 Take just a moment and remember your first job in software. What was it like? And who were the people you worked with? And would you say that the successes you achieved were because of or in spite of the environment you worked on? I have to admit as I look back on my own experience, I was really lucky to work with some great people, but the rest is a bit of a mixed bag. I came out of training and some great lab experience, having learned a bunch of languages and written operating systems and done some interesting things with natural language processing. And so I was so excited to get a position working on a defense project inside a big enterprise inside a big government contractor enterprise on satellite and missile systems. And I was ready to put all this knowledge and to solve big chewy problems. And I didn't know that right away I'd run smack into the wall of the cubicle farm. I had so much more to learn, but all that technical education and experience didn't prepare me for. I spent months in that cube reading through big stacks of standard operating procedures, technical specifications, learning about super specialization within this type of software development. Like I said, there was a great team so the people were wonderful, but boy did I find myself spending a lot of time that I wasn't in my cube in dark conference rooms with them at the dreaded change advisory board learning how to carefully review every single proposal for a change because of all the risk it might bring. Now don't get me wrong, I appreciate that that system came up for very good reason over a number of years by very well, many well-intentioned people. And since then, during then and since I've made it really part of my mission in life to think how can we improve things? I am always in awe and so respectful of how amazing teams of people accomplish unbelievable achievement despite the barriers put in their way. But at the same time, I'm always very mindful that if we create an environment that's effective, easy and really most of all fun to work in that's when the real greatness happens, right? To make it easy. So as a leader in a CIO, that's a huge part of my job and I'm really excited to be able to be here today and talk to you a little bit about the work we've done over the last few years to really create that environment and ecosystem for not only our developers but for the whole product team to achieve and succeed and really give the best for our customers and our business units. Here's a photo of one of our great product teams in our labs. I think Abby's theme yesterday was spot on. The developer is a hero. And I kind of think of the whole product team like the Justice League, right? Each product team's like their own Justice League of heroes of different roles really out there getting the right thing done for our business and for the customer. We went in really big on change starting in early 2015. Really systemic change that I want to talk to you about change again that is designed at unleashing the power of these heroes to really perform for all state. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about all state and the great opportunity we've got at hand but really spend some time talking about this ecosystem that we foster that we continue to foster as we scale and perform. And I'm really excited to be able to share with you direct from the voice of some of our customers who've been delighted by the changes we're making and the impact it has on their experience in life. So if you've been here the past few years you might have already heard a little bit about all state. Two years ago our then CTO Andy Zitney talked about how we were creating the freedom to disrupt. He really gave us no excuse to say no to making big bold change. And last year my colleague Doug Stafford came back and he talked about no reason to slow down how to blow through the walls and keep accelerating change and scale of this transformation putting the power in the hands of all of our product teams. So I'm really excited to be able to give you this update. If you don't know about all state I'll just give you the quick rundown. So we were born in 1931 we're just an 86 year old company not quite the century you were hearing about in the last talk. But we were born in a period when the use of the automobile was really scaling. So think about that what a past period of huge societal disruption and then think now what we're living through the wave of digital disruption and the continuing change in automotive and transport and what that brings to our society but particularly to our industry and property and casualty insurance. We're the largest publicly held property and casualty insurer in the US and we have this tremendous responsibility of taking care of over 16 million customer households. That's a tremendous thing that we hold in high regard. Our purpose as a company is to protect those customers from life's uncertainties and to restore them when something bad happens. And for me as chief information officer of the claims division that restoration aspect is really close to the heartbeat of what my team and I do every day. When we work together as an enterprise we're also very committed to giving back in all the communities that we're in and across many, many different dimensions. For the last several years we've really been thinking and dreaming together as a whole company about creating what we call the 22nd Century Corporation. When we think about all the dynamics changing in society and many of those that are so digitally enabled we really think that the companies that continue to thrive in the future will do this by building strategic platforms. Those platforms to allow our customers to interact with other stakeholders and with us in more and more meaningful ways transcending from just a product by product basis to a way to really fulfill our purpose for our customers and their families throughout the different stages of their life. And we'll do that again by strengthening our relationships. How do we show that commitment in many different arms? There's so much that we can do to really connect all of the great assets we have all the power that our customers have and bring it to the fore. And we believe in doing that as a company while we also create positive societal change. I love that aspect. It was a huge thing that attracted me to the company and it's also something that you'll hear we've really worked to live into as we wanna improve the lives for every employee, every developer, every product manager, every designer, everyone that interacts in our ecosystem. Positive change. Together we're all shaping the future and it's really exciting. And I do think it's a huge exciting time. Sometimes we can kinda dwell on the dark clouds of the threat of industry disruption. You heard about it a little bit already this morning. It's amazing to watch and see what competitors are doing, what some of the new upstarts as digital breaks down the barriers to entry, perhaps using some of the same technology we're talking about today, right? One company that's gotten a lot of attention recently is Lemonade offering insurance wholly digitally and in some cases resolving claims in three minutes. It's an interesting case to look at. It's too early to know how that particular business model will play out, but directionally, no doubt, right? There is huge change in the industry. There's change from competitors and new entrants into the market. There's changes from coming from autonomous driving, from the sharing economy, from all different aspects. We're intent on embracing this opportunity and like I said, that's why we really went in big starting in 2015 to change the way we do development. If you stop by our booth, when you get a chance and you're out in the foundry, you'll kind of see our tagline about we're really changing everything. It's how we do, we think, we act, from the start to the end, changing what we do. So let me break it down a little bit and tell you about that ecosystem. And I'm gonna use a metaphor today of this tree growing out in the open air because I think it's really apt to talk about, you can think about a developer is the tree or a product team is the tree, but it's all about kind of healthy growth as an individual and what we give there. But it's also about all the surrounding bits it takes in the environment to make that really flourish. I like using the tree for a couple of reasons. Again, I think it's an apt metaphor. It also reminds me it's the exact opposite. Back when I had that first job and I was sitting in my dank little cubicle farm, I can remember some of my more, I'll say seasoned colleagues used to walk by sometimes and they say like, yep, we're just mushrooms. They keep us in the dark and feed us full of crap. So not growing mushrooms here, we're growing some trees or other great produce on our farm. But again, it's really important because it's at the core of recognizing our company has always been one that valued every individual and what we have to give, but that can get lost in this super system of enterprise level risk and control and how we really put the teams back at the forefront of what we're doing. It starts with being customer-centric, customer and user-driven development. And that sounds pretty obvious, but as some of you may know, it's a bit more of a change than it seems on the surface level if you've been layered into a traditional IT organization that maybe had a lot of intermediaries. In the past era, it was pretty credible to say that someone that had been in the business for 30 years had enough expertise that they could prescribe and specify what we were to build and if we built it, it would be successful. That's no longer the case, right? With changing consumer preferences, with changing competition, we need to get direct to the heart of the customer and direct to the heart of our fellow employees that serve the customer in so many ways. That's really the central, that focal point for us. How do we focus on that? And then it came down to creating the environment. We started with some very bold physical moves in our lab space, creating pairing stations, making screens very visible to be able to track the pipeline, giving lots of collaborative area, moving people from separate functional teams into cross-functional co-located lab settings and giving them plenty of space to work things out. Partnering to do design thinking sessions, moving through learning a lean startup approach, getting into experimentation. Of course, our decision to adopt Cloud Foundry was huge. We worked with Pivotal very closely in the early stages and we're very excited since we joined the foundation to benefit from the whole community. All of these pieces are very necessary, but they're not sufficient, right? They all have to work in tandem. We hired an awesome platform leader in Matt Curry who came in and he's led his team and they have tremendous empathy. So they were a key part of not just getting the platform up and able to run, but in helping teach everybody else within the system what we need to learn. And that's been fantastic. Developer leaders like myself started realizing, wow, we really need to get the devs up tempo and on scale. We've hired great engineers for years, but they performed exactly in the system as we prescribed it, right? How do we make sure people come current with Cloud Native? How do you do that with a large incumbent developer workforce? And most of all, how do you do that without slowing down this tremendous engine of business change that you're only seeking to accelerate at the end of the day? So we developed a partnership with Galvanize and brought a 12-week bespoke boot camp type of approach in-house where we train developers, we train them on XP methods, on new tools, on Cloud Foundry, on other technologies. We've adapted the curricula as we went forward. We've put hundreds of people globally now at different sites through this training. We just graduated a class in Charlotte, North Carolina this week and we'll be starting a class in Dallas in just a few weeks from now. So that's been very effective because what we didn't do is take people out of work and put them into training and then drop them back into work. We brought real product backlog, small to medium-sized candidate products. We trained product managers parallel to the developer program and starting in week five of a 12-week program, they start co-developing. So at the end of 12 weeks, we finish at or near MVP, answering some hypotheses, validating or honestly sometimes invalidating and shutting down threads of inquiry. It's tremendous in the time that we used to spend just discussing and debating whether we could write a check to have some people spend a few hours in a conference room to get together and maybe outline an estimate of what it would take over the next nine months to conceivably get things done if we didn't hit big roadblocks and if the infrastructure got provision, we've got people spinning up and working. From there, we've only like lit the switch to just fire it up even more. Again, the platform enables it, the training enables it, there are many other aspects, other tools we brought in, DevOps, different approaches, it all comes together. It's a holistic environment of really creating this. A big part of it too has been the role changes. It's shifting people from the traditional way of development, again, very segmented waterfall practice to more dynamic, everyone exercising critical thinking, product managers, designers, engineers, all working together, a lot less specialization, moving closer to a full stack approach. We still have specialists that are near to help the teams, but it's amazing, right? I think many of you have seen this, what we can accomplish with a few talented pairs and the right product management and design team to prove things out for the enterprise in a short period of time. So that to me is like the soil, right? Everyone needs to take root. That's the real core of what's feeding you as an individual in the enterprise to be able to exercise your expertise and do that in benefit of the business and the customer. And of course, all that is to apply our best talents to these business opportunities. The winds of change are blowing through. They're accelerating all the time. That's like the air that we're breathing off of. I love the business leaders we're working with who are coming with excited ideas and challenging us and also understanding as they themselves learn more about lean and agile thinking, the concept of MVP. They don't need to ask for it all upfront anymore, but if we can agree what's really useful to prove a hypothesis, we can move out together. So it is a cross-functional effort. It does cross the bounds of technology, but it's been very exciting to see where with the technology we can able to explore in these business opportunities at speed. And then I want to take a few minutes to talk about the support that has to happen because I think that's easy to gloss over sometimes. People understand it takes an enormity of investment and support, but also I hear people sometimes jump right to the fact, well, if you did all that, right, if you invested in the labs and you changed all of your real estate, if you invested in the partnerships and the training and cloud foundry and you brought all this in, you obviously have top-down support and you are just there and going. And it is true, it takes that support, but once again necessary, not sufficient. It's not a one-time willing to write a check from those of us at the most senior levels on down through, it really takes continuing support and from the technology leadership across to the business, just spent a lot of time all of us on the ground exploring our own behaviors, our own rules, how do we act, how do we show up, how do we really support and enable the team? Those are some great themes I think in leadership in general, one book that I read over the past years, I got a lot of meaning out of was team of teams by retired Army General Stan McChrystal. And he talks about this thing, right? We need, the teams to me are the various product teams but getting them to work together and that in the past, the command and control mindset, we thought we could just say use cloud foundry, pair it together, why aren't you building great software? And instead there are all the things day to day that can creep in, it's ongoing funding, it's making sure there aren't contradictory messages. It's really walking the talk. I've realized more and more consciously in the last six months with my teams as I sat down at the end of last year and I reflected, I thought we've made so much tremendous progress and people have really went into that and been willing to be courageous in the change but where else can we go? And I thought we're still often sitting and having dialogue about theoretical things or people are coming to me and they're letting me know we're having great progress, we're still green on developing the product and here's the date it'll go in. And I started the year saying what I wanna do when I spend time with my teams now is I want more touch and feel, more show and tell and less kind of opining over the abstract structures that make us all comfortable. So let's put away the PowerPoint decks and let me just come into the lab and see your latest demo and look at what's going on or grab me if you need my support for when I'm going into meetings or can advocate or bring the team. That's also just collapsing the speed, right? We have all these tools to collapse the speed of development. If we can collapse the speed at which management support and decisions are made it is so vital to our progress there. I'm really, really excited about the progress we've made. Again, my team's been amazing seeing individuals that have been in the enterprise from brand new hires to people that have been with us 25 or more years embracing this way of working, excited, thrilled stepping up to the next challenge. And it's not just us, it is across the whole enterprise. And to me, this is where when we pull back we see the force that's being created by all this good health of the individual product teams and all that benefit that we get from being part of the ecosystem. The future's so bright when I can better connect what I'm doing in claims with my partners in connected car and they can connect to what we're doing in roadside services and we can connect all of that back to the insurance policies we offer. There's just more and more virtue there to be tapped as the new business opportunities and challenges come. It's really, really exciting. We still got a lot of scaling to do. It's far from over, but it's a really tremendous time I think to be part of this digital revolution. And like I said, it's not just how I feel about it. It's seen what our customers share, particularly on social media. We get a lot of good stories that come through. We get some too that are concerning. That's great feed into the product process that helps us adapt. But I love this first one on the top left that someone shared. I'm not tech savvy at all and I was hesitant when I was instructed. I mean, that already sounds bad there, right? I was instructed to work my claim through the app. But then like, oh my God, they're a convert. So many pieces of people saying, when you have a claim to begin with, right, that's never the best day of your life. So when somebody can leave feeling happy about the experience, then we know we've really done something right to turn that around. It is, like I said, it's all about the customers at the end of the day, but it's also really about the people at every role at every level. It's about really taking care of the developers and the mandate of leadership to do that, to get out of the way and make sure we're not in the way and to help hurdle other barriers and get there. I'm so excited to be here. I'm excited for the program the next day and a half. I really want to thank all of you, members of the community and all of the folks at the Foundry. We get so much from being members and from having these experiences. I know we've got people in our labs today that are watching the live stream and will take so much away from this gathering that are going to help us on the next stage of our journey. So I hope we'll be back to share in the future. Thank you so much. Thank you.