 Okay, here we go. Okay, warning. There's nothing in the picture to add. So without you being concerned, this is all worthless. This is one of the best military books I've ever read. But actually, command by Colonel B. P. McCork, the Marine, was fantastic. Command. You want answers? I'll take out the title. I have a lot to say. You want answers? I'll take out the title. You want anything? I have a lot to say. Well, I think you can handle the trade, so I'm wondering what you think. Cody, is that what you're talking about? Yeah. Okay, this is who I am. My real name is Danny Blitz. I used to be Daniel Philpott, but I changed my name. My lovely wife back here didn't like the name Philpott. I was embarrassed to name her, so I changed my name. I was fairly famous for music that was under Danny Blitz. I've got 20 plus years of systems build management. I've built military systems, banking systems, medical systems, entertainment systems. I get hired for that, but I live like this. I'm currently a software manager. Thank you for the interview. This is the conversation we have trying to describe the chaos and something about it. This is what you guys would like to know how to proceed. That's the baleful stare of our program that doesn't want to be told. But I was actually hurting drunk cats because I had a band on the road. So this was my life. That's right. I got a family from Germany already, so... Did you get it anyway? So yeah, I was in a band. I'll show you some junk I was doing while I was building systems. This is a poster from the Wall of the Whiskey. I have trust in my two brain cancer operators. I have a tumor in my head. That's probably what I have in my head. So yeah, I got sick. I stopped playing guitar. And during that time, I identified a few things. I had songs on the Osborns. I had to deal with some intelligence. I wrote songs for the Oscars Creek. But while I was here, my sponsor was quite dangerous to me. Also, e-tails were shot a while ago on the episode on me called Hollywood Rocks. And the area where I was in my hospital bed, I signed my deal with Miramax in my hospital bed as well. So the only thing that worked on me from my right eye and my right hand was to sign my contract. The left side of my body was really dead because of the tumor outside. That's why my butt's handy. During this time, I was building systems that would prepare all sorts of keep working. I built this for the Department of Defense. I lived in Washington, D.C. I was building fox pro systems for them. I also ran some pre-school jobs in Time Magazine in 1998. I ran the build of the last technology system. I built Dell's online HR system. That was the last system I built before I stopped programming that was 10 years ago. You guys have some of the tools that I have. I also built Cisco's online consultant site if you want to find an international Cisco consultant that you can find on the system I built. I was a software developer for Quest Diagnostics. I was also one of the grand opera challenge teams who built the robots in the race across the desert with over the four-wheel drive thingies, drive range-finding things that you can see through the front of it, and pattern recognition, artificial intelligence. The last system I did before I got into Covey had an LLC that created the huge system that built the dotnet. I know that makes you very excited. I set up a new constant now, which is AT&T Interactive. I run the Tiger Team program. I started it. Covey has tolerated me quite well. My boss is Covey, the guy who didn't do this thing. So it's been Covey a hand. Covey built soft. It's the only way it makes sense. It adds to the trouble. I'm not talking about this right now. This is one of the best quotes ever I've built. The good plan by the executed now is better than the perfect plan next week. That's by General Patton. General Patton is the man on the move. There's the man himself. Love that guy. Software development is hard. That's not trivial as what we do. It is very difficult to build these big systems we built. So why is software development so difficult? I mean it's because people want to invent or accept the truth. Why don't we invent the truth? Why? We don't know the truth. We don't know some of these answers. When that CIO or CEO is looking at us and saying when is this going to be done? We don't know the answer. What are we afraid of? We don't know things like this is all. Why don't we know what this is all going to be? Well, here's the right thing. The business needs change. The new competitors period. The technology tools change. You guys are making a huge dip now. The new product needs to be built. You have a guy show up. You hire a new customer. So how should we deal with this? Here's what I think. We should admit the truth and build our process around these issues. So what is the Tiger Team? The Tiger Team is a small, self-improving software team with velocity and quality as primary drivers. I expected to produce an enormous amount of product in very short time frames with very low or low defects. So how are we going to do this? First of all, let's start with what we expect from the Tigers. We've already done this in 80 years. We started our first team live in America here. Our first project was laid for 5 weeks. We finished it 7 days. Our next project was roughly for the first. We finished it 3 days. We were accelerating. We were growing the process. We were getting better as we were doing it. So as they were learning and moving, they were taking this knowledge and transforming momentum for the project. So what's different about the Tigers? These guys actually need to share the load. They can cash work with each other. These are going to be a lot of work. So it's a good old white swambo. And I want to show you a photograph. This is a remarkable photograph. This photograph was a minute long. It was a minute long. I didn't stand this photo. What's really remarkable about this photo is who was in it. Two golfers on the left and two QA people on the right. We were very, very close to each other. The QA people were actually Tigers themselves. They worked with us from the very beginning. We could actually get their attention from the beginning about what we did. They're also not smiling because I said to smile. They were just having a good time talking about the project. So what else is different about Tigers? Tigers show leadership. I exist upon this. In the group I'm working with the Tigers, I want people to step out and lead. Because you know more about what you're doing. So I need someone to help me run the team. Now, this model new woman here, her name is Jaya. She's actually here today. Jaya is now the leader of Team Lightning, the first team that we built the TTI. We're building a Tiger team program. We're building the initial teams. I couldn't run them all. So Jaya stepped up and became the manager. I worked very closely with her still. Because we're a very different Jaya. And I'm very sort of like a berserk. And she wants to plan and calculate the requirements and make a plan. Well, Tiger's self-improvement is a big deal. We improve every single day. We constantly look to get better. Not only are you going to write the system, you're going to get better at writing the system. You're going to get better at execution. And even though you don't know, you're going to have to make these huge moves every day. Because you make a 1% improvement once a day. So 365 days, that's not 365% same one year. That's thousands of shifts of combat. So you get to where you're moving to speed of thought. It's a boom. You are moving. The backbone runs and we know what to do. We have almost no meetings. This is the big thing for me. I hate meetings and a bunch of waste of time. So it's the very first thing you do with the Tigers is don't meet with the Tigers, leave them alone. They're working. We isolate them and make sure that people leave them alone so they can work. If you call a meeting with our Tigers, you miss the look they're going to get. What? Why? You don't get a lot of meetings. What else is different about Tigers? QA and test automation are tip of the spear. If I have my way, I have the QA person in front of the very beginning. I'm restating this because it's so important. When that product person talks to us for the very first time, I want them to be there. I want the QA person to be there and just do the program to listen to what's going on because the program is listening to years that are saying, how can I build this? Well, the devious mind of the QA person is, how can I break this? So they have different questions they ask the product person because they'll say, if you follow this or this and you'll find solicitation is much better. Also, we build a test automation in a big net in the system to protect us from what's going on. What else is different? We have a shared psychology and intelligence in these groups and this is for real. I watched this happen. It's a psychology of winning the expected one. They just believe they're going to win the game. They're very bold. They're not afraid much. The last one is excellence. These groups push each other. They start to, as they work with a team, they look at each other's commits and see how fast they're going to use all these things. They just get better and better cut. So this is very, very important. So what else is different? They're not afraid of the dark. But what I mean by this is, a type of team will start on a project knowing almost nothing. We don't have to know a lot because, obviously, waterball makes sense. You'd like to know what you're building before you build. It just makes sense. You're going to build something, what am I going to build? Well, we know our clients are so cool or something like that, I don't know. So we start knowing what we know. And I have to ask you, do you look like this when you go play in the dark? I don't think so. This is the type of waterball thing. It's the main reason I named my folks Tigers and it's the military term of respect. So I named them Tigers from the beginning. They are Tigers. What I'm thinking of themselves is Russia's not being used to programs that need to be queued. There was a lot of tiger teams. All the staff that delivered our product I had my piece of system. But I really needed the full group. But he developed, just had an NDBA. What I have now, the Tiger leader, that's me. We typically have four of them with a good idea number because we do a lot of pairing, swarming, what not. That's automations here, QA tester and very, very important that product staff I want them in the room because we're asking a lot of questions moving so fast and we're showing so much product. We want to ask the questions right there. In addition, you might have architecture but we're seeing the enterprise architecture of the company and it's looking at everything they're building. This is Admin's NDBA. Why warfare? Well, business is battle. Our battle field is the marketplace. Battle is simply divided into attrition and maneuver. It's not about attrition warfare. Attrition warfare is traditional tactical battle. Clashing head on, it's like two large armies grinding against one another. This is the traditional wave battle. You just slug it out for victory. What kind of companies do this kind of battle? Well, tell our records. We used to work for Saddle Out of Business. GM, I think you know their story, Ford. Chrysler, Home Depot. These are all attrition warfare companies. Home Depot is fighting blood, the ballmark, what not. It's all... The idea is you're a bigger company and you crush your company to get more average $20. But I don't think attrition warfare is bad and it got a hold on to the ground again. And to prove that, I'm going to bring on my great American who was a great attrition warfareist and who really made World War II go. President Eisenhower was Patton's boss, and attrition warfareist. Patton was a maneuver warfareist and Eisenhower was an attrition warfareist. I know what you're thinking. I know what you're thinking. So let's talk about maneuver warfare. Maneuver warfare is the internet space. This is the space we all live in. You guys are by definition maneuver warfareists that have sister children. Maneuver warfare is rapid, modern, and violent. I'm just saying you're violent people. Anyway, that's what maneuver warfare is all about. It's unexpected movements and things appear that you don't expect when you create a what the Marines say are rapid and continuous situations of your competition. What companies are getting at this? Well, suddenly I was good at this. eBay, well, AT&T Interactive. I wanted to mention eBay now, because AT&T Interactive, like, we're a new warfare company. eBay, of course. MySpace, I didn't see that coming. Facebook, also good stuff. So let's talk about the military aspect. The Marines are full maneuver warfareists. They believe in maneuver warfare. They believe very fast. Maneuver just means just moving around. It also means doing not expecting things, like perhaps I can't keep the full description. Ironically, the warfareists that I'm going to describe here are not Marines. Pat was an armyman. He was actually a general of the Third Army of World War II. And General Sherman in Civil War. General Sherman was what it considered one of the first maneuver warfareists. Because General Sherman decided he was going to fight Civil War. That was not his problem. The problem was the Aristotle machine of the south, the slavehold. They were creating the problem of funding the army. So he just ran straight to the south. I said, I'm going to burn all the plantations down. I'm going to put in the slaves. So he shot in the south. And of course, as a southern man, I was raised with Satan. But in fact, he's a great American. Because the Confederate army right here, there was this guy walking through the country burning it down. So they were running from battles to go home. So he saved lots and lots of lives. He lost 1% of his men, one. In Civil War, that was an amazing, amazing, low number. It's like nothing. So it kind of makes me feel bad about hating the army. So I thought, people of business, who are maneuver warfareists? Anyone know who this is? I do not know who this is. I didn't do this while I was standing up in the picture. I just found out he was a great maneuver warfareist. So I shall leave you now. I think he was a great maneuver warfareist today. That's Steve Jobs himself. Great man. I think I like him. Oh, Lord, blessed the financial aid with which the famine flowed by enemies who tried to bridge in our country. Yeah, you know, he says that for every time he speaks to the my father, my father. God bless him. Okay, speed. That's not about speed. Speed itself is a competitive weapon. Military says speed is a weapon. It's an undeniable invention business. First market is a huge invention. Matter of fact, some consider this the primary rule of business and warfare and marketing. Civil War general force, as you said, did their firstest with the most was actually a joke. You know, of course, it was a smart, educated man. He was rich, and he just got to say this to be kind of faulty. This is how he operated. You know, force was crazy. He would write a battle on the force with a nine-shot revolver, and it shot the American American. It's got a little map. That's terrifying. It looked like that's it. It was like, stop. Speed mitigates risk. I hear this nonsense all the time. Speed kills. Speed is not killed. Speed mitigates risk. Speed is no guarantee of the software feathers. I mean, we're going to blow it up. I'm going to blow it up. I know I'm going to blow it up. I'm just going to say that right now. But it mitigates the effect of that feather because we're moving so fast. Also, a professional at some level bugs, not an expectation of life, we contain the damage by the racial time-saving system. Yeah, we blew it up when it was two hours down. That's it. It's the team's room is on. Speed improves the team. It gives us more time for processing for growing the team's shared psychology and intelligence. Speed adds to job satisfaction, reducing the grind of the job. There's a little bit slower than when the time has come to come along. I have to say that very happy we're here now. Time flies when we're on the front. Speed allows agile to function properly. Azure has a stem like an engine. You're surrounded by high performance engines. This should bring truth for you. Anyone who knows that an engine is not meeting a certain rotational speed was just stalled. The development is too slow. These two slows the engine will stall. Virtually all agile methods refer to a maximum iteration. Usually it's 30 days. If you get to a situation where you're programming for, say, 90 days before you show them, you're not agile. You're something else. You don't know what you are. You're not agile. Your engine is stalled. So I just put this up to get some of that bar built this two thousand horsepower and I'm going to try to put this out and share it with you. Speed builds credibility. This is huge in a big company. For those of you that are in big companies, we have to build credibility with our products that are non-technical people. We want to reduce the feeling with them that we don't care about the time since they didn't need the company. We're showing so much work so fast. Boom, boom, boom, boom. So what do we want? Well, my cartoon guy says, wow! It's not about cows and tigers. A cow is much bigger than a tiger. Roughly twice the size of a tiger. So who wins? So in this corner we have elsewhere in the black and white trunks. In this corner we have orange and black and we have a Simba. See what Simba has to say. Well, Simba didn't want to talk to us. We're using agile terms to describe a non-agile process. This is happening in companies all the time. All the time people adapt and adapt. The taxonomy, what happens is somebody on high company says we want to be agile. And so some guy in Henry Reed's book he sees the word scrums. He says open-air scrums and I scrum, scrum, scrum, scrum, scrum, scrum, scrum. He says we're over, over, over, over. And it's complete crap. Really, this thing. So the point of fact is it makes agile a joke. He's one of my big pet peeves. If you're doing this, you are not this. You are in fact this. That's a brain or maybe I can put a cow tiger in that picture. So, right. This is what the broken animal kingdom is. Non-agile projects that I've had, resistance is a lot of fiction towards it. I mean, kind of various types of people that helped me and got me in my way on the title for most people, a tiger. Well, a tiger wouldn't be what we are. We might need the tigers. We are actually pretty cautious as an animal. A tiger wouldn't be a type of human. We'll calculate it. We look to win. We have tremendous velocity in business now. But we avoid unmanable fights and go crazy, too. Let's talk about the cow. Well, the cow is a herding man, a personal thought, afraid of this and of what voice is about everything. It's like what you get in management because applying a lot of them about reconstruction theories. Yeah. It's been half day and everything like that. So, you could just go ahead and get here as soon as possible. That would be different. That's not a job either, guys, to me. Let's talk about the bear. The bear is a big, usually mellow creature. They have awesome dinosaurs, because we all know this. They have a little mind of their own, and typically bears are pretty mellow creatures. They avoid unnecessary fights. But they make great tiger bosses. I can't have a cow as a boss because ultimately they just know that if I don't have a tiger, she's scared of me. I need a bear for a boss. I need a bear as an animal. But if you go for a new stick, you get this. Do you want to see a human bear? I'll show you one. I'm talking about the leopard now. They see what you don't want to be. The leopard has an animal's heart. It's just creepy, fierce animals. They have unmatched ferocity. They are truly wild. They'll fight eating and everything. They're not going to wait to see it these days. They're just going to attack it. I used to dig on the leopard. I had to learn to calm down and become a tiger and pat it more silently around. What a huge and tough, intelligent, virtually invincible in battle. You typically see it on the folks. You don't want to fight on it. This is the way you do your job. You don't want this dude to say that you're a tiger. And the last one, the one I really hate behind me now, is the scouting. They steal from their food. They do the obstructions. They get my way around and try to do something. I will absolutely and can't get this kid if he's dead. So they are evil. That's all I would say safe and effective. I just think, I think they're creepy. Let's talk about leadership. Leadership is the real deal of tigers. You would think it's odd to talk about faith and love when we talk about leadership. But this is really the thing that makes tigers go. And I say this because faith, I have faith in my team. I feel like a baby in that. In fact, the walking is going to be tough. I see that you're not worried about one bit that these guys are going to get this work done. And the absolute faith in me, faith in me as a leader that I'm going to do everything I can possibly do to give them a good work situation. And I love them. These are my battle waves with my brothers and sisters. And also hope. Let's talk about hope. Now, has anyone ever worked in a place where there was no hope? I have. I've worked in a place where it was just never going to get better. I think we can pretty much also be good there. I've worked with my team. Success belongs to the team. If you succeed at the success, all the launch, you can get the credit. If you fail tomorrow, I'll take the blame. I'll go to the president's office and say, I did it. I blew it up. I have absolutely no problem with that. So it's a fear reduction strategy, my guys. They know that I'm not going to get into trouble. The buck stops here. So who said that? The Great Heritage Union. Fearlessness. Now, I'm not actually fearless. The Marines describe two types of bravery. Well, I was brave, because I do anything. I'm not scared of it. The Marines describe two types of bravery. There's the stoic, reasonable kind of bravery. The reason you're going to win, that's COVID. Then there's the sort of frenetic, fierce bravery that I am, sort of the motion-based. So if you're going to be a leader, you've got to be this and not be this. If you say you're a leader, you're tiring your little kitty cat, well, you're kind of going to be a leader. You've got to be a listener and learner. That's a big deal. I always ask my team what I can do to make a job better. I always talk to them about it. Constantly, what can I do? What can I do to improve your work-life? I'm not a guy who thinks he knows everything. I know that. I know that I'm going to listen to what he has to say. I'm a protector of my team. This is a big, big deal. This is what I at first had to do. First and outside influence is that's the ridiculous number of meetings I can get out of my head. Let's have a meeting and discuss this for a time period. You can take five people in a room and have a lot of footage at a time. So I see the stuff that doesn't happen. In terms of team on occasion, you'll get a problematic rock star. There's a pain in the ass. We don't have anybody else to protect the team from that. We have to take the straight and problem out. All for the team members themselves. Now, this doesn't have to happen. On occasion, I've had guys get on my tiger feet and they just flip out. They're so excited about how much work for you. They just go crazy. When I was on CBS Radio, this happened. I was working in Sac Building once in Wilshire. There was a lot of things that were coming out. I was going on weekends to see where they were. It was kind of fun. And I would go there and my team would go from there. Like all of them. I mean, I'd find out, I'd say, guys, really, it's something. You guys are like, this is something. Those are the U.S. Marines' management techniques. Now, the U.S. Marines have published a book called Core Business. It's called Marine Corps, COPS, Core Business. They talk about 30 management techniques they use to have effective fighting. Now, I've got the four of them in my hand. I manage by name-state and content. I do not micromanage my team at all. Basically, I say, there's what we're going. There's a lot more to get there. I don't micromanage them at all. I mean, they know more than I do what they're doing. So, I'm reaching the same for the one I'm here to do. All right, we work together. What I say about this is I have a mistake for anyone. If you make a mistake, no one in the team is going to know. I'm so not going to do it. No one else is going to point to you and say, man, you made a mistake. And I mean that. It's one of those things that programs like communities don't know how to handle. I demand to be questioned. The bottom line of this is, you know, I want programs to tell you what they want. And programs are not to be heard by people, and of course, John, for us to say about that. This is the big one. Glorifying the low levels of the organization, this is the really big one. In the Marines, the grunts are more important than the generals. You guys are going to get your work done. You're going to get your work done. And this is how I see these other Marines here. I think it's really bright on. Let's talk about polite and professionalism. This is a disease and software jam. Now, I'm not pointing to any of you, because I don't know anything about it. I know something can be weird. You've got your own brain. But polite and professionalism, the lack of polite and professionalism, somehow we get out of kindergarten, or we get out of high school, and we start programming and say, they are killing you. If you are polite and professional, they will not be throwing you in jail. They will put you in hard labor. It's very funny, because when I worked with a Marine sniper, he said they make you make big rocks in the low rocks all they want to make you carry your solution all the time if you are polite and professional. It's a big deal. Because without polite and professionalism, you get poisoned in the air. Very important to have this. Now, I'm talking about agile itself. Agile is not a methodology. It's a way of thinking. And agile is an element as well. I work on main-frame systems. Everyone I've ever seen has been refactored, rebuilt, changed. Everybody suddenly features ripped out of them and looked back at new features added. So it's another way that you're going to have build the iterations on any systems. It's the beginning of computer science as a trick. So that's true about agile. If you want more info, well, you are in luck. You're really in luck today. I've written an email. I'll leave it to you today. I'm writing a full-length book on stuff. I didn't make any mistake in not bringing it before. It's got pretty good trouble. It's all right. HurryTigers.com is the site we have on it. I don't have a lot of time to work on it because I'm actually writing a book. You can also run it at the end of HurryTigers.com. So any questions? We all came back in the seats. Sir, yes, sir. That's right. That's all I'm here for. That's right. That's all I'm here for. That's all I'm here for. That's all I'm here for. You are views. You are nothing. That's all I'm here for. Question. I have a question. So I noticed that you had an automation engineer. What exactly did that person do? Automation engineers go to testing. We operate a team. We do the right tests ahead of time. Automation engineers do the right things. We have magic technology called事-to- Tree. We understand what is happening. We know about that all these sites. The codes we will define may go. If you run into testing, and essentially push and commit, it runs thousands of testing. So you can- literally, once you reach the 100, they say code cultures. When my brother told me he had begun this a couple of times, you can read my treatment. It's little yawn and it, something breaks it up below the net, software development, or any project for that matter. You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, or you can have it well done. And how do you manage the quality? Because you're already going for speed, and so, you know, how do you grow the quality and how do you grow the quality of your team, whereas you're still trying to do it cheap? You need to get it in from the very beginning. You're a quality process. I mean, I've had six-segment training now. I don't think six-segment is a good way to stop all of our work altogether. Quality, it used to be the fast, good cheap pick-to is the way. But now we know that quality and velocity are tied together. You actually get better if you are fast by building it in. With when you look QA and test-bottom machines from the beginning, you can be very, very fast. And when you're riding your brains are fresh, you run to the thing, and you actually, you get quality and velocity, and that's the whole trick here with this thing. It does some flipping to make sure you get it in the beginning. Yes. Some interesting things to say about the big rewrites, and he pulled out the example of the tiger team kind of as a negative in the following way. If you're not on the tiger team, then you're one of the not as good people being left behind by your organization. So how do you really deal with that as far as avoiding the negativity of those who aren't part of your tiger team and bringing them into the fold? Sure as I do. We have five. As a matter of fact, I'm glad you're missing that. I actually have a spot on Team Thunder available now at ATTI. So you're going to be talking to me if you need a job. Until I miss you if you need a job. So we actually have a spot on that which is pretty great. I'll be your team tiger. Yes, sir. You guys ever have some downtime? It seems like you guys are going fast all the time. You worry about burnout? Like I said, I'm going to protect my team. That's why the third point is so important. I watched that. I mean, I can have guys get flipped out and just go, go, go, go, go. But I'm also very quick to say, oh, you're trying to go home. I mean, my guys all have a lot of tiger teams in here. And I tell you, you know, I don't push them at all. The truth is they push themselves. I just stand there and go, wow, holy crap, that's a lot of code. But if I see the tiger team really get exhausted at any time, you know, I'll say pull a break. That's what it is, man. I mean, I'm really big on that. I'm really big on things that might happen. Uh-oh, I'm done. So I'm done.