SpringOne 2020 Outcomes and the Death of Heroes Johnny Scimeca, Product Manager at Raytheon Scott Hiland, Solutions Lead at VMware

1. September 2–3, 2020
springone.io
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2. The Age of Heroes
Characteristics of a hero:
● Values their labor over their well-being
● Takes ownership during a crisis
● Acts without expectation of reward or gain
● Heroes have good intentions
● Heroes are good, and good for an
organization
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3. All heroes are tragic
● Heroes lead imbalanced lives
● Heroes are universally taken advantage of
● Heroes suffer injustice under the guise of duty
● Heroic efforts are anti-diversity and exclusionary
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4. Heroes clash with others
● Hero culture is toxic
○ Heroes clash with leadership
○ Heroics are unsustainable by heroes or humans
○ Heroes are enabled to mistreat others
● Because humans admire heroes, some want to follow in their footsteps
● Heroes work alone
○ Act on instinct
○ Don't follow process
○ Don’t teach or learn from others
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5. Heroes go away
● Heroes make themselves irreplaceable and then leave anyway
● Shooting stars burn brightly and then burn out
● When a hero inevitably fails, the results are usually catastrophic
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6. The Age of Outcomes
What do we achieve by turning heroes into team leaders?
● Consensus driven decision making
● Cross-functional teams with maximized skill sets
○ Create a higher quality product at a greater velocity
● Higher degree of diversity and inclusion
● Better work and team sustainability
● Cultures that value psychological safety
● Improved stakeholder engagement
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7. Measure
Understanding through Data
● How do I start?
○ Design and implement basic people metrics like:
■ Team Turnover
■ Story Point Burndown per person
■ Excess Hours Worked
● Continually improve and monitor
○ Workplace satisfaction surveys
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8. Manage
Effect Positive Change Through Culture
● Enable sustainable work hours
● Pair with other leaders
● Manage to the metrics you implement
● Be forceful in removing the hero constraint
○ Pair heroes (NOW leaders!!) with junior team members
○ Rotate pairs on a consistent schedule
○ Frequent 1:1s
○ Celebrate awesome work
○ Foster full participation
● Lead by example in all of these practices
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9. Process
Make it easy to do the right thing
● Recognize when toil is heroic
○ Understand what tasks are toilsome, repetitive, frequent
○ Manage everything as a product
○ Automate that toil
● Enable a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practice in your organization
○ SLO's/SLI's provide guidance on quantifying emergencies
○ Error Budgets help us manage toil and emergencies
○ Incident Response provides a framework for managing emergencies
○ Postmortems help us reduce the need for heroic action
○ Iterate!
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10. Join us for questions after the presentation
or
connect with us on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/scimecajd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/scotthiland
#springone@s1p
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