Modern Ways of Working at Scale: Growing Lean‑Agile Champions from the Inside Out

Duygu Stubrys at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/KZEfI9oTdQk

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

"We are Agile" and the gap in daily behavior

[00:00:08] Hello. Wow, there is a big light here. Thank you so much for staying, and thank you so much for having me today. Before I introduce my topic, I have a question for you. Are you ready? Okay.

[00:00:28] Raise your hand if your organization says, "We are Agile." It's everywhere, right? In your job description, your presentation decks, your strategy decks. Okay, please keep raising, because I have another question. Can you please keep raising your hands? Okay, it's a good amount.

[00:01:01] Keep your hands up only if your team's daily behavior is truly Agile. Ooh. What happened to all the hands? Some of you are still raising, so lucky you. I'm looking for my Nestlé colleagues here. Yes, good, it's up. That's good.

[00:01:27] At Nestlé, obviously, we are a huge global enterprise, and we have that gap. I think in many organizations you definitely feel it as well. There was a moment when we stopped asking, "How do we explain Lean Agile ways of working better?" and started asking, "How do we change or improve how teams actually work day-to-day?" Because we know that more slides, more presentations or trainings are not going to close the gaps that easily. We needed people, not AI. We needed people. And that's where the champions come in.

[00:02:16] My name is Duygu, but people call me D, so feel free to call me D, too. I coach teams and individuals across Nestlé globally on how they deliver better outcomes. Throughout the years, working with different markets, different business units, and also teams that have different maturity levels, I get to see what actually works and what doesn't. Today I will share one model that helped us modernize our ways of working at scale, not through frameworks or presentations, but by growing people we call Lean Agile Champions.

[00:03:12] This session is not a talk like the ones you were hearing all day today. It's a format called a forum, which means it's not only me talking. I will also be asking a couple of questions to you throughout the session, so please engage and share your thoughts and experience with me, okay? Are you ready? Give me more of a shout, please. Are you ready? Yeah! This is what I need. Okay, great.

[00:03:51] Let me give you a little bit of context first. You've probably heard this story many times, so let me remind you again. I work in a very big global enterprise. We currently have, I think, 271,000 people working at Nestlé. Obviously we have different cultures, different markets, different processes and different maturity levels. So I will digest this information a bit.

[00:04:29] We noticed something that I think many of you will also recognize, and not only because it happens in big organizations; it happens in any organization. The teams used the same vocabulary, the same words. If you were here during the morning opening, Mihai was also mentioning how we interpret the same words differently in the work environment. We had exactly the same problem. The teams were talking about Agile, product teams, product management, or being lean, but day-to-day, the behaviors of the teams were completely different.

[00:05:20] I'll give you an example. Some teams had their daily sync; maybe they met daily, maybe two or three times a week. And they were focusing on, "Okay, what is blocked? Who needs help? And what did we finish today?" For others, it was literally a status report, just to prove who is busy and how busy you are. Some of the product backlogs were very crisp: a few clear outcomes, and easy to prioritize. But some of them were literally a list of tasks, half written and half outdated, and no one could explain what success looks like.

[00:06:16] Is this familiar for you in your organizations? Do you have similar situations? Which is normal, yeah? That happens. As a result, obviously, the delivery felt slow and painful for these teams, and a lot of rework needed to happen. In a nutshell, and following my theme images, which were not generated by AI: same recipes, different kitchens, and the food tasted very differently. Okay?

Selecting the champions

[00:07:01] We asked ourselves, where do we even start? Again, it was not another training that we needed to build. We started asking who actually influences how the teams are working. So we launched the Lean Agile Champions program. This was an experiment, by the way; it was not a big planned program. We were quite surprised, because so many people applied and so many people wanted to volunteer for it. But the selection had to be done very carefully. First of all, it's an experiment, so obviously if we fail, that's okay, but we really wanted this to work.

[00:08:01] What we were really focusing on while we were interviewing the volunteers was this. We selected people that teams already listen to, not because of their title or seniority, but because of the trust that they had built within their team. We also selected people who are curious, who actually ask the why: why should we do it this way? They have some curiosity and open-mindedness. And we selected people who were willing to experiment and to try something different in front of others, which really takes courage, by the way.

[00:08:59] One thing that we learned the hard way: if their leader doesn't give them time and support, it doesn't matter how good they are. So the leader's support became part of the selection, not a nice-to-have. Probably that resonates with many of you as well.

[00:09:27] I have a question for the audience. Think of someone who really changes how a team works. What's one word to describe them? Please enter it; this is a word cloud. We have "awesome," "energetic," "Jupiter." Okay, great. Maybe you are the one who was in the workshop with me, because our team name was Jupiter. Great. "Inspiring," "energetic," "visionary," "inspirational," "good communication," "empathy," "charismatic." Mm, I like that. "Kind," "shows up," "amazing."

[00:10:25] That's great, because if you notice, all those things you have just written are not roles or titles. You didn't write, "Oh, someone is certified," or "senior." These are all behaviors. That's why this model can really work in any company. We just need to select the people with the right mindset and the right behavior. Thank you. We can move on.

Less explaining, more experience

[00:11:01] Okay, so we selected all these great people. But we had a new problem. In our company, many people actually understood Lean Agile concepts, whether they were bringing their experiences from their previous companies or they took some trainings, even got certified. More or less, they knew it. However, in real life, when the pressure hit, they went back to their old habits.

[00:11:43] Also, our earlier trainings were very abstract, because when you talk about Agile ways of working or the Agile mindset, it can be really, really abstract if you are not practicing it. And we didn't really have real trade-offs that could stick with people. So we changed our approach from less explaining to more experience. Let me show you what this looked like.

[00:12:23] On the screen you see some of the games that the champions played. Have any of you heard about them, or played them? Yeah? Great. Two? Three? Amazing. Do you have any favorites? No? Okay. The champions played them, and after that they taught their teams. For the ones you may not be familiar with: the Ball Flow game [?] shows how the minimum viable product and prioritization work. Then we have the Tweak game [?], which is all about improving flow and the importance of work-in-progress limits: it's not about starting more work, but focusing on getting the work done. And the Ball Flow game [?] is, again, about the importance of early and continuous feedback from customers.

[00:13:26] Nest Down [?] you probably don't know, because I actually designed this one when I joined Nestlé. It is a fast-paced simulation to practice real cross-functional and outcome-focused teamwork. It really works, and still works. It's in Mural, so it's easy to duplicate and make it happen, and it still works.

[00:14:00] This is one of the quotes from the champions, saying that "the hands-on experiences helped me apply the concepts to real-world scenarios, allowing me to improve and support my team more effectively." After hearing this great feedback from them, we realized that, more or less, we were on the right path, and then we continued.

[00:14:30] Before I move on, this is a bit of a self-reflection for you, so I will give you a couple of minutes to think. What's one habit your team keeps repeating even after you explain why it needs to change or improve? I'll give you a couple of seconds to think. Got one? Yeah? Okay, good, because hold on to it. Whatever you just thought of, that's the habit or behavior that needs to change, and it needs experience, not explanation. That's where a game or a simulation does what a slide would never do. Okay? I will leave it with you.

Incentives and flow metrics

[00:15:32] Even when we have the right people and the right learning, change doesn't stick if your incentives work against it. If the system rewards the wrong things, people will naturally keep doing the old behaviors, even if they have the best intentions. Incentives are powerful. What we reward shapes behavior, sometimes without us even noticing. So let's check your reality. Are you ready?

[00:16:16] I have another question for you, and it's going to be a poll. Which behaviors do your incentives reward the most? Is it being busy? Starting more work? Delivering value, or improving flow? Great. Amazing. Please keep voting, because this is great to see. Okay.

[00:16:58] It's great to see that delivering value was voted the most in this room. But we still have being busy or starting more work, which could also be rewarded. Because if our system is rewarding busyness, we will get busy, and as a result we will be overwhelmed and burned out, right? Then we keep starting work and we never deliver anything. But if we are focusing on delivering value, then as a result, of course, we are going to improve our workflow, and then we will improve our delivery accordingly. So it's good that many of you are rewarded for delivering value.

[00:17:53] On the screen you see some of the metrics that we were recommending for teams to use. These are more focused on their processes. Obviously we also had people metrics and product metrics; every product team should have their own product metrics. But these are the process metrics that help the team understand, and we were rewarding finishing, focusing on getting work done, improving flow, and delivering value. These don't really measure who is busy. They show where work is stuck.

[00:18:36] Once the team can see that, it's actionable, right? They start solving the problems together before other people from outside come and tell them so. They are able to reflect and start improving, and that's already a big behavior change that we created. Are any of you familiar with these flow metrics? Do you use them? Yes? No? Yes? Great. Hopefully you learned or found out something new.

[00:19:18] This is another quote from one of the champions, from the US. After the program, she was saying that they are more focused on outcomes, delivering value, rather than just outputs or being task oriented. They also started measuring flow and improving their processes. That was another signal that we were on the right path.

A champions builder canvas and closing

[00:19:54] If any of this resonated with you, I made something for you. This is a one-page champions builder canvas, and it is not a Nestlé template. It's just a thinking tool. If you would like to build some sort of program or community in your own organization, please scan it, steal it, adapt it. If you have any feedback or improvement ideas, please do let me know. Or if you use it, please reach out to me and tell me you used it and it works, or how you adapted it in your organization. I would love to hear that.

[00:20:46] I would like to close my talk with one simple thought. In organizations and companies, we love buying new recipe books. But the food doesn't get better until someone actually changes how they cook every day in their own kitchen. That's what champions do. They don't install a new framework, because we know in our companies that a single framework is not going to fix it. What they do is change one habit in one team, and then the person next to them starts doing it too.

[00:21:35] I don't know if you need permission to do things like that in your organization, but if you don't, please pick one person, one team and one habit, and start building these communities. I hope you find it useful, and thank you.

Q&A

[00:21:59] Host: Amazing. Thank you so much, Duygu. This was a very thorough and interesting talk. Well, you have plenty of questions.

[00:22:05] Duygu: Oh, wow. Okay. Can I have the clicker, because now I own it?

[00:22:12] Host: Where can I learn more about how these games work if I want to use them with my team?

[00:22:18] Duygu: Oh, definitely. First of all, those three games that I showed you are online. You can literally go online, and I'm happy to share the links. I don't know if we are sharing these presentations later on.

[00:22:33] Host: We can definitely look into it.

[00:22:34] Duygu: Yeah, then definitely we can put it there, and you can also reach me on LinkedIn. We can connect and I can message you all the links.

[00:22:42] Host: Thank you, a lot of interesting resources. Can someone vote for serious questions? In the meantime, I will ask my own questions here. How did you adapt these ways of working, and the work that the champions do, across different cultures and the different levels of readiness you were talking about? I assume it's not the same in every country around the world where you operate.

[00:23:13] Duygu: Exactly. What our team does is work like a little consultancy firm within our own company. We connect with the teams individually, and we do a sort of interview with them. We understand their pain points, as any product team does: understanding the pain points and what their issues are. Then we observe them, and after that we spot some of the gaps together with the team, and then we adjust. Even with the champions, I was having all these follow-up meetings and calls, and they had their own specific goals for their own teams. Not all of them were following exactly the same thing, because the readiness was different. I would say that we work in a really personalized way in our company, because it's impossible to implement one thing and make everyone the same. As you said earlier, it's not one size fits all.

[00:24:19] Host: Totally. And I think the next question connects nicely with what I was mentioning earlier about distributed teams. When you work with offshore teams, where meeting people in person is not possible, how do you work with them?

[00:24:33] Duygu: Yes, we work with them. Obviously we do a lot of Teams calls, because we heavily use Microsoft. So Teams calls, not Zoom calls. But we also always have an occasion to connect with them. Especially in my team, with the other coaches that we have, we have a community of practice. We meet once a week for an hour, and we share all our pain points and what we are going through, and that way we connect. We also work with a lot of vendors who are offshore, and we keep them as part of our team, making sure that they feel like one of us.

[00:25:30] Host: Integrated.

[00:25:31] Duygu: They are integrated. They also have all the necessary information, all the trainings, all the things so that they can adapt to the Nestlé way of working. So we are all aligned and working together.

[00:25:44] Host: Would you say that you meet regularly, or is it more on an ad hoc basis?

[00:25:48] Duygu: No, regularly, 100%. And some of them are also able to come and visit once a year, because we already meet once a year as a team to work on our OKRs, objectives and key results, our team goals, making sure that they are aligned with our company's strategic goals. I think you heard this from many other speakers; we have exactly the same.

[00:26:14] Host: Any key learnings you can highlight from working with and helping other teams?

[00:26:22] Duygu: Okay. First of all, I think everyone more or less has the same problems. It's just about prioritizing, depending on how their own context works. That's why it's very important that we personalize and adapt. I think we all have the same problems; you probably have similar problems too. But I can't think of one big one right now. I will think about it.

[00:26:57] Host: We can expand on it afterwards, for sure. "My design team is not part of a product team, and when we work on project work, we are submerged by daily and weekly planning, retros, reviews, etc. The amount of regular meetings. How can we work more efficiently with everyone while being agile ourselves?" Great question.

[00:27:17] Duygu: That's another way of thinking, right? People think that Agile equals Scrum, which is a framework, or using Jira or Azure DevOps as a work management tool, or having all these meetings. In our literature, we don't recommend that many meetings unless they are really necessary; or you reduce them and combine them. It's all about understanding why you are meeting and why you need to be there. If you have clear alignment inside your team, I don't think you even need that many, for sure, because some teams are doing them just for the sake of doing them.

[00:28:01] Host: Or because it's been done that way over time, right?

[00:28:04] Duygu: Exactly. These are definitely not things we tell teams they have to do. We understand first.

[00:28:13] Host: Just adding on here, an audit is worth doing at some point, to check all these regular meetings or discussions. Why are we doing it? Are we getting any value out of it? What's the value we want to get out of them? And if there is none, then think about cutting them.

[00:28:31] Duygu: Exactly. It's also all about collaboration, about visualizing your work and increasing transparency. If you are visualizing your work, if you have a Kanban board and a clear backlog, you already have everything there, so why do you need to repeat yourself in a meeting? This is what we recommend to the teams: if you make your work visible and transparent, and you are regularly working on it and updating it, it's visible to everyone, and you don't need any of these meetings. For me, this is half of the Agile ways of working.

[00:29:13] Host: Thank you. One last question. "Do you have any recommendations for integrating UX and UI into sprints? Working a sprint ahead, or in parallel sprints?" From the teams you've been working with, what are the most common approaches?

[00:29:32] Duygu: Believe it or not, in big enterprise companies, sometimes UX is another team that starts doing all the things and then gives it to the teams, and product writes all the things. It can be really, really challenging most of the time, because we have teams that also work in silos. Obviously we are trying to get everyone together, making sure that those teams are integrated, that they are attending and deciding together. You can still work together, but if you stick with the sprints, the context is completely different and it makes it really, really difficult. My recommendation is to focus more on getting the work done, improving your processes and flow, and integrating all the work together, rather than having certain sprints.

[00:30:34] Host: Okay.

[00:30:35] Duygu: Yeah, because it makes things more complicated.

[00:30:37] Host: Okay. Thank you very much, Duygu.

[00:30:39] Duygu: You're welcome. Thank you so much.