When I walked into Aetion four months ago, I was immediately impressed with the caliber of talent and intelligence I encountered — here was a Series B company that had managed to build a product that handled some of the most complex data science in the health care industry. Like many high-growth startups, there were new faces and leaders in the technology organization and a struggle between legacy pain points and perceived business pressure for release speed. As I met with team members, it became apparent that these forces culminated in a general perception that their frequent retrospectives were simply a ritual and lacked the power to activate meaningful change.
Retros, as all agile-enthusiasts know, are a bedrock milestone in the scrum process. They give teams space and time to reflect on how things are going and what can be improved. Similarly, “post-mortems” are incident-specific retros for key stakeholders to identify root-cause issues and analyze how to avoid them in the future. Retros are great for reflection, but not so great for galvanizing change and providing the momentum teams need to rally around actionable, integrated solutions.
We needed to take steps beyond “retroing” past events if we wanted to tackle the ambiguity in product discovery or a painful deployment process. We needed more than just leadership or just those “on the ground” to close out a long-lingering project. We needed a way of activating meaningful change across the board that included the entire team from top to bottom. The question was — how?
During my first two weeks, I started meeting with members of the team 1:1 to listen and understand their perspectives. The critical first step in activating change is to truly listen and understand where people are coming from — what are their pain points? What motivates and demotivates them? Taking the time and opportunity to seek understanding is key to gaining trust and ensuring that the path to change is inclusive of as many perspectives as possible.
I took what I learned in my 1:1s and started to immediately tackle the simplest things first to build momentum. I sought to bring clarity to our development process by creating a shared calendar with all relevant dates. I worked with the product team to create a mechanism for reviewing initiatives to align stakeholders. I escalated issues to Selvam, our CTO, where warranted, so that he could help resolve things I couldn’t. Consistent, small improvements build upon each other to create a sense of forward motion that is crucial in priming a team for larger-scale change.
Once I had a good handle on the existing issues and had started tackling some easy stuff, I discovered that we were at a tipping point — we needed to start thinking more systematically about larger-scale change. I worked with Selvam to draft a reimagined product development process and started to float it informally at all levels. There’s a certain art to building consensus by informally sharing potential changes with key members of the team from top to bottom. It builds trust and creates stronger bonds within the team because they begin to see that they are moving in the same direction. I cannot overstate how crucial this is to ensuring the success of your proposed change, especially if it is something with a large impact.
Now, the team was poised for larger-scale change, and it was time to present the proposed process more formally. We had already incorporated feedback from those we’d met with first — they were now positioned to be our champions when the changes were more formally discussed. Whether a change is big or small, it’s crucial that feedback is encouraged and has the power to affect decisions. This builds the necessary trust between leaders and the team.
We’ve experienced a lot of early success as we implement these changes. There is a great degree of alignment across the technology organization — and outside of it as well — as we message the “why” and the “what” in various forums. Half the battle in activating change is often priming the right people in the right ways, and I think we’ve been able to do that. The real work is still ahead of us — measuring success and continuing to iterate until we get to where we want to be — but now we’re poised to get there together. That might be the biggest success of all.
