Guest Bio: Richard Dalton, Head of Design at Verizon, is a seasoned expert in the field of user experience and design. With a rich history at Capital One and now leading design at Verizon, Richard brings a wealth of knowledge on managing large-scale product development.

In our conversation, we discuss:

00:01:00: The Complexity of Coordinating Hundreds of Product Teams

Richard highlights the inherent complexity and messiness of coordinating and aligning hundreds of product teams. Verizon has over 300 Agile ACT teams, each managing its own backlogs, epics, stories, and priorities within a broad ecosystem of touchpoints, channels, and products. When projects get delayed or new products are added for release each year it requires a massive coordination effort involving thousands of people leading to huge waste for the organisation.

00:02:00: The Value of Visualisation with Jam Jars

Richard uses a metaphor to illustrate this complexity, comparing the 300 agile teams to 300 jam jars filled with water, representing their current workload. When a new product requires changes involving, for example, 42 of these teams, some jars overflow because they are already full. Resolving this requires lowering the priority of some initiatives, but since each initiative involves many other teams there are cascading effects that can be hard to understand. Richard is tackling this today using spreadsheets but is in the process of implementing a strategic enterprise portfolio management system to better balance capacity and manage multiple projects simultaneously.

00:08:00: Who Feels the Pain of the Replanning

Agile product owners and their teams feel the most pain from juggling multiple requests and managing overflowing workloads. The lack of a proper system forces each product owner to make difficult decisions on what to prioritise, often leading to inefficiencies and delays in product launches. They can try to coordinate the movements with each of the other 299 product owners but this is incredibly inefficient and results in significant business impacts.

00:30:00: Why SAFe Isn't Always Safe

Even though Verizon uses the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) for structure and predictability through quarterly and product increment planning, Richard explains that SAFe isn't always effective in their complex environment. The framework's periodic planning cycles struggle to keep up with the rapid and unexpected changes that occur during a cycle. These changes create ripple effects across the entire portfolio, rendering static plans quickly outdated. Richard stresses the need for a dynamic system that can continuously adapt and re-prioritize in real-time to complement the periodic planning sessions.

00:35:00: Fixing the Plane Mid-Flight

Richard discusses the irony of trying to reduce overheads for teams by implementing a strategic enterprise portfolio management system which, during implementation, will increase the overhead for each team. He likens it to fixing a plane while it's in flight. Despite this, Richard is confident that the overheads will be paid back within weeks due to the improvement in performance across all of the teams.

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Where to find Richard Dalton: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richarddalton

Where to find Rory Madden: Website: https://zeroblockers.com

Twitter: @roryuxdx

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/rorymadden