 All right, good morning, good morning, everyone. How are the energy levels? Good, 10. Oh my God, we have some people who are super energized. Who's feeling low? All right, I got to tell you something. So I live in Barcelona yesterday when I flew into Stockholm. I actually, the first thing that I did, my jacket was in the luggage. I took out my jacket and it was freaking cold. I lost 20 degrees yesterday, and that was like, definitely a thermic shock. So if you're feeling low, I'm feeling even lower because of that. Today, what we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about the case of VistaPrint. But before we do that, I would love to a little bit introduce myself. So first of all, on the Excel sheet, my last name is Paltron. So if you look me up on LinkedIn with that, you will never be able to find me. You'll probably find somebody else, actually, which could be kind of funny. But you can add me on LinkedIn. I'm also on Twitter. I use much more LinkedIn than anything else. If you want to add me on Facebook, if we'd be able to become friends, why not? We could always do that. A little bit about myself. So I'm not Swedish. I'm not Spanish either, although I live in Barcelona. I'm Turkish-Bulgian. I've been living from Barcelona for the last five years, of which four with VistaPrint. I've been working my entire career in HR. So for the last 10 years, I spent working in recruiting, in town acquisition, HR business partner roles. Today, I lead the strategy and insights team, globally, for our town and experience team at VistaPrint. And I have actually two main hopes for this presentation today. My first hope is that this feels authentic and pragmatic. Authentic, because we only have 20 minutes, I will have to rush through a lot of things. And we're going to basically summarize our agile transformational journey in 20 minutes, something that has lasted for more than four, five years. It's just not doing justice for something that has taken so long. So while I will highlight most of the things that have worked well, there are definitely things that haven't worked well and that we piloted and lessons learned. And there have been also a lot of moments of frustration, including for myself. Because at the beginning, we were spending much more time in getting organized, in talking about the way we work, than actually delivering value to our customers. And that was quite frustrating. But I'm a firm believer that in order to go fast, in order to achieve agility, you need to go slow at the beginning. And you need to slow down things. And my other hope is that this feels pragmatic. So we'll be talking about very concrete examples. I purposely wanted to do that because I wanted you actually guys to feel about, how does it feel on the ground at VistaPrint? Versus talking about models and things that we have actually elaborated. My second hope is that actually it's linked with what everybody else said at the very beginning, is that you guys get inspired, that there is some inspiration here, of things that you might either say, oh, this is actually quite interesting, this might work well with us, or you might say, this doesn't resonate with me, but it's so inspiring because it's just the way you guys have found your own voice and defined your own culture. Does that work for you guys? All right, cool. How many of you know VistaPrint by show of hands? All right, we've got half of the crew, which is not so bad. So VistaPrint is actually founded by Robert Keane, who is the CEO of our matter company called Simpress. We're about 7,000 employees. We have our headquarters in Boston in the United States, and we have more than 20 offices across the globe, mostly in Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia. We sell 4.3 billion business cards in a year, and this only in North America. So we're mostly known for our business cards. We do other marketing materials as well, like polos, if you want to print out your logo on a polo, or hats, or t-shirts, those are the things that we produce marketing materials basically. We have 16 million customers each year, a number of those repeat, and we generated 1.5 billion revenues last fiscal year. The picture that you see is a picture of actually our Waltham office that's just outside Boston, Massachusetts. We have about 700 employees there, and I actually am based in Barcelona, although it's frequent travels to Boston. In Barcelona, we're about 240 employees, just to give you an idea about the magnitude, and we're 40 different nationalities. We're quite diverse in just one office. By the way, all the pictures that you will see in the presentation are either pictures that have been taken by VistaPrint employees, some of them are taken by myself, or professional pictures taken by VistaPrint or for VistaPrint. So none of the pictures, if you see people appear in the pictures, it's because it's pictures from our offsites. It thinks that actually those are actual VistaPrint people. So let's start a little bit about our journey. Agile at VistaPrint started in 2013. It started completely organically. It started in the technology teams and in Barcelona. Shouldn't come as a surprise because Agile has its roots, obviously, in software development. So what happened is that those teams were actually already used to working in a specific way, and they started basically testing out and experimenting much more with Agile. We saw definitely some results in delivering working software much faster to customers. But technology never works in isolation. It works with different teams, right? So we had different experiments started running across the organization, starting although with technology, but that we're spending across different teams. We had marketing teams interacting with technology. We had creative teams interacting with technology. And what we realized is that they were actually starting to raise their hands by saying, this works for them. They were able to reduce and they were able to build working software in much less time. Why wouldn't this work for us? So what they did is they started running experiments on their own. At that time, at no point in time, we had mentioned that we wanted to use Agile as an organization. We didn't even fully know, I think, what it was. In 2015, this is where our journey starts for our HR team. We actually rebranded it to talent and experience. This is also our logo. Our logo is the compass, which shows what our northern star is and where we want to head. It also shows actually where we want to focus on. So we have priorities that are defined each year and we're very transparent with those. So how did we get there? In 2014, it started actually with this, with our approach to performance and feedback. So if your organization is starting to work much more with cross-functional teams and delivering and working in projects in incremental value, there are different feedbacks that you start to hearing on saying, why do we have a semi-annual process? Why do we have an annual process? It doesn't make sense. And there are two main feedbacks that we actually heard from the people. First feedback is annual feedback is not timely. If there is a project that I'm working on in September and if there is feedback from specific people, from a specific person to me, why am I getting that feedback through my manager in May, June at the annual review process? And that was very consistent across the organization. And it's something that we said, well, it kind of makes sense, but how could we do it differently? The second feedback, which I was 100% behind as well, was that feedback was treated anonymous, confidential. So basically, I would have some feedback for John. I would go to John's manager, give that feedback. John's manager, let's call her Karen. Karen would have that conversation with John, hey, I got some feedback for you, but I cannot say where it comes from. It's confidential, it's anonymous, and you're not allowed to ask many questions, but this is the feedback there is for you. So basically completely useless, you can't do anything with it, and you can't even challenge it because the person who was giving you that feedback is not the person who was experimenting with this. So what we did is we said, okay, we're hearing all these different feedbacks from the organization about what we should be doing. Also, we're seeing different trends on the market. We had read a number of articles from the Harvard Business Review, Deloitte was eliminating the performance reviews, GE was also going into that direction, and we're saying like, what should we be doing? What is actually helpful for us? So what we did is we started with an open space facilitation technique. I'm assuming most of you are familiar with this, but it's just in case. What we did is basically we invited up to 100 people in each of our sites and we organized a session where we basically gave them a problem statement and we did a lot of divergent and convergent thinking. What we did is we said, we actually had a bold statement. What should we do differently to grow and develop talents at Vistaprint? We invited up to 100 people for each session and we ran a number of those in different offices. This is actually a real picture behind from that session. And people were giving us different feedbacks. We had facilitators come in. Those facilitators were not from talent and experience because back then HR had a very negative connotation. And so we hired external facilitators. We could facilitate this actually for us. We were present but we actually were asked to shut our mouth and just listen to what people were saying. What we heard during that session is a couple of things. First of all, the formal annual process, people didn't understand why it was manager lets. Why don't we give the accountability to our people? Why don't we, should I not be driving this as an employee at Vistaprint? And plus, why don't we have ongoing feedback? If there's somebody who has a feedback for me, it shouldn't go through a triangle and create this drama triangle with the manager, that person should come directly to me. That was one idea that got prioritized because we had people voting for actually the different ideas. This one was quite interesting because we identified a big impediment for this. And the biggest impediment that people identified was for this to work, people need to be skilled at giving and receiving feedback. It's actually only working if you are giving feedback that comes from a good intent place. If you know how to choose your words. If people are receptive for feedback, if there is no defensive reaction for it. So we said, all right, let's capture all those impediments and let's try to see what we could be doing. Let's not try to jump to solutions right away. Let's keep all ideas on the table. And then afterwards, what we did is we also heard, well, for us specifically, this was the very first time that within our HR team, we had actually co-created with the organization. We had worked more than 500 people for this. We had never done this in the past. In the past, what we would have done is we would have designed something, we would have listened to certain people, mostly leadership team members. We would have come back and we would have done a big bang introduction and an implementation across VistaPrint for 7,000 people. And a year later, we would have learned that the adoption rate would not even be 5%. So that was a big change. Regarding feedback, when we identified the impediments, we actually figured out an approach to address that. What we did is we leveraged feedback champions. At VistaPrint, for all of our talent and experience initiatives, we leveraged champions. How do we do that? So we said, we have a lot of people in the business, we actually have the right mindset and the attitude in giving and receiving feedback. Why don't we train those people? We wanna spend 10 to 20% of their time. We're very passionate about this topic and we'll help us train the rest of the organization. So we did that. And the way we do those sessions is not by imposing a framework. We don't talk about frameworks. We actually facilitate conversations because we believe in power of connections. We have always two facilitators in a group of 10, 12 people, cross-functional teams, three to four hours. We ask what is actually, how do you have received or giving feedback recently? What were your challenges? How did that work for you? What are the things we could be changing? And basically we engage in conversations. The fact that those are cross-functional teams and that people don't work regularly with one another is actually incredibly helpful because you get to see and hear different perspectives. So this is where we actually realized, we said we had to pause and we said, okay, so let's start to rebrand our name and we moved away from HR to talent and experience. The company by that time in 2015 had also realized that the majority of the organization was already working in an agile way. So they said, all right, why don't we actually hire a team internally and externally? And we staff them with agile coaches and we make sure that they can actually enable this change throughout the organization. So what we did is we opened a number of positions internally and externally. Externally actually just four. We hired quite senior people across different offices, agile coaches. We wanted to help us with this transformation. And then internally what we said is we opened more than 10 positions for 7,000 people if you think about it. And what we did is we said, well, if you're interested in learning, if you're interested in becoming an agile coach, we will be actually investing in you. We will be making, we will make this work. Our work was completely behind the idea. Why, why would someone like, why would a CMO say, all right, I'm willing to give up four of my resources and I'm not gonna replace that because you don't have additional headcount, you don't have additional budget. It's because ultimately the agile coaches will come from marketing and will have been trained there. They are the best ones who know how marketing works. So they are the best ones who will be ultimately helping actually your teams to work in a different way. And that's actually what happened. I'll skip this just in the interest of time. This is a picture of our offsite, our Tandon Experience offsite a few years ago. This was in Maine in the US. And what we did is we basically introduced the agile manifesto and we, we talked to everybody like about the manifesto. One of the things that we however had identified is that there was a big barrier with the manifesto. If you think about it, look at all the terminology of software in it. So we have people saying, well, this working software that doesn't resonate with me, our working accounting, our working finance or our working marketing. So what we did is we said, all right, let's create our own manifesto with our business agility values and principles. We rewrote out, we rewrote to values. We said, all right, what if we say instead of delivering working software but delivering value early and often to the customer? So we changed those principles. The way we do this is after doing this, what we did is we actually trained our 7,000 people in the same format through agile champions, same concept as feedback champions, people who wanna spend 10 to 20% of their time, facilitated conversations by two champions in a round table of 10 to 12 people. And what we asked them is we don't impose a mindset because you can't change somebody's mindset, but you do wanna actually have a conversation about it. So we say, what does customer success look to you? What does customer success look to you? And you actually make sure that you leverage the room so that people challenge with one another. So people with specific backgrounds would come up with customer success means this to me and for somebody else, it would mean something completely different. And that's okay. The facilitators role is to remain neutral but to challenge to make sure that people have a good understanding and they have good collaboration across the room. And we go through the 12 principles as well. So we have created our own business agility values and principles. Today, we have 95% of our employees from the 7,000 that have gone through this training. This is also part of our onboarding. So it's a three to four hour facilitated conversation with 10 to 12 people. By the way, this picture before we were featured in Forbes. I like this picture because we're quite good on this picture, but also because just part of our talent and experience team, there's an article from Steve Denning on our talent and experience transformation. If you just wanna hear a little bit more, we're also part of the learning consortium. There are a lot of cases about how we actually drive customer centricity within the organization. If you wanna look it up and if you wanna have more information there, I'm also happy to chat during lunchtime. All right, so one of the things that we also did was around thinking, okay, so what are the challenges and enablers we have within the talent and experience team? We started with a Kanban board because we wanted to visualize some of the work. And the way we do this, because we never believe in push, but towards pull, we actually ask questions, all right, what is the goal that you wanna reach? What is ultimately the outcomes you wanna reach? And people were saying, we wanna be able to help one another quite quickly. So we wanna visualize our work. We never talk about Toyota's rules on Kanban and all of those things. We say, blah, blah, blah, just move away from that. Let's do whatever makes sense to you. And we actually think about make and starting small. So we started with our first visualizing visual board, this one specifically. I think this one was actually in Boston, but then we moved away and we did, we obviously used a digital form of it. We also do stand-ups, retrospectives, product reviews. So there was a lot of education from our agile coaches to our team. At our team off-site, we came up with a purpose. We talked about enablers, but also challenges in how we work. And we're very inclusive in our talent and experience team. We're about 100 people supporting 7,000 people across Vistaprint and we try to really get the input from everybody in our team in really defining this. So if you look at the enablers, some of them are, we believe that we actually are open to try new things. We're very open in doing and starting small and experimenting. If you look at the challenges, we're thinking about the organization. How do we actually implement this? Those are small incremental works and how do we give visibility? Ultimately, where we lend it is with the following. There is a small video that I would like to show you. Okay, so it's internal use only, but I'm showing it here. We actually, the way we did it, we asked our employees obviously on what is the best way to communicate with you guys to give you visibility. They said, don't send another email place where we don't read them anyway. So what we did is we did different channels. One of them was this video because we have screens in all of our offices and we actually displayed this video for a few months. The words that you saw, remember, we word send recognition and all of these things, those are actually our products, the focus areas that we have. So we want it to be very visible to the people without talking terminology about product owners and what we do exactly, how does it interest them? But ultimately it's the outcomes we want to reach. So we want to talk about, hey, we want to have a place where people recognize each other, where you also have the tools that actually to make this work and happen. So there are a number of experiences that we have prioritized. Here you can see some of those. The example that you see and the way we are organized in talent and experiences, we have product owners. This is the triangle. This one is actually an example of a cross-functional product team. Amy Waters, who is the product owner, she actually is the closest to the business, probably who understands the strategy, sets the strategy and the what and the why about what we're trying to achieve. You have a delivery lead, Ali, here in this case. What she is doing is she's making sure that the work is chunked down into increments and the work gets done. Melissa, who is our agile coach on this team specifically, make sure that we actually have the right ceremonies to be successful for this. And then the team members, for each of our products at VistaPrint, we continuously co-create with our team members. There is no single product, no single experience that we do without talking to our team members. So we involve them. What are their champions as feedback champions or agile champions? But for all of our experience, we do that. So I know in the interest of time, and you're probably all hungry, what I will do is I will just explain one last thing and then we can close. A very specific example of one thing that we experimented with is at Agile 2017, we actually heard an organization that was trying a sailboat exercise, basically on getting and receiving feedback in an open way. The way it would work is that you would invite, if you want to gather feedback for yourself, you would invite all the people that you want to participate and you would have a sailboat that you would draw. The wins would be your strengths, the things that propel you forward. So let's say for myself, what are the things that propel you forward, that actually make them shine and move forward? And then you would also have rocks. What are the things that slow me down that come into my way? And we would have brainstorming and so you would see themes emerging. It allows actually also the receiver to ask clarifying question and to see, all right, so this is where the feedback is going. Today at Vistaprint, we're using this for all of our candidates. So we always ask our candidates, are you comfortable after being interviewed by four people to have an open feedback session? Which means that the candidate, it sits in the room, you have four interviewers who have never talked to each other about the feedback of that person and we would actually give openly feedback to that candidate. The candidate actually is allowed to ask question and we even encourage that, but also allowed to explain himself or herself so that you have a very concrete example. Oh, did you feel that? Well, well, it's because I was nervous. I didn't really mean that or something like that. Sorry. And then ultimately, the reason why we do this, there's always a why and a what's very clear. Here, this allows us to see how the person is receptive to feedback and reacts to feedback. So there is a way for us to assess cultural ads, not cultural fits. It's just actually by seeing the reactions and there is not one single person or candidate who so far has said, no, I don't want to be actually in the session. The feedback that we received, some people sent me emails over LinkedIn and I have never interviewed them or seen them. They said, it's such a bummer that I got to know but actually I've never received such an honest and transparent feedback. It felt truly authentic and they're really grateful for that. And we also make decisions changes, right? So sometimes when you see interviewers debating amongst themselves, they would have one opinion and then when they talk directly about the feedback with the candidates, they would change their opinion. They say, actually that doesn't make sense to us. So to close, all right, this is getting, you can see that I'm using Windows and the other speakers had Mac. So all right, I just wanted to thank you guys. I hope I had two hopes for this presentation, being authentic and pragmatic and giving actually some inspiration. So I hope that this was inspiration for you guys. Thank you.