Jen Swanson - How to implement digitization with low investment and high return

And Jen, welcome to the podcast. It's great having you here with us today. Anything to add before we dive in? 

Jen Swanson: Nope. You pretty much said it. I, you know, it's a high bar to hit the high returns, low investment, but here we are. Let's dig in and do it. 

Tim Butara: Okay. And straight off the bat, like this is, I think the most important question to start off with. Why is the conversation that we're about to have? Particularly relevant right now. So in, let's say mid 2024. 

Jen Swanson: Well, I mean, let's just look at the headlines yesterday, right? The, at least in the US the headlines were all about inflation's not coming down quickly, as quickly as everybody says, which tends to get, as we like to say, everyone's knickers in a twist over here in the US at least.

And although, you know, a lot of that is about consumer spending, but we all know that consumer spending quickly. Translates to businesses freaking out and deciding that they're going to hold on to their purse strings just a little bit tighter. And in my experience, you know, I've been, I've been doing this work.

I've been consulting in this space for almost five years now. And I started in 2019. I started doing this work in 2019 and looking back, like, I'm not really sure how I managed to. Do this, start this just on the eve of the pandemic, right? And ride through the pandemic, but coming out of it, people said, how did you do it?

How did you like, how did you manage to hold on when everybody was like shutting down and not spending any money? And what I found during that time in doing this consulting, now the projects were smaller. I will fully admit that. And the projects now, sometimes they're bigger, but sometimes they're smaller.

I mean, it's all relative, right? But what I found was that in times of stress. Companies may stop buying big new shiny objects outside, you know, how during the pandemic we all decided we were going to clean out our own closets, right? We were, we were all stuck at home and we were all going to like to tackle that closet we'd been shoving stuff into for the last three years and said, well, we'll tackle it later.

Well, it's later, right? And so I think that that is metaphorically true of businesses. When times of stress hit, you turn around and look and say, well, if we're not going to, I mean, maybe it's an optimist way of looking at the idea of tightening your belts, right? But there is a sense of if we're not going to invest in maybe some big new market expansion this year, or we're going to wait just a little bit longer before we chase that new big shiny object, most companies aren't just going to sit still and do nothing.

They're going to still, there's still forward momentum because. Doing nothing isn't an option. Stasis is death, right? In business. And so something oftentimes looks at looking inward and saying, how can we do better, be better, be more nimble, be more effective, be faster with delivery of value with what we have right now, who we have right now, what we're doing right now.

And I think personally, I'm biased. This is the work I do is making an investment in. Agile transformation, operating model transformations. Looking at how work is done inside a company, how we organize resources is an incredibly effective way to dedicate resources. And I'm not always gonna say spend money.

There is oftentimes some investment of dollars or a shifting of dollars, but it's an incredibly effective spend to get more. Juice from the squeeze, as they say, to be able to say, we're going to on the other side of this, we're going to be able to be faster, more nimble, small, agile, right? Because of it, and perhaps better able to capture market share or capture value when things look better out there. So that's my opinion. 

Tim Butara: And I'm also guessing that this was probably this transition was easier to make for, for really established players in the digital landscape and digital native companies. And I'm wondering how, how the others, so non digital native companies or some huge legacy firms how are they able to catch up with, with this digital transformation that's propelled by kind of the really established players that, that had an easier time transitioning. 

Jen Swanson: Listen, you're speaking my language because I actually, my bread and butter are the non digital players, not that I don't love our digital brothers and sisters, but they were built with a, they're built with speed in mind, right? Like the, the companies that have come into being in the last 15 or 20 years were built with a different chassis, right?

Like if you think of them as cars, right, they were built with aluminum frames, right? They were built with speed and and with speed and agility in mind. The companies that are legacies, I think, in these days, in this day and age, when you hit these speed bumps, the legacy companies, the companies that have been around for 150 years, they are facing more existential threats when these kinds of big crises hit one after another.

I mean, you could probably say that the financial crisis, if we are in one, I, I would beg to say we're not in as big of one as everyone likes to think we are, but this is probably the same financial crisis we were in in 2020. It's just the lingering effects of the pandemic, right? We're still, we're at the end.

We're in the tight, we're in the tough end, right? The end is always the hardest, right? And so. But when we have to ride these things out, the big players, the big legacy players that don't move as fast, they're built on the big steel inflexible frames. They are the hardest ones to move, but they are also the ones that are most likely to be parked and sort of turned over for the new lighter frames, right?

And I think those are the companies that I most like working with because I think there's a, there's a sort of a, a more of a burning platform to make the change. And I think there's a more urgent desire to move towards new ways of working. For a couple of reasons. One is there's generational shifts happening inside these organizations.

And this always happens with me, by the way, we start talking about technology and we ended up talking about people because companies are people, right? They're made up of people, even companies that are strongly tech driven are made up of people. And those legacy companies are made up of, you know, there's generational shifts.

So even though those companies might be 150 years old. They're hiring younger workers, they're, you know, their, their executive teams are retiring and new executive teams, younger executive teams are taking the helm and they're saying, you know, we have, we could learn some things from where those digitally born companies have maybe stumbled and fell over the last 20 years and what they've learned, we now get to benefit from and just jump right straight to what's working and maybe we can do the same. Right. 

And we can start to apply some of those learnings inside of our company. And I think that is, that is beneficial. And there's, so there's a couple of things. One is, and I know this, you know, the subject of your, your podcast is agile. I think the, the, some of the mistakes that some of the legacy companies make is going straight to agile. 

You know, applying saying, hey, agile is the way, you know, everybody's going to agile. Let's go to agile, but they apply agile sort of like pixie dust. They walk around and are like, you're an agile team. And you're an agile team. And you're an agile team. Instead of thinking about agile paired with a construct like product management, where they're thinking about really clear ownership constructs and saying, okay, business and technology together, owning capabilities, owning experiences and creating empowered teams to say, okay, together, you own this capability. 

You have the, the data, the infrastructure, the, the skill sets to really now make decisions, get the insights, make decisions, go forward and deliver value. And we're going to. And we're going to remove the barriers and we're going to let you run, right?

The ability to do that in a large organization is incredibly difficult. And so I think that when you're asking about how non, non non native digital native and legacy firms are doing that, like, you got to, you got to address some of the elephants in the room, as they say, you got to talk about culture.

You got to think about leadership culture. You got to start thinking about how you're, you can't just like slap agile and product on an existing infrastructure. You got to start looking from the top to say, well, how are we thinking about strategy? Are we still talking in terms of outputs? Or are we talking about outcomes?

Are we putting it over in a box over there and business over here? And we're saying, good luck guys, figure it out. Right. Or are we bringing those, those two really important strategic functions together and creating, you know, sort of small teams tasked with those outcomes to be able to say, okay, you know what we're trying to create.

You're closest to the customer. How might we deliver on these outcomes? How might we do some of these things? And I think those shifts are cultural. They're about leadership competencies and they're, they come with a realization that what got those legacy companies to be legacy companies, right. That 150 year legacy is not actually what's going to get them to be the next 150 year legacy.

And I think like that takes humility. It takes vulnerability. It takes a whole bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with technology. And that's usually what gets me sort of people start to freak out. I, I like to say, I like to go into rooms and use the F word a lot, which is feelings. People, people don't like to talk about feelings.

Technology people don't like to talk about feelings, but like there's a lot of like emotions in there, especially with leaders who have been, you know, come up through the ranks in very commanding control style. They're used to project management, they're used to time scope and budget. And they want to know, well, when am I going to have this?

And how am I, you know, how's this going to work? And how much money am I going to spend? And we start talking about roadmaps and value chains. And we start talking about these things and people's minds go. You know, and that's a very different change. So I think part of it is there's some of these like science parts, right?

Agile product management, adopting some of those practices is some of the how, but there's a ton of cultural changes and leadership behaviors that also have to change around with it. And I think that some legacy teams, that's the pixie dust or legacy companies will just think you can sprinkle agile and product and that's enough.

And if they don't also tackle some of these other cultural and sort of contextual things, they don't, it's a failure, right? Like they can't ever kind of get over the hump because they haven't addressed some of the underlying issues. 

Tim Butara: Yeah, basically the change has to be holistic and there has to be a substantial mindset shift on the force of leadership that then needs to drive the entire Agile transformation if they want it to be successful.

Jen Swanson: Right. And like, this is one of the things, and you let me know if you've ever heard this before, but like I talk to leaders and I will try to get the leaders to say, you know, this is something you need to address. And what, what I'll hear them say is, let's just work on the teams for now. And I'm like, okay, but they're only gonna get so far because they're gonna keep bumping into you and you are gonna be the blocker, you know, so.

Tim Butara: Okay. So, so now if we move on to like, to like the meat of the conversation and probably like, like to, to give listeners what they came here for. So what would be some key tactics for achieving great ROI from these digital transformation and agile transformation efforts without maybe a too big of an investment?

Jen Swanson: Sure. Well, I think that part of it is. So, I mean, this is where I always say it depends because it depends on if you're talking about a company where agile is already maybe got a foothold agile and perhaps product management has a foothold in the organization, right? And maybe that's only one or two teams.

I think having an honest assessment about how it's working, right? Looking at it and saying, and you know, if you're, if you're doing like a scaled agile or you've got scrum masters, whatever. Yeah. You know, having somebody who has some sort of like disprofessional distance, right, where they can evaluate and say, okay, according to sort of some of these standard principles and practices, how are we doing?

Are we living into the principles of Agile? Are we living into the principles of product management? And where could we do better? Right? And so almost like ring fencing, a couple of teams where if there is a foothold, look, standing back and looking at it and saying, how are we doing? What are our barriers to success?

Where, where are we falling down? And where are we doing great? Right? And stepping back and looking at that and then thinking about what would it take? Honest assessment again, and you'll hear me say this again, honest assessment, honest orientation, because then if you can't really honest, be honest with yourselves about where you are, if you're kind of whitewashing it or you're shoving some of the like dirty little secrets under the rug, it's never, it's not never going to work.

Right. But really being honest about where you are and, and then figuring out in that kind of ring fenced area to say, let's get really good at this. in these little, maybe three or four teams. And then let's figure out what would prevent, what's preventing us from, you know, again, you're not inviting anybody in from the outside, but you're just saying, what's preventing us from doing this at a bigger scale, right?

Are there other teams that would be ripe for working in this way? And could we start to bring them into this way of working? Right. And maybe it's the teams that are adjacent to those, you know, a couple of teams. Right. Because we know that sometimes when you've got, say, this happens a lot in like a digital team where maybe you've got one team that's kind of like way out ahead, they're, they're really doing great on a customer facing app.

And yet all of the teams around them, maybe the infrastructure team or the API team or whatever, they're still working on maybe in a Kanban way or more project based way. And they're kind of like bumping heads and could you bring those teams over and say, we're going to like, we're going to spread the good word, right.

And kind of have a peer, peer training kind of a way, right. Peer to peer, peer coaching kind of way. And could you bring some people together? That's like. No cost. Now, that's no cost as in no line item budget has to go outside the company. There might be a cost on that on velocity. There might be a cost on, you know, you might have to push back some delivery dates and things like that to give space to teams to kind of experiment and get good at ways of working.

But that is a way to do it with literally no external budget spent, right? Now, the next way is if you have, you know, if there's nobody doing this in the organization, but you're, you've curious people, maybe you've got some folks that have done this elsewhere and want to bring it into the organization to start to maybe form like what I would think of as like almost a study group or a pre center of excellence.

Right. And. There's tons of really great education organizations out there. So again, whether or not you want to start with some, you know, perhaps in the engineering organization or in, you know, on kind of more of the business ownership side with the, with product organizations to be able to spend a couple thousand dollars of very low, low investment, to be able to take some basic training and bring that back in and have a commitment from, you know, some, the leadership of those teams to say, we're going to experiment.

We're going to experiment with some new ways of working. And again, give some grace to, we might not release or produce as much as we typically do for the next six to eight weeks, because we're going to experiment with some ways, we might go slower to go faster. And I think some of those kinds of ways where you might say, we're going to do this whole team's going to take some fundamentals of product or some fundamentals of Agiler.

We're going to take five people and send them to a CSPO, you know, certified scrum product owner training or something like that. Right. To do a baseline training. So we're all speaking the same language and we're going to come back in and agree as a group on how we're going to apply it and to create a bubble.

We always talk about like wrapping teams in bubble wrap to give them a little bit of like structure on the outside to then experiment inside, but what that has to, again, we're going to go back. You're going to hear me keep saying that. What does that require? It requires leadership buy in and all of those team members that go around it because five, you know, five POs are not going to make product team.

Right. You know, five scrum masters are not going to make a scrum team, right? Like you're not going to be able to do this with just a couple of people to training and then hope and pray that it's going to work. You have to have, you have to dedicate the resources you have to do that. And what that might mean is delivery deadlines or project deadlines might go slower until you can get these teams sort of experimenting with these things.

And I do think one of the things that's really useful is. Surveying or interviewing folks again in these legacy companies, chances are you've hired people in the last five years that have come from other companies that have done this form. 

Some study groups find out how they did Agile and Product, or Scrum or Kanban or something at other organizations and create, again, a center of excellence or a prete pre, you know, a pre COP community of practice to start to say, how might we do it here because it is not enough to say, well, just bring what you did at company X in here, because that won't work, but to say, what might work? What elements might we bring in here? 

And how might we build a community of practice here? What might agile look like here? What might product look like here and start to create those definitions and do it from a grassroots perspective and all your spending, whether it's right? Is their capacity and time. And it is a different expense. It's not an outgoing expense, but it is an expense, right? On some level. 

Tim Butara: Those were some great tips, and they really highlight and showcase what we already pointed out previously that for an effective and successful transformation, it's the people aspect that's most important, right?

And in a similar vein, the last thing that I really want to discuss with you today, Jen, is so, you know, we covered how to successfully implement digital transformation, but how can businesses also sustain this success with their digitization efforts? 

Jen Swanson: Well, I think one of the things to the first things when we talk about sustaining efforts is that the first thing is remember that transformation is never done, right?

It is an ongoing commitment over time because at the heart of all of transformation is that consumer expectations are always changing. I think we just have to like, No, I'm not going to stop changing what I expect from companies, right? Because technology is changing. So as long as technology keeps changing and evolving and getting better and better, I'm going to keep expecting more from the brands I interact with, whether that's as a business owner, you know, as a company or as an individual.

So as long as I keep expecting more companies are going to have to keep evolving and as long as they have to keep evolving, digital transformation will always be a thing. So any executive team or CIO or VP out there who says when are we going to be done with this needs to be taken into a room and explained.

Never. We're never going to be done. Right. So that's the first thing. So sustaining is absolutely the right word. And I think part of it is a commitment to, I think there's a commitment to curiosity and a growth mindset of how can we, and again you'll hear me say the same things over and over again, how can we, as Product team or an agile team, how can we, as a, you know, the people, you know, kind of in the middle management, the director, you know, directors and DPs in an organization, how can we as an executive team keep showing up to do better work together in service to the client, right?

And so you kind of let this idea of being in service to each other and in service to the client or the customer, and that curiosity of, can we work better? Can we work faster? Can we, can we put. Better products out in the world, better experiences out in the world, all of that kind of thing. I think as long as you keep showing up with that mindset, what you do is then you open yourself up to the world of, well, whether that's new ways to do product discovery or there's new, there's new technologies or solutions that you might bring into it.

You know, a technical solution or new platforms that you might consider to develop or new engineering solutions or whatever it is, wherever, you know, new UX designs, whatever role you might play on an agile team or a product team, you have that curiosity. Of it. And again, so then it really what it is, I think it's a mindset, but it can't be one person's mindset.

It has to be like an enterprise mindset of curiosity of how can we do better? How can we work better together? And, you know, how can we do better for the client or a customer? And I think those that like, if you just show up every day with that, those three questions in your mind, I think that is like the key kind of driver behind that transformation heartbeat, you know?

Tim Butara: Could we call this like growth culture or growth-oriented culture? 

Jen Swanson: Yeah, totally. Totally. And like, I think that growth word freaks everybody out, right? Because it feels like pressure. Oh, we have to make more money. And I think if we can like de stigmatize that growth word to say like, growth is, growth can be many dimensions.

Yes, revenue. Yes, of course, revenue, but growth can also be growth of like, what are we doing together as a team? What are we doing as a company? How are we, you know, growth in a market growth in a, you know, lots of different dimensions of growth. I think that it's a growth mindset, right? 

Tim Butara: Yeah. And, and definitely a growth mindset and digital transformation, transformation in general, it doesn't need to be digital, they just go hand in hand because they're both based on the concept of never being done. Right. If you have a growth mindset, that doesn't mean that you'll suddenly improve, reach a point where you don't need to improve anymore. There will always be something left to improve. And it's just, it's just, you know, I guess it's the right mindset to have for the current times.

Jen Swanson: Yes, 100%. 

Tim Butara: Well, Jen, this was actually the perfect note to finish our conversation on. I really enjoyed it. I think our listeners will have, will have gotten a ton of great value from our conversation. If some of them would like to reach out, connect with you or learn more about you, where can they do that?

Jen Swanson: The best place to find me is on LinkedIn. I my handle is JG Swanson, and I'm assuming we can put that in the show notes. Yes. 

Tim Butara: Yes, of course. 

Jen Swanson: Okay, great. 

Tim Butara: Thanks again for joining us. It was great having you. 

Jen Swanson: Excellent. I had a great conversation. It was, it was a pleasure being here. 

Tim Butara: And to our listeners, that's all for this episode. Have a great day, everyone, and stay safe. 

Outro:
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