panel video, uh, with our friends and audit, compliance and risks. So, so many good insights to share there.

00:30:45

Terrific. And then just to close out, we feel, we should explain the, the fashion here, um, all the red shoes, thank you for us. Some of the other presenters and attendees here who have worn the same and kind of always been helping us fly the colors here. This is something that grew very organically in the studio. You know, you're often a little bit nervous when you start these big events with these accoutrements, you know, having some cynical, like senior leaders say, ah, you know, you put people in jeans and sneakers and you give them table tennis and then productivity and sues. Um, so we try to be like, you know, very circumspect about, listen, how much do you drive these things in this just fully organically came from, um, the first teams in the studio where there was an individual that would just wear these red shoes.

00:31:29

And, you know, as is my habit, I just used it as a way to poke fun at him and explained that he was a grown man who dressed like a child. Um, and then like, as we had the conversations, it turned out, he had a very thoughtful and quite profound model for what he thought. It meant. The fact that we were working in a completely different way, team sport, agility, logging many miles, right? That the fact that the solution and creativity can come from unexpected places, including the person in the red shoes and it has completely taken off. So our very formal annual all employee meeting of 74,000 people, our head of consumer and business banking went on the stage for the first time ever without a tie and wearing red sneakers. And it seems simple, but it's difficult to overstate the ripples that, that sends through an organization, a number of questions that generates when the CEO visited the studio, he put on his red sneakers, you know, there's something about the leveling and saying, Hey, we're all on the same team that you get from a symbol like that. And I'm like, if something like that emerged as we would definitely say, embrace it.

00:32:31

I know these are a us bank symbol. Uh, but I think it's relevant for our whole community, right. Uh, I saw quite a few people wearing red shoes in the last few days. And I was originally going to ask them if they worked at us bank. And then I just realized that these are just people that are comfortable being bold, right? This community knows that we need to be the advocates for change. And, uh, and being bold and wearing red shoes is one of the ways to accomplish that. Um, we give them to anyone that's part of the U S bank transformation because of this. We have a pair to give to Eugene for, uh, being part of our transformation. Uh, We, we, we hope that you'll wear them be bold and we know you work hard for the community and log many miles. Um, and following the event, we'd love to take a pic

00:33:22

And we're happy to celebrate the totally unintended parallel with the red shirts in your book. So red is the color. Thank you very much, everybody. You,

00:33:29

Yeah.