As a DevOpsDays sponsor you’re often given the chance to give a one minute pitch to the entire audience. Back stage at DevOps Rex, this week, I was talking with a first timer. One minute seems like such a small amount of time: how could you say anything consequential in 60 seconds? You’re presenting in front of the full audience, anywhere between 150 to 500 people. They probably also loath vendors, or, at least are bored by them. The stage in Paris is intimidating. It’s a huge room in an old cinema, imagine the most stereotypical movie theater from whatever “the golden age” is: double decked seats, a huge screen. Plus, the organizers are meticulous: there’s a rehearsal for these 1 minute pitches in the morning. Like a full one where you’re given a minute to talk. Normally, these pitches are very informal. Overall, it can be a public speaking challenge…plus you have to get up an hour earlier than normal.
People get rattled by these 1 minute talks and they can also give boring pitches. Here’s what how I think about them and what I do:
The people like socks.
Despite how disorganized and spontaneous I may appear (that’s part of my well planned out and cultivated schtick, a safety valve for when I haven’t prepared, plus it’s a fantastically caustic feedback loop for my self-loathing — yay!) I usually prepare content before each talk.
I write a bunch of points down and reduce it to three points that I want to make. As I wait to get on the stage, I go over these three points my head; I usually write them down and look at them. Ask the local sales people what the make up of the audience is (are the developers, ops people, management, or just a general audience?), and any local events they want to drive people to.
Now, I often forget most, if not all, of that content, but that’s fine, really. Some of it will show-up. And definitely don’t let your three points constrict you, just use them as a fallback and a suggestion.
Being at a DevOps event, you should probably talk about how your company relates to DevOps. I tell people that Pivotal Cloud Foundry removes all the toil of lower-level automation that DevOps is looking to eliminate, the A in CAMS. It makes DevOps real, solves you DevOps problems, et. al., so you can get to the whole reason (the “outcome,” in business speak) for doing DevOps: creating better software and running it reliability in production.
The main thing you want to avoid is being stuffy. If you’re wearing a sports jacket (without being ironic), I’ve found that you’re more likely to give a stuffy talk — someone like Damon Edwards can sports-jacket all day, but he’s the exception that proves the rule.
If you’re just naturally wooden in public speaking situations, try to say something about your involvement in the pitch: how does it make you feel and how do you relate to it? Talking about yourself is easy as you’re the expert on the topic and have hopefully been there the whole time.
A little bit of humor goes a long way in these tiny talks. For example, Pivotal’s main product is well known for being more expensive than free, but it works and changes the fortunes of organizations that use it. That’s a good thing to joke about (“good thing it actually works ’cause it ain’t cheap”), or weird branding names (“for some reason, we call these ‘platform engineers’ rather than ‘SREs’”). I sometimes make a joke about PaaS, the cloud category Pivotal Cloud Foundry is in: “remember PaaS from five or so years back? It was terrible! Well, we’re a PaaS, but we doesn’t suck so much this time, it actually works!”
The stakes of this pitch are extremely low. Look at it as more of a learning experience for yourself, practice for next time. If you biff, nothing bad will happen unless you work for shitty management that punishes you for 60 seconds of time (start looking for a new job — Pivotal is hiring!).
Some people like to memorize pitches, which is fine if that helps you. Most of all, the way to succeed at these pitches it to have fun, be playful.
You’ll be fine. Good luck!
There are two types of digital transformation. First, literally. You had an analog process (booking appointments at the barber shop with phone and paper, planning tanker refueling schedules with a white board), and now they’re replaced by pure software. These transformations are often about optimizing an existing business process, gaining huge cost and time efficiencies (bottom line revenue, profit) and resulting in higher customer productivity and satisfaction (top line revenue, “growth”). You might call this sustaining in the innovator’s dilemma canon.
Then there’s creating new business and innovating existing ones. Here, you use custom written software to create a new line of business (in-Home hair cuts) or make an existing one better (ordering pizza from an Apple Watch, using drones to do auto accident claims, entering a new market, wealth Management for lower income people, on-demand [uber like] Long-hail trucker scheduling).
The line between the two can be blurry (is using drones for claims inspections really just changing an analog process to digital? A better one might be doing spot/temples insurance [i want to buy a three hour policy for broken limbs and such minutes before I climb into a zip line, grocery curb-side or home delivery]). But don’t get too worked up about it: the work you end up doing ends up being the same.
The point of the distinction is more to make sure you don’t forget about one or the other. Sometimes you need a dramatically new line of business enabled by software, and sometimes you just need to transform a whiteboard into an app.
Coffee is for coders.
Whether you’re doing waterfall, DevOps, PRINCE, SAFe, PMBOK, ITIL, or whatever process and certification-scheme you like, chances are you’re not using your time wisely. I’d estimate that most of the immediate, short-term benefit organizations get from switching to cloud native is simply because they’re now actually, truly following a process which both focuses your efforts on creating customer value (useful software that helps customers out, making them keep paying or pay you more) and managing your time wisely. This is like the first 10–20 pounds you lose on any diet: that just happens because you’re actually doing something where before you were doing nothing.
When it comes to time management, eliminating meetings is the easiest, biggest productivity booster you can do. Start with developers. They should be doing actual work (probably “coding”) 5–6 hours a day and go to only a handful of meetings a week. If the daily stand-up isn’t getting them all the information they need for the day, look to improve the information flow or limit it to just what’s needed.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, pairing up developers (and other staff, it turns out) will increase productivity as well. When they pair, developers are better synced up on most knowledge they need, learning how all parts of the system work with a built in tutor in their pair. Keeping up to speed like this means the developers have still less meetings to go to, those ones where they learn about the new pagination framework that Kris made. Pairing helps with more than just knowledge maintenance. While it feels like there’s a “halving” of developers by pairing them up, as one of the original pair programming studies put it: “the defect removal savings should more than offset the development cost increase.” Pairs in studies over the past 20+ years have consistently written higher quality code and written it faster than solo coders.
Coupled with the product mindset to software that involves the whole team in the process from start to end, they’ll be up to speed on the use cases and customers. And, by putting small batches in place, the amount of up-front study needed (requiring meetings) will be reduced to bite-sized chunks.
We’re going to need a lot more coffee to get through this requirements meeting.
The requirements process is a notorious source of wasteful meetings. This is especially true when companies are still doing big, up-front analysis to front-end agile development teams.
For example, at a large health insurance company, the product owner at first worked with business analysts, QA managers, and operations managers to get developers synced up and working. The product owner quickly realized that most of the content in the conversations was not actually needed, or was overkill. With some corporate slickness, the product owner removed the developers from this meeting-loop, and essentially /dev/null’ed the input that wasn’t needed.
Staff can try to reduce the amount of meetings they go to (and start practices like pairing), but, to be effective, managers have the responsibility to make it happen. At Allstate, managers would put “meetings” on developers calendars that said “Don’t go to meetings.” When you read results like Allstate going from 20% productivity to 90% productivity, you can see how effective eliminating meetings, along with all their other improvements, can be on an organization.
If you feel like developers must go to a meeting, first ask how you can eliminate that need. Second, track it like any other feature in the release, accounting for the time and cost of it. Make the costs of the miserable visible.
This concept of attending less meetings isn’t just for developers,The same productivity outcomes can be achieved to QA, the product owners, operations, and everyone else. Once you’ve done this, you’ll likely find having a balanced team easier and possible. Of course, once you have everyone on a balanced team, following this principle is easier.Reducing the time your staff spends in meetings and, instead, increasing the time they spend coding, designing, and doing actual product management (like talking with end users!) get you the obvious benefits of increasing productivity by 4x-5x.
If you feel you cannot do this, at least track the time you’re losing/using on meetings. A good rule of thumb is that context switching (going from one task to another) takes about 30 minutes. So, an hour long meeting will actually take out 2 hours of an employee’s time. To get ahold of how you’re choosing to spend your time, in reality, track these as tasks somehow, perhaps even adding in stories for “the big, important meeting.” And then, when you’re project tracking make sure you actually want to spend your organization’s time this way. If you do: great, you’re getting what you want! More than likely, spending time doing anything by creating and shipping customer value isn’t something you want to keep doing.
It may seem ridiculous to suggest that paying attention to time spent in meetings is even something that needs to be uttered. In my experience, management may feel like meetings are good, helpful, and not too onerous. After all, meetings are a major tool for managers to come to learn how their businesses are performing, discuss growth and optimization options, and reach decisions. Meetings are the whiteboards and IDEs of managers. Management needs to look beyond the utility meetings give them, and realize that for most everyone else, meetings are a waste of time.
For more on improving software in your organization check out my 49 pages in a fancy PDF on the topic.