112: Heidi Helfand

Agile.FM

Transcript:

Joe Krebs 0:00

Agile.FM radio for the Agile community www agile.fm.Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Agile FM today I'm here with Heidi Helfand. She is a director of product and technology excellence at Procore technologies. Heidi was on the original development team that invented GoTo Meeting and GoTo webinar. Heidi is based in Southern California. We're going to talk today about dynamic reteaming. Welcome to the podcast.

Heidi Helfand 0:46

Hi, Joe. Thanks for having me here.

Joe Krebs 0:48

It's awesome. Thank you for spending some time here with me and the listeners talking about dynamic reteaming. So you wrote the book, dynamic retaining. And this book is now published in the second edition. And so what I learned because I have only the second edition of the first edition, but what I learned about the change between the first and the second is you expanded on Team calibration, onboarding retrospectives. I'm always interested in talking about that. And it's also while I was reading through it a reference to COVID. So this is a relatively new edition.

Heidi Helfand 1:27

Yeah, I believe it was published maybe around July 2020. Finished around then. And yeah, it was like COVID was among us, as it unfortunately is now. And and yeah, it was. Yeah, it was, it was something that definitely has impacted teams. At as I was going through the manuscript, it was definitely worthy of mentioning.

Joe Krebs 1:57

Absolutely. So just like I mean, we're gonna go into more the definition of what reteaming is just in case somebody wonders, what is reteaming? And somebody might not ever heard that term before. Did reteaming increase as a fact of COVID? Or is that something that is irrelevant? Or is this more like from working from home kind of thing? I will assume the answer to that is yes, there's more reteaming going on, but I just want to hear from you. So does COVID have an impact on reteaming?

Heidi Helfand 2:27

COVID definitely has an impact on reteaming. And I think the main thing that stood out definitely in 2020, I think it might be getting a little bit better now is a lot of people were leaving teams, and there were a lot of layoffs. That was very striking, due to everything that happened and the economic challenges that companies were going through. Yeah, so definitely challenging, challenging time. And when people join teams, it's reteaming, when people leave teams, it's reteaming. And sometimes it's just one person. But other times it's a lot of people to feel happier when it's a growth situation. But we experienced, definitely, in the world, there was a lot of people leaving teams in 2020.

Joe Krebs 3:23

And so in your book you're you're describing, and I want to go back and bring all the listeners here into the road towards that book, The initial idea. So you're illustrating a couple of bumpy roads, with companies you had worked for way, way back. And some of those companies went through things that we now would define as something as reteaming, but I'm just curious when at what point was there like one moment that stood out was like, Okay, I see a pattern or is there I see, I noticed something in in my workplace or something I'm doing where you feel like, this is the moment I need to start writing about this topic. I'm just curious because your The road was bumpy, right? There was several things you went through with companies that hit the wall, purchased, acquired, if I'm not mistaken, and all these things. And then something really, really good came out of it.

Heidi Helfand 4:20

Yeah, so back, if I look back in my career, and it spans about a little over 20 years, I was at three different startups. That grew bigger, and then I had us consulting stent in the middle of that first company, I was the 15th. employee. I left at 800. We invented GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar. At the early stages of that company, we were building different products. We were trying to change the world with screen sharing or tech support delivered via screen sharing. We were creating this marketplace of experts. The startup was called expert city. And I was on the web developer went team. At the time I was an interaction designer we were, we were working on these amazing features for our clients. But the problem was there weren't many clients, there weren't people didn't want to buy our software. And we had to pivot to save the company. And as I look back at that circumstance, I was invited to be part of a small team that was put off the side to work on a new product, we wound up building one called go to my PC, and in my view would save the company was that people were invited from existing teams to be a part of a small team off to the side, we weren't given process freedom, everyone else was told to leave us alone. We didn't have to follow the waterfall processes that we all were very much into for building the first product. And we were able to do something different. We were able to innovate. And I later many years later, I look back on that experience. And I've noticed other teams forming to solve a purpose like that off to the side, I call it the isolation pattern of reteaming. So I think after a number of years, I looked back and I had perspective. But so that was like one thing that led me to reteaming, but then there was another thing. And this was more of something that started to bother me. So I was at that company for eight years. The second startup I joined, I was the 10th employee, and I was there I think until 600 employees, so for 600. At that company, we wanted to do things different. There were several people from the first team at the first startup, and we shared a co-founder from both. And it was almost an opportunity to do things differently. And we deliberately reteamed in order to spread knowledge, we had roots in pairing, switching pairs. And it was a very kind of changeable, deliberate, dynamic environment in which we, we learned we had feedback loops, we didn't want to get the situation where someone would leave and knowledge would leave with them. So we deliberately did things for knowledge sharing. And I saw I was at that company for nine years. And I was coaching, I built a group of coaching group as well. And at one point, we were all very addicted to learning and getting better at what makes a successful team and how do we coach teams, and all of the stuff that I would read always had the theme of well, what you really want to do is have these long lived stable teams, you really want to do is keep your teams the same for predictability. That was some of the lines that I would read. Right? After a while I looked back at my career, and this second startup had already gone public, we were very successful company, many, many customers at folios, the company and I look back and I was like, wait a minute, if I believe all this stuff that I'm reading it, it kind of insists that we were doing it wrong. We had built an award winning company culture we had fair, just, you know, it was kind of like we did the market. We we did the market validation for the products, we had a lot of customers in all of this traditional wisdom about teams just to me, it was like it's, it's off to the change. And then I became obsessed with trying to prove the point that to your teams are going to change, it's inevitable, you might as well lean into it and get good at that. And then I thought well, was it just us was this just some southern California thing? I became curious. So you know, part of it is my experience and my stories from from these years and software development. But then I started interviewing my worldwide colleagues. So I'd interview people for an hour at a time, transcribe the data, code the data for themes, and what emerged was patterns of Team change. And there are five and I write about them in the book. So I really it really became like a quest to prove a point.

But it's funny, right? Because in the Agile community we always talk about embracing change and and then you look at teams and like this, this this addiction sometimes in some companies we have worked for I have worked with where there's an addiction to of keeping teams stable. Right. And, and I always remind them just naturally this is not going to happen. There will be people leaving there will be people joining and products are changing. So why would the team's not be changing? Right? But it is refreshing to see that there is something out there where you did the research, right. And you found these patterns of of reteaming and I just want to just spell them out here, right? So it's one by one In a row and split, isolation, merging and switching, if somebody wanted to start with any kind of reading is that one of those five that would stand out for I guess, for the listener says, like, you know, like, give me one, what would be a good starting point? For me to start? Anything with reteaming? is one of those patterns more suitable than others?

Well, it's interesting, because it's kind of like what have I would almost flip that question a little bit to be? What have you experienced so far? so many of us working in companies have experienced the one by one pattern, people are going to join our teams, and people are going to leave our teams. So what can we do to better support both of those situations, there's a wonderful, almost history of activities that we can do to support onboarding of new team members. And I think many of us have been doing this for so many years, it's just kind of normal, we might not even think about that as a team change. But really think about it, one person joined one person leaves, that team system is different. So maybe you have someone joins from another team or someone joins from outside the company. And suddenly you have maybe a new perspective that you haven't heard of before. So anyway, I would I would almost think of like, what have you experienced in the past? So one by one is, is is like, probably one of the most common patterns that we might not have really thought about, but it's there, and how can you get better at it? When someone leaves the team, we can acknowledge their contribution. There's a wonderful activity from organizational relationship systems coaching from ORSC, which is about inner roles and outer roles. So someone's outer role is like their job description. I am a product manager. Okay, well, what does that mean? And what do you do? You hire for that role. But when the person inhabits that role, they bring their personality, their differences, their experiences. And so when they leave team, maybe there's something that you want to carry on that they did. Maybe they were the ones that always told a joke, during your daily stand up meeting, maybe they were the ones that when you were in person, they baked cookies and brought them in, like, so what do you want to carry on now that this person has left maybe for another team? Or? Well, if they go on to another job? There's tactics that you can do? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead.

Joe Krebs 12:31

Well, I'm just saying like, maybe some of the listeners think that cookies in a daily scrum, what am I missing? You know, like, No, but you're absolutely right. There's, there's a need to fill something in when somebody leaves where somebody was, maybe, let's say, famous for doing. And that was obviously lifting the team spirit. Who, how could we compensate or change or, or anything like that? So that's a great point. I didn't want to walk you though.

Heidi Helfand 12:59

Oh, please do I can tend to go on and on about this stuff.

Joe Krebs 13:03

So yeah, it's good. So one of the subtitle of the book is The Art and wisdom of changing teams. Yeah, that that subtitle tells me that just changing teams, because of changing teams is not a good idea, either.

Heidi Helfand 13:21

No, that's not. So I'm not saying bust up all your teams and switch them all around. I'm saying that changing teams or reteaming is something to have on the table as a lever while you're continuously improving. So let's say you have a retrospective, and you realize that it's hard for us to make decisions as our team. Our work is becoming unrelated. Why do our stand up meetings take twice as long or a planning meetings even worse, it seems that people don't really feel the need to listen to each other anymore because their work has diverged so much. When we have a retrospective and challenges like that come up, it's usually because the team has grown really big, and it leads to the grow and split pattern. So when I'm in so sometimes these teams will split because they've noticed and in the pursuit to become more effective. Team members will say, Well, maybe we would be more effective if we were actually two teams or three teams. That's kind of that's grow and split. So So what I'm saying is that I think a lot of the best teams that I've seen in the past concluded the ability to reteam when they're talking about how can we be more effective. And I think it's been such a taboo topic, because of all the dogma that says Keep your teams the same. You're going for long lived stable teams, where a shift in perspective might be useful.

Joe Krebs 14:59

Yeah, so I'm Thinking about, you know, while I'm talking to you this is, this is super interesting here. Just one thing that came to mind and that is naming a team. Some I don't know, I don't know how often I heard it's a great idea. And a lot of organizations do this. But in the context of dynamic reteaming putting a boundary like a name on a team, isn't it so much harder to escape out of that team? Like to actually do? Reteaming like someone part of team? I don't know, not very creative right now. A, you know, it's like, I identify myself with A and, and with that particular team, and sometimes are very funny names and so on. But it's a name right? I don't know how you feel about that. And naming a team. Is that counterproductive to reteaming?

Heidi Helfand 15:49

That's an interesting question. I definitely think teams form identities like we are this team. Maybe it ties to what they own, or what they build. Or maybe in an environment where there's a lot of collective code ownership, the names might not be so related to a feature that they're building, for example, right. So there's that. And what I've noticed is that sometimes when teams change dramatically, are they like, maybe there's only one person left in the team and all the other team members moved on to other teams. And then you have new people hired into that team, it's just different. The identity is has changed. So maybe the team renames itself, there's a story, I believe in my first version of the book about a team that they were, they were called the Foo Fighters. And it's F fu they at this company, they had like nerdy twists on bad names, see a diff, member fighters. They have they shared code. And so the names of the teams were just the collection of people. And they pulled from a backlog different features that they would work on, it was really cool. When the teams changed dramatically, sometimes the name didn't really fit, it's like that we are not that collective noun anymore, that proper noun we are different. And so they would have this identity shift at other times, if, if you have a team with an existing name, and then one person joins, it almost doesn't feel like enough to change the name of the team, right? Unless somebody takes away what you're doing. And you're suddenly working on something else.

Joe Krebs 17:31

I agree here. We're going down is really fascinating here, right? So if you if you think what's what's going on with all the Scrum teams that say out there and organizations, and they have a Team name and stable and so on here, we're really talking about somewhat the opposite of that might not be a good setup in the first place. If I'm a team member on one of those teams, and I would be let's say, I'm spotting that reteaming would be a good idea, let's say, right? It's not necessarily easy to speak up. I mean, it takes courage to, to possibly in in a meeting to say like, I think we should abandon this team, or we should be merging with another team, or we should split and reorganize ourselves. I mean, what do you have to say to individuals who feel like there is a better way of, of organizing themselves in an organization because somehow I'm, let's say, I'm in a team of six. And I feel like this team should not call it continue to exist as it is right now. It is not easy to bring up to say like, I think we should dissolve as a team. I don't know if you've ever had a situation like that.

Heidi Helfand 18:39

I think it's more like as we as teams go through time, we come up with challenges. So we were talking about when teams grow bigger. Oh, that example that I was giving before a team grows bigger. Maybe we keep hiring in people, because we think that might help us build more, let's say that's a common thing. You're gonna work in a higher end, because we're going to, we're going to build more software together as this big team. And the team will have a difficult time more difficult time making decisions, they will have longer meetings and their work will become unrelated. Those are very common challenges of big teams. So then it's kind of like, okay, we are facing this challenge. What are the possible options to address this challenge? Well, one option is, apply different modes of facilitation, have an experienced facilitator come in and it's, you know, stop having your meetings where it's one or two people talking and everybody else listening, maybe you need to facilitate that large group differently. So maybe one of the solutions is shift your facilitation, maybe apply some liberating structures or some patterns where you could have small group discussions you diverge And then you converge as the big group. And you apply facilitation as a solution to the challenge of the big team. That's possible. There are big, I'm not saying don't ever have a big team because some, some teams like to be larger, because that gives them more variety for collaboration, like pair programming, some teams work together to get a larger group. In fact, I happened to be I was just asked by one team last week one manager last week at my job, hey, can you come help our team, we're merging together with another team. And we want to start up again, that's like, something that I'm working on right now. I'm gonna reach out to them, see what's going on, and then suggest a few things. So So anyway, teams go through time they encounter challenges, what are the different options that you want to consider to solve them? One option for large team is facilitation. Another option is splitting the team up into two teams, there's probably a third option. So it's kind of like you encounter a challenge. You entertain different possible solutions, what are the pros and cons of each, and then you convince yourselves, you talk to each other, you talk to your leadership, and then you probably pursue something, right. And so it's kind of like that. I used to give talks on this topic, which were really based on like, here's a problem you might encounter. These are different reteaming patterns to consider as part of your solution. I think in the past, what happened was, reteaming was really never a valid option to consider because it was down so much by the dogma that says, Now you don't want to change your team, you have to keep that constant. And it's almost like it took away so many possibilities. And in some cases, it's it's kind of like, you might want to split.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there is evidence out there for sure that we have, you know, a better learning environment with reteaming, right and more knowledge sharing and you know, etc. I would like to take you big here and thinking now we were talking about the individuals, we talked about the team's re-org's. We all went through re-org's. So I think at one point in our lives, and we're participated or consulted on on reorg Sometimes organizations go through those on a yearly basis, sometimes even more often. So sometimes you speak with employees, and they basically they're just saying, like, not another reorg, you know, and they're getting, it's almost like this being tired of reorg. Does that mean does that mean, with reorg that these, these employees are not dynamic, if they're resisting reacts in the context of dynamic reteaming? Because everything is in turmoil. We're changing the organization up. We're reorganizing everything, and there might obviously be some resistance, right?

Most definitely. And, you know, reteaming can rip your heart out. Yeah, he is not this panacea for the world's the team's problems in the world. It it's like the book has several different stories organized into patterns. It's almost like an anthropology just explaining the landscape, teams are gonna change, they change, here's how to cope with it. Sometimes we're going to want the teams to change so much that we're going to try to catalyze it for ourselves, maybe we want to switch to a team, maybe we want to catalyze it within our team, like we're too big we want to split. And other times, we're gonna encounter situations, especially as companies grow and mature, we're gonna encounter, somebody else is going to switch us from this team to another team, it's just gonna happen. I've been at companies that have doubled, tripled, quadrupled and more bold. Somebody, you know, at some point, sometimes it's the new leader effect, you get a new executive that comes in, they see things differently in order for us to succeed as a company we have to organize in this way. Not in my career. Yeah. Sometimes it's it's more sometimes we don't even know who determines the reteaming. There's some it can be more abstracted. So there's a wonderful article that I read recently, that you know, it's about it's about change. Sometimes change is done to us. Sometimes you just done by us for I'll send you the link if you have the show notes. Yeah. It's Cormac Russell, is that his name? And I found it to be like a wonderful, kind of succinct thing to look at. And yeah, just kind of a very nice frame. I mean, the fact is, we're gonna encounter a lot of different things, we get to choose how we respond once we're in the reteaming.

Joe Krebs 25:05

Yeah. But it's, it's like sometimes the the reorg itself could be counterproductive, right to a retaining, let's say a team has just found its way of reorganizing themselves, you know, in a way that they're like, you know, more productive now as a team and more effective as a team to, to solve, let's say, a client problem, right? And then comes this reorg, especially in very large organizations on second wave through the organization like a tsunami of change. Right. And that might be counterproductive, right? It's almost like an adaptive organization or like an agile organization would have dynamic reteaming on an on a such an ongoing basis that re-org's would be just not, you know, not like part of the DNA anymore, right?

Yeah. So I think people reorg for different reasons. In 2020, we saw a lot of reorg, stew to COVID, we saw companies going through financial challenges and letting staff go, yeah, that resulted in most likely some consolidation of ownership, and, and some, probably some shifting of work to account for all of the people that were gone. I mean, this is, this happened at many, many companies, if you look at just google COVID. Yeah, layoff you'll find many, many company different different examples from different companies. So that's like, kind of, there's, that's like one thing, people come in maybe companies, I've never been a part of these in my career, because I've always been in companies that evolved. But if people do Agile transformations, they come into a company and they change the team. That's another kind of reorg that can happen, maybe a company reorganizes, because they have a new strategy. And in order to get to the future place that they need the company to be they shift from the company is organized, it could be that they were organized by component team, they change and now they're organized by product. I saw that a few companies ago, I think there's many different reasons for these large skill change events. And the ones that I think are the most successful are when people are included in some of the decision makers, right? That's, again, it's like changed on to us. And that article here, I'll put it in the Zoom chat is, is four modes of change to four with and by, and it's by Cormac Russell.

Awesome. And I'll put that on the show page for everybody. To see. That is awesome. Thanks for Thanks for digging this up. Yeah, this is this is really interesting stuff. You I mean, everybody who listens to this here right now and things about me my team structure or things about possibly, or reorganizing departments doesn't have to be the whole organization. Right? And putting these things into effect. You absolutely right. Me included, I just think always very positively about a that company's in growth and so forth. It could be obviously other factors, too, as we see right now with the pandemic and etc. We're going back into the financial crisis 2009. I mean, there's just other forces that challenge this. What are you working on these days? In terms of the topic? Are you are you still possibly working on version three at some point? Or are you picking up another topic? What are you? What do you what keeps you up at night?

Heidi Helfand 28:41

Yeah, it. Frankly, I'm not, I'm not quite sure I'm in that space, where I have a lot of different ideas. And I'm pursuing different things in parallel. And I'm not quite sure where to focus. I started writing some stories, like I was actually working this morning on on a story about my son is a cancer survivor. And I was writing he he's doing very well. And I was writing a story related to that. I have that kind of thread going. I have another thread going. We're in kind of writing about coaching engagements and how to have them internal in your company and how to structure them. Kind of thread that I have, right? Yeah. Yeah, just I think, you know, it's interesting after writing this book, and after doing a couple editions of two editions of this book, I had thought even last week, should I continue on this topic? And there's definitely more to say, there's more third edition. I don't know. Maybe. Yeah. Part Part of me is kind of like, well keep that going another part of, like, explore other things. And yeah, well acted in torn?

Joe Krebs 30:02

Absolutely. And you should celebrate the moment because this, the second edition just came out. But when you start writing and taking into this topic, you're all of a sudden realize, hey, there's more. And here's another one. And here's another handle on this. And so and sometimes things just evolve, but you have enough interesting topics on your end. Maybe we can talk about them in a later podcast at some point. Talk about coaching.

Yeah, I would love to say that I love championing people that are doing interesting things in the reteaming space like Chris Smith, from Red Gate software. So another kind of reorg is more of an open reorg, where the people have a say, in the decision making on the teams. And have you heard of Red Gate? Have you met Chris? No, I've not done. So he's there over in Cambridge, in the UK. And at Red Gate, they have open reteaming events where they facilitate workshops where people choose the teams that they want to work on. And they've done this in person. And they've done this just virtually a month or two ago, and Chris blogs about it. I believe on medium. And so they're doing some really interesting things there, where it's at the opposite end of the spectrum from what we were talking about, right? So it's kind of like that change with someone else, like that article. So they have these. This is in the spirit of the book, creating great teams by Sandy Mamoli and David Mole, where they talk about having self selection events where people choose or have a say in the teams that they join in. So I love hearing these stories about what they're doing at Redgate. Because it's the it's a great example of how do we include people in the decisions about what really is a reorg? Just a special type of reorg. Right?

And people could get in touch with you about this? Because it seems like you're very interested in finding out what is going on in the in the field of reteaming, right?

Heidi Helfand 32:04

Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. When people have interesting stories to share about this, I'm definitely interested to hear about it or when people are coming upon challenges as well. It seemed to me,

Joe Krebs 32:17

awesome. And maybe there's another pattern in the making. Who knows? Right? Through all the stories, maybe there is something so heidihelfand.com is the address. We're also going to put it on the on the Show page, I want to say thank you for spending some time here with me talking about this topic. And just the last reference you made to Sandy, she was also on the show. So that's a few, I think was a few years, maybe one or two years ago, I had her on Agile FM. So I crosslink that episode, if somebody is interested in learning about that, too. So thank you. And maybe we can talk about another topic or a deeper conversation about this topic here on Agile FM sometime in the near future.

Heidi Helfand 33:00

Sounds great, Joe, thanks for having me.

Joe Krebs 33:02

Thank you. Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host Joe Krebs. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www agile.fm. Talk to you soon.