 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of BizOps Manifesto Unveiled brought to you by BizOps Coalition. Hey, welcome back variety. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios and we'd like to welcome you back to our continuing coverage of BizOps Manifesto Unveil. Exciting day to really kind of bring this out into public. There's been a little bit of conversation but today's really the official unveiling and we're excited to have our next guest to share a little bit more information on it. He's Patrick Tickle. He's the Chief Product Officer for Planview. Patrick, great to see you. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invite. So why the BizOps Manifesto? Why the BizOps Coalition now? When you guys have been at it, it's relatively mature marketplace. Business is good. What was missing? Why this coalition? Yeah, so again, why is BizOps important and why is this something I'm, I'm so excited about but I think companies as well, right? Well, you know, in some ways or another, this is a topic that I've been talking to, you know, the market and our customers about for a long time. And it's, you know, I really applaud, you know, this whole movement, right? And it resonates with me because I think one of the fundamental flaws, frankly, of the way we have talked about technology and business literally for decades has been this idea of alignment. Those who know me, I occasionally get off on this little rant about the word alignment, right? But to me, the word alignment is actually indicative of the flaw in a lot of our organizations and BizOps is really, I think now trying to catalyze and expose that flaw, right? Because, you know, I always say that, you know, alignment implies silos, right? They instantaneously, as soon as you say there's alignment, there's obviously somebody who's got a direction and other people that have to line up. And that kind of siloed nature of organizations and then frankly, the passive nature of it, right? I think so many technology organizations are like, look, the business has the strategy you guys need to align, right? And, you know, as a product leader, right? That's what I've been my whole career, right? I can tell you that I never sit around, I almost never use the word alignment, right? I mean, whether, you know, I never sit down and say, you know, the product manager team has to get aligned with that, right? Or the dev team has to get aligned with the, you know, delivery and ops teams. I mean, what I say is, you know, are we on strategy, right? Like we have a strategy as a full end-to-end value stream, right? And that, there's no silos. And I mean, look, on any given day, we got to get better, right? But the context we operate is not about alignment, right? It's about being on strategy. And I think I've talked to customers a lot about that. But when I first read the manifesto, I was like, oh, you know, this is exactly, this is breaking down, maybe trying to eliminate the word alignment, you know, from a lot of our organizations, because we literally start thinking about one strategy and how we go from strategy to delivery and have it be our strategy, not someone else's that we're all aligning to. And it's a great way to catalyze, you know, that conversation that I've, it's been in my mind for years, to be honest. Right. So, so much to unpack there. One of the things obviously stealing a lot from, from DevOps and the DevOps manifesto from 20 years ago. And, and as I look through some of the principles and I look through some of the values, which are, you know, really nicely laid out here, you know, satisfy customer through continuous delivery, measure output against real results. The ones that jumps out though, is really about, you know, change, change, right? Requirements should change frequently. They do change frequently, but I'm curious to get your take from a, from a software development point. It's easy to kind of understand, right? We were making this widget and our competitors made a widget plus X and now we need to change our plans and make sure that the, the plus X gets added to the plan. Maybe it wasn't in the plan, but you talked a lot about product strategy. So, in this kind of continuous delivery world, how does that meld with, I'm actually trying to set a strategy, which implies a direction for a little bit further out on the horizon and to stay on that while at the same time, you're kind of doing this real-time continual adjustments because you're not working off a giant PRD or MRD anymore. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, you know, one of the terms, you know, that we use internally a lot, and even with my customers, our customers is we talk about this idea of rewiring, right? And I think, you know, it's kind of an analogy for transformation. And I think a lot of us have to rewire the way we think about things, right? And I think at plan view where we have a lot of customers who live in that, you know, who've operationalized that traditional PPM world, right? And are shifting to agile and transforming that rewire is super important. And to your point, right, it's you've just, you've got to embrace this idea of, you know, just iterative, getting better every day and iterating, iterating, iterating, as opposed to building annual plans or, you know, I get customers occasionally who ask me for a two or three year roadmap, right? And I literally look at them and I go, there's no scenario where I can build a two or three year roadmap, right? You think you want that, but that's not the way we run, right? And I will tell you the biggest thing that for us, you know, that I think has matched the planning, you know, impedance is a word I like to use a lot. So the thing that we've like, that we've done from a planning perspective that I think has matched impedance to continuous delivery is instituting the whole program implement, you know, the program implement planning capabilities and methodologies in the scaled agile world, right? And over the last 18 months to two years, we really have now, you know, instrumented our company across three value streams. You know, we do quarterly PI program increment, 10 week planning, you know, and that becomes the terra firma of how we plan, right? And it's what are we doing for the next 10 weeks and we iterate within those 10 weeks, but we also know that 10 weeks from now, we're gonna adjust and iterate again, right? And that shifting of that planning model, you know, to being as cross functional as that big room planning kind of model is, and also, you know, on that shorter increment, when you get those two things in place, all of a sudden the impedance really starts to match up with continuous delivery and it changes, it changes the way you plan and it changes the way you work. Right, the other thing, right? So obviously a lot of these things are kind of process driven, both within the values as well as the principles, but there's a whole lot really about culture. And I just want to highlight a couple of the values, right? We already talked about business outcomes, trust and collaboration, data-driven decisions, and then learn, respond, and pivot, right? A lot of those are cultural as much as they are processed. So again, is it the need to really kind of just put them down on paper? And you know, I can't help but think of, you know, the hammering up the thing in the Lutheran church with their manifesto. Is it just good to get it down on paper? Because when you read these things, you're like, well, of course we should trust people. And of course we need an environment of collaboration. And of course we want data-driven decisions. But as we all know, saying it and living it are two very, very different things. Yeah, good question. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways you bring that to life, you're right? And just hanging up, you know, I think we've all been through the hanging up posters around your office, which these days, right? Unless you're going to hang a poster in everybody's home office, right? You can't even, you can't even fake it that you think that might work, right? So, you know, you really, I think we've attacked that in a variety of ways, right? And you definitely have to, you know, you've got to make the shift to a team-centric culture, right? Empowered teams, you know, that's a big deal, right? You know, a lot of the people that, you know, we lived in a world of, quote unquote, where we lived in a deep resource management world for a long, long time, right? And a lot of our customers still do that. But, you know, kind of moving to that team-centric world is really important and core to the trust. I think training is super important, right? We've, you know, we've internally, right? We've trained hundreds of employees over the last year and a half on the fundamentals really of safe, right? Not necessarily, you know, we've had teams delivering in scrum and continuous delivery for, you know, for years. But the scaling aspect of it is where we've done a lot of training investment. And then, you know, I think leadership has to be bought in, right? You know, and so when we PI plan, you know, myself and Cameron and the other members are leadership, you know, we're in PI planning, you know, for four days, right? I mean, it's, you've got to walk the walk, you know, from top to bottom and you've got to train on the context, right? And then you, and then once you get through a few cycles where you've done a pivot, right? Or you've brought a new team in and it just works. It becomes kind of this virtuous circle where people go, man, this really works so much better than what we used to do. Right, right. The other really key principle to this whole thing is aligning, you know, the business leaders and the business prioritization so that you can get to good outcomes with the development and the delivery, right? And we know, again, in kind of classic dev ops to get the dev and the production people together so they can, you know, quickly ship code that works. But adding the business person on there really puts a little extra responsibility that they understand the value of a particular feature or a particular priority. They can make the trade-offs and that they kind of understand the effort involved too. So, you know, bringing them into this continuous, again, kind of this continuous development process to make sure that things are better aligned and really better prioritized because ultimately, you know, we don't live in an infinite resources situation and people got to make trade-offs. They got to make decisions as to what goes and what doesn't go and for everything that goes, right, I would say you pick one thing, okay, that's 99 other things that couldn't go. So it's really important to have, you know, this, you said alignment of the business priorities as well as, you know, the execution within the development. Yeah, I think that, you know, I think it was probably close to two years ago, Forester started talking about the age of the customer, right? That was like their big theme at the time, right? And I think to me, what that, the age of the customer actually translates to, and Mick and I are both big fans of this whole idea of the project-to-product shift, Mick's book, you know, is a great piece on how you're gonna talk to Mick, you know, as part of the manifesto. He's one of the authors as well. But this shift from project to product, right? Like the age of the customer, in my opinion, the embodiment of that is the shift to a product mentality, right? And the product mentality, in my opinion, is what brings the business and technology teams together, right? Once you're focused on a customer experience that's delivered through a product or a service, that's when I start to go, the alignment problem goes away, right? Because if you look at software companies, right? I mean, we run product management models, you know, with software development teams, customer success teams, right? That, you know, the software component of these products that people are building is obviously becoming bigger and bigger, you know? And in many ways, right? More and more organizations are trying to model themselves over as operationally like software companies, right? They obviously have lots of other components in their business than just software. But I think that whole model of customer experience equaling product, and then the software component of product, the product is the essence of what changes that alignment equation and brings business and teams together because all of a sudden, everyone knows what the customer is experiencing, right? And that makes a lot of things very clear, very quickly. Right, I'm just curious how far along this was as a process before COVID hit, right? Because serendipitous, whatever, right? But the sudden, you know, light switch moment, everybody had to go work from home in March 15th, compared to now we're in October, and this is going to be going on for a while, and it is a new normal and whatever that, whatever's going to look like a year from now or two years from now is TBD. You know, had you guys already started on this journey? Because again, to sit down and actually declare this coalition and declare this manifesto is a lot different than just trying to do better within your own organization. Yeah, so we had started, you know, we definitely had started independently, you know? Some, you know, I think people in the community know that we came together with a company called Lean Kit a handful of years ago, and I give John Terry actually one of the founders of Lean Kit immense credit for, you know, kind of spearheading our cultural change, and not because we were just going to be, you know, bringing agile solutions to our customers, but because, you know, he believed that it was going to be a fundamentally better way for us to work, right? And we kind of, you know, and we started with John and built, you know, kind of centric circles of momentum, and we've gotten to the place where now it's just part of who we are. But I do think that, you know, COVID has, you know, I think pre-COVID, a lot of companies, you know, would adopt, you know, would adopt digital slash agile transformation. Traditional industries may have done it as a reaction to disruption, right? You know, and in many cases, you know, the disruption to these traditional industries was, I would say, a product oriented company, right? That probably had a larger software component, and that disruption caused a competitive issue or a customer issue that caused companies to try to respond by transforming. I think COVID, you know, all of a sudden flattened that out, right? We literally all got disrupted, right? And so all of a sudden, every one of us is dealing with some degree of market uncertainty, customer uncertainty, and also, you know, none of us are insulated from the need to be able to pivot faster, deliver incrementally, you know, and operate in a different, completely more agile way, you know, post-COVID, right? Yeah, that's great. So again, very, very timely, you know, a little bit of serendipity, a little bit of planning, and you know, as with all important things, there's always a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work involved. So really interesting, thank you for your leadership, Patrick, and you know, it really makes a statement, I think, when you have a bunch of leaderships across an industry coming together and putting their name on a piece of paper that's aligned around to some principles and some values, which again, if you read them, who wouldn't want to get behind these? But if it takes, you know, something a little bit more formal to kind of move the ball down the field, then I totally get it and really great work. Thanks for doing it. Oh, absolutely, no. Like I said, the first time I read it, I was like, yep, like you said, this is all makes complete sense, but just documenting it and saying it and talking about it moves the needle. I'll tell you as a company, we're pushing really hard on, you know, on our own internal strategy on diversity and inclusion, right? And like once we wrote the words down about what, you know, what we aspire to be from a diversity and inclusion perspective, it's the same thing. Everybody reads the words and goes, why wouldn't we do this, right? But until you write it down and kind of have, again, you know, a manifesto or a terra firma of what you're trying to accomplish, you know, then you can rally behind it, right? As opposed to it being, you know, something that's everybody's got their own version of the flavor, right? And I think it's a very analogous, you know, kind of a initiative, right? And it's happening, both of those things, right? Or happening across the industry these days. Right, and measure it too, right? And measure it. Measure it, measure it, get a baseline. Even if you don't like to measure, even if you don't like what the, even if you can argue against the math behind the measurement, measure it and at least you can measure it again and you've got some type of a comp and that is really the only way to move it forward. Well, Patrick, really enjoy the conversation. Thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. It's great to be here, it's an awesome movement and we're glad to be a part of it. All right, thanks. And if you want to check out the BizOps Manifesto, go to bizopsmanifesto.org, read it, you might want to sign it, it's there for you and thanks for tuning in on this segment. We'll continue in coverage of the BizOps Manifesto unveil here on theCUBE. I'm Jeff, thanks for watching.