Bethan Vincent – Remote control: helping non-engineering teams to achieve faster workflows

I'm thrilled to welcome Bethan Vincent, Marketing Director at Netsells. Her session is entitled Remote Control, helping non-engineering teams achieve faster workflows. In this session, you'll learn how non-engineering teams revolutionize their remote workflows using centralized tooling to manage workloads, integrate with product and engineering teams and facilitate sprint based delivery schedules.

Bethan, thank you for sharing your genius with us. Take it away. I'm Bethan Vincent, I am the Marketing Director at Netsells, we are a product and software development consultancy based in York, in the UK, hence my accent.

And I'm here today to talk to you about improving remote workflows for non-engineering teams and delivering things faster and more efficiently and sharing some of my learnings from the past four months, because let's just say it's been interesting and I'm fairly new to remote life. So to give you a sense of the past of Bethan. So as I said, I live and work in the beautiful, historic city of York.

And this is your Cannavaro Sunny Day in the UK. I've got to admit, that doesn't happen every day. Sometimes it's quite rainy and cold, but my commute to work was very much I walked into work.

I walked along the bridge. You can see in the background here and then over to our offices, which are just behind the wall. You can see on the left hand side, and I probably don't need to go into too much detail about what happened in the beginning of 2010 20.

But let's just say my commute stopped. I, like much of the UK who could work from home, worked from home from March to 16th, and pretty much went remote overnight from being someone who worked in the office most days a week, maybe worked occasionally from home one or two days. And it really was a big shift.

And it taught me a lot about how to be resilient, how to perform under pressure and how to take some of the lessons and learnings I had from pivoting a key to an agile setting, a marketing team to a natural setting, and almost how that kind of set us up to actually thrive in the remote world. So if you're interested in kind of how to move a team over to a remote, agile setting who's a non engineering team, I actually did a talk about this at GitLab Commit, San Francisco, back in January. So please go and check out that video that goes in kind of the nitty gritty, how to do it.

But this this whole process really kind of was an inflection point for me. It changed everything from the way I felt personally about my work. And a lot of this talk is inspired by, I guess, my kind of personal challenges over the last four months, but also some of the changes we made just to make sure that we could continue to thrive and survive in a remote setting.

So as an organisation, I think all organisations have had to think about these four things over the past few months. And these are the order priority. I think they've been relevant to us at Netsells and other organisations we've been working with and saying so no one has been agility know.

Most organisations have found their business landscape completely disrupted and have had to have that room for manoeuvre, because I think that's how agility is different from speed. But we'll come onto that, have that room for manoeuvre, for manoeuvre, to basically change what they're doing, pursue a new line of business, change the service, really new features to move towards a customer base, maybe slightly different or looking for new things. And just to share a little bit of an anecdote about this.

So here in the UK, we have a organisation, a company called Primark. They are a fast fashion brand to primarily do kind of retail, essentially, and they only have ever done retail in terms of physical retail. And obviously at the beginning of the pandemic, they found all of their stores were completely shut down.

And because I'd never thought about were invested in e-commerce, they literally lost billions of pounds overnight because they couldn't serve their customers and they had no way of pivoting to serve their customers. And I think even if they had had a small e-commerce offering, they would have had to completely transform overnight and have the speed to be able to move everything online. And that's where speed comes in has become very important.

It's not enough to know you can change course. You've got to actually be able to do the work to change course and do that quickly and again. For most people, it was kind of an overnight thing.

This was all very unexpected. And that comes onto kind of resilience. As I said, the past few months personally have been very hard for me.

I think they've been hard for a number of businesses. I'm sat here in my spare bedroom, which I had really valuable, and have the resilience to kind of continue doing good work, try and kind of reach our goals and push forward has been really important. So it's resilience in the sense of your personal resilience as a person, as a human, and also resilience in terms of your resilience as an organisation.

And this is where kind of caring about people comes in, your resilience as your people. And one of the things I've really learned is that you've got to take care of your people. And I know that's been something we've been hyper focused on over the last few months.

It's even simple stuff like making sure people are having conversations. They're communicating, even though the. Sitting in different houses, different countries, different places, and making sure that you do have avenues you have passed to understand how everyone's adapting to all of this, because some people are different and that's absolutely fine.

And that brings me to the final organizational priority, which I think really has been community. And this is kind of linked to everything. I think we can't deliver great work without a community of people pushing forward together who are on the same page, who understand what they're working towards.

And again, community has been a big learning for me, community of colleagues, my community of friends, and how do we connect with each other and adapt together to what has been, again, a very challenging time. I know I'm hammering that point home, but I can't underestimate and under emphasize how difficult this has been for people. And I think we need to embrace that and talk about that.

So that's kind of what this talk is about as well, a little bit, as well as kind of helping organizations and what you can do to help your organizations embrace these full priorities and the kind of structure things. And to give you something maybe to think about, I I'm a big kind of devotee of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So you recognize this triangle?

You know where I'm coming from, if you've read anything about that. But I was a behavioral theorist and essentially he talked about motivational theory in the sense of that kind of like different levels of needs people have. And you've got to meet all of those levels to kind of satisfy people.

And if you can get to the top, if you can get to the pinnacle, it's called kind of self actualization, then people will basically be motivated. They'll perform better. And I think I've kind of adopted this in a remote setting.

And this is kind of all of the things I've been thinking about and how to facilitate these things and why they're important in actually the work we do in the delivery of the work we do. So we're going to kind of walk through these. But cafÈ, I'm not going to walk through the bottom level because I think if you're not providing salary benefits with Wi-Fi, well, you're probably doing something wrong.

So I'm hoping you've all got those you're all feeling good about that. And we can move on to the next level of the pyramid. So we're starting off with this resources, information and discourse level, and I'm going to be talking about centralizing information and processes because this was kind of the first thing when I went overnight, I had an old moment about.

So to give you a sense of how I work normally in the kind of office setting, I am a scribbler. I love scribbling. Just to give you a sense of how much I love scribbling, I do it at home still.

I'm the person who has Post-it notes everywhere. I have pieces of information in all different places on my computer, multiple different folders. And when I first transitioned a team to work agilely, a marketing team to Agile, one of our big learnings from that was you can't have bits of information everywhere, especially when it's to do with achievement projects or issues.

And I've kind of extended that to you need everything to be centralized. You need all information about your company to be centralized because it's so, so important in a remote setting and allowing people to basically have an operating manual for their work. And I think GitLab does this really well with the handbook, which is open source.

And it's a great template for anyone who wants somewhere to start. And I think actually a company handbook is a pretty good place to start. And this is something we've been thinking about Netsells.

And it's just again, it's an operating manual for anyone to come in and understand kind of who's in the company, what are their roles, what are the different functions, what are they responsible for? How does work happen? Because that's often a really big question.

When you join a company, it's like, how do we actually deliver things? And to have that all in one place is very important. But just to kind of dig into that a little bit deeper.

So it's creating a single source of truth, which is a really cool idea. I borrowed that from GitLab just because I love it. But having this kind of handbook or we have a reading list for new starters, and that's where essentially when they join the company, again, it's like an operating manual to how everything works.

And it just takes the stress of way of having to ask someone, of having to feel like you're interrupting someone for some information or that feeling of am I asking a really stupid question, which there are no such thing as stupid questions. But you can imagine when you're new to a company that's quite difficult and onboarding a new team member is an experience I've had during this period. We've had to adapt to that.

And having this kind of centralized information has been part of that. And I think it's also important to have a document. It's a written documents document in the sense of when you have verbal contracts between people.

And what I mean by that is if someone's kind of in an office and they just have a quick question, they go to a colleague. It's just a question about how you want this report to be produced. Is it like this?

Is it like that? And people respond and that piece of information will only ever be held between those two people, which means that if anyone else needs that information, that conversation has to happen again. And from a kind of time management point of view, it's not ideal.

Ideally, you want people to be up to self serve information because again, all of the points are just raised, but also to spread the knowledge around. You know, you don't have little silos of people knowing everything. Everyone can find out the answers.

And I think it's really important that this is held in one repository, not in multiple different spaces. I've come across that before. And that can be kind of confusing because you like to check for that piece of information.

Here is this document folder or wherever. So if you can try and have it all in one and owned by everyone, everyone should feel a sense of ownership about that information, should feel empowered to change it, to revise it. But the caveat to that is it's got to be pruned often.

It can't be a massive long document that no one's ever going to read because they're so put off by the length of it. You do need people to go in and kind of edit it for clarity and brevity and also just make sure it's searchable as well. That's just another top tip I've learned.

There's nothing worse than masses of text you can't search. So that's my kind of tips for creating a single source of truth. But we're going to move further up the pyramid and we're going to go to support, collaboration and respect.

And again, I think this has become even more important during this period in a remote setting. It's extremely important to feel like you do have colleagues to rely on. You do have input into processes, into procedures, and that there is respect between teams.

So a lot of my talk again in January 2020 about agile marketing teams was the fact that I'm a big believer in cross team collaboration. All of the organizations I've worked with who have unlocked that have massively improved that, especially development processes, but also general kind of delivery across the organization. They've just ship stuff faster because people can kind of work stuff out a lot more quickly.

They can collaborate. You know, if marketing needs to provide coffee for certain Web page or for for an app screen, then it can just be integrated into the delivery workflow instead of it being like a separate little process that always seems to take forever. No one knows quite when it should happen or who should be commissioning that work.

So these are my. Around Crossbeam collaboration. I think firstly, you've really got to break down the work and have an overview of the work every team does.

What I love is having company boards where you can see exactly what's open, what's in the backlog, what's in progress, who's it assigned to, what different kind of areas of responsibility are assigned to the this is, again, the lap product marketing board. I love a love story, get love stuff and seeing what they're up to, but I'm just not like that. But, you know, you can then see when stuff is closed and I think every team should have this kind of visibility into other teams.

And I find it really important if I want to get something from the development team and I need that help on a project, if I can go in and see what they're working on and actually say, oh, gosh, they're quite overloaded or they have a little bit of an opening here, maybe in front end, that just helps me with having a bit more empathy for what they're working on. And that's really the core component of crosschecking collaboration for me is empathy. So these are some other tips on kind of collaborating in between teams.

I think teams have to define their work. Obviously, you know, everyone's kind of got domain expertise. And this idea that teams own different areas, departments own different areas, I'm not taking that away at all.

But it's this idea that teams define for everyone collaborates. And again, this has become even more important in a remote setting where it is sometimes more difficult to collaborate. But if you can see what everyone's working on, you can see that work is happening.

I think that's a fair for some more traditional organizations that they're worried. If we're all at home, we'll just be watching Netflix. And I don't know about you, but I'm absolutely sick of Netflix now.

But, you know, if you can see what everyone's working on, it just it kind of makes everyone accountable to each other, which is nice. You've got to open up your backlog's. I think there's no way around that.

I'm a real believer in the kind of transparency. I think there should be nothing to hide because you're all working for the same goal. Right.

But you've got to define clear areas of accountability with that. So you've got to understand, for example, what is marketing responsible for? How should you engage with us?

How do we like kind of information Posterous? How do we kind of prioritize our work? And again, it's about having empathy for other teams.

You've got to make it easy for teams to contribute to each other. And I'm not just saying, you know, this idea of opening up the backlog's, everyone should be kind of flinging an issues into other people's backlog's willy nilly. I actually in the past work with the product owner who was so sick of that that they thought to everyone but themselves, which was an interesting experience.

But you get around this by having clear rules of engagement, having almost kind of service level agreements between teams where this is how you contribute to our backlog. This is the information we need. We need very clear acceptance criteria.

This is how we will prioritize that work and deliver it. And feedback to you that that work's been delivered, that again, it's all about empathy. I can't stop going on about empathy enough because it's so, so important.

So, again, we are moving up the pyramid and we're getting to accelerating delivery processes. So that's the central premise of this talk, is that speed and agility are really important. So we've got the sense that everyone's got the information they need within organization.

Teams are starting to collaborate together, which is really great. And then how do we actually deliver the work quickly and how do we pivot? How do we accelerate things in an area, an area which is so right for people to be shipping new ideas, shipping new things?

What is that famous essay? It's time to build, so let's get to it. So again, this is something I'm a big believer in, that anyone, any team can adopt Agile.

And you can use this format, you can use this kind of pared down, maybe drop the pelican release process for any department could follow this from HR to marketing to business business analysts. It works for everyone. You just maybe have to tweak some of the kind of parameters a little bit, but you should be encouraging people within an organization to work on a hypothesis basis.

So instead of kind of traditionally what you would do, especially for marketing, is you lay out your work for your head like this. What we're going to deliver Q1, Q2 to Q3, Q4. Now, if I'd done at the beginning of this year and kind of said, OK, this is all very much for the year ahead, these are all of my kind of assumptions about how everything is going to go.

I would quickly have to revise that. And I think because the situation is so uncertain, it is so changeable. I mean, even before Covid, you could argue things were moving so quickly that you have to be agile.

This is this is the operating model of the future. I mean, lots of people had already embraced it. But if you haven't also parts of your business haven't.

It's time to rethink that. And it's about giving people freedom to iterate. And as I've said, agile and scrum isn't just for engineering.

So I ran a full marketing team on Scrum. Yes, we changed some parameters slightly, changed some of the rituals and the artifacts, but we made it work for us and we just tweaked it. We we almost had a build measure Taslim process within our delivery process.

Anyway, we're getting a bit better here, but you've got to empower teams to experiment and this is kind of a cultural thing with organization. It's about community, it's about empathy. And I know kind of in Silicon Valley, failure is something that's very much embraced.

I think that's a wonderful thing. It's not always been something that has been embraced everywhere. K.

and that's kind of a cultural thing and I'd love to see more companies do it. One of the reasons I love working for Netsells is we all kind of told to try new things. And if it doesn't work, as long as you learn something, that's absolutely OK.

But you've got to have that kind of senior leadership kind of telling people that it's OK and not just telling people it's OK, demonstrating it for themselves as well, kind of showcasing people acting and leading. And one of the other things, I think experimentation is great, but you've got to have things to experiment on. You've got to have hypotheses.

And this kind of goes back to very early in my career when I worked much more in a kind of customer service role and we were dealing with customers every single day, customer complaints, customer problems, what customers needed. We were getting all of that information and it was to do a kind of retail. And the customers would often ask us for this certain kind of addition to a product.

And we were kind of like, oh, that's really interesting. Should we tell our manager? And hopefully they can escalate it to the head office manager.

Never knew who to escalate it to. And whenever she tried, she got blocked. So really vital piece of information just was kept within our team just because no one had given us a clear process to kind of send our hypotheses to the people who could action them.

And I think this is something organisations can always improve on is, you know, are you asking everyone for that feedback? You have clear path for that feedback and you make sure that feedback and action done, because it's not just enough to kind of say, you know, we want everyone's opinions, what everyone's thoughts. We want to make things better, but nothing ever happens.

Quite demoralizing in my experience. And this is where kind of the final point is, you know, we've seen this phrase bandied about a lot. It's not just mine, but delivery is a culture, is not a process.

It's more than just your procedures, more than just your software, your aptitude. It's your kind of giving people permission to do interesting things, to do new things. And again, as I said, this is the time now to be doing things differently, to try new things out.

The companies that survive this are going to be the ones who are doing that and doing that well and able to push it through. So we're getting to the top of the pyramid now and connecting our work with the bigger picture. And this is about mission.

This is about meaning. This is about purpose. And this, again, comes from a very kind of personal reflection of the last four months where I get stuck in these four walls.

I've sat here and I've kind of thought, what am I doing? What am I doing with my life? It sounds pretty heavy, but yeah, those thoughts to go through my head and it wasn't really work, really, but it was just kind of how am I contributing to this world that seems so strange and full of kind of chaos, you know, how can I make things better?

And I think work is such an important part of my identity, of most people's identity. I spend, however, many hours a day doing this, sometimes more hours than I'm sleeping. And I want it to be worth something.

You know, I want to feel like I'm contributing. And I liken this to kind of the idea of climbing a mountain. Why do we climb mountains?

It seems ridiculous when you think about it. Why do people communicate to an Everest? Lots of people seem to die doing that, yet people continue doing it.

And it's because we want the feeling. We want to know what it's like when we get to the top. You know, we want to have that view.

We want to be able to look back on how far we've come and have felt the mileage. But we've got somewhere and I think a lot of organizations operate with the peak of the mountain obscured. You know, they're telling people to deliver work, deliver faster, to work better, work smarter.

But there's no sense of where you're going. And it's really hard to climb a mountain. And that is the task that is ahead in some ways of us, you know, a lot of us working on easy problems.

And that's kind of exciting. But we've got to know what it's going to look like when we trudge up there. You know, what are we aiming for?

Otherwise, it's just going to fail and you're never going to know where you're going. And I think the best companies and the companies that will really inspire people to do their best work will remove those clouds and kind of say this is the peak and it doesn't have to necessarily be that kind of be Hagg gold or North Star mission. But it's just like this is how we're helping the world.

This is how we contribute to this is your part in it. And that's what's going to look like when we get up there. We don't know for sure about that, but that's what we're aiming for.

And I think you've got to answer the question now of why work for you? What are people contributing to? What does success look like?

And this is slightly tied in with recognition as well. But you've got to celebrate things. You've got to celebrate achievements and tell people, you know, we know we've done something really good when this happens.

And this is about having very clear milestones, having those Epic's and kind of bunching up work so it displays a bigger picture. And that's why I think it's is important to try and celebrate milestones for them. At the moment.

I'm working on a massive project which has taken over a good kind of couple of months. But I know when we kind of push the button and we go live on it, it's going to be amazing. And yes, I'm going to celebrate that with a glass of wine and celebrate a good job done and tell the rest of the team excellent job done.

And no, that's not our kind of like main mission or main goal but it's breaking it down into smaller chunks and giving people a pat on the back, even if it's just good job. That's so, so important. And we have to feel part of something.

I think that's a really big learning for me from all of this. I know I need to feel part of something bigger than just myself sat in these four walls. I want to feel like I'm part of a community, feel like I'm part of a company that's going somewhere and I'm lucky that I do.

But that is a huge motivation in terms of getting people to deliver what good work. You know, you do your best work when you're really invested in something. So just to recap, this is a remote hierarchy of needs.

It is a really useful tool for you to think about your work, your organization, how you kind of operate, and maybe some of the areas you're slightly stuck on that you could improve. And I've outlined some of the steps I've taken and I've kind of learned throughout this whole process. But hopefully that's useful.

And as I said on Bethan Vincent, if you want to find out more about Netsells and some of the exciting kind of tech stuff in the UK we're working on, if you want a bit more about the UK taxi, then do you follow us? And if you want to kind of give me any feedback about this talk or ask any questions, I'm going to be in the Q&A. I'm also on Twitter as well and always happy to chat to people, but thank you so much.

It's been an absolute pleasure to be here with you virtually.