DisruptoVision vs Executive Synergy

DisruptoVision

In the heart of Silicon Valley is a startup called DisruptoVision. Their CEO, Thad Nevowitz, wears a t-shirt and jeans to work, and, despite attending C-suite meetings most of the day, loves to hangout with all the employees. On Fridays his staff can finish two hours early and have a free beer or two. A foosball table can be found on each floor, usually across from the discounted café selling all sorts of coffees and cereals.

DisruptoVision takes pride in its Agile ways of working. It’s a huge selling point and something that dominates its recruitment strategy. “Want to be part of a great Agile team?” starts every job posting. “We don’t have managers, per se,” says the Head of Engineering, “we have leaders. Our people - oh, we call them people, not resources - are agile. We really believe in a pragmatic approach to using Agile, and part of that is enabling our development teams to self-organize. Just the other day, one of the teams planned, budgeted, and held its own after-work drinks and bowling night to celebrate its release of a major product.”

“We believe in face-to-face communication because it says it right there in the Agile manifesto,” explains Thad. “We require our employees to come into the office at least three days a week.” In the main workspaces are large open tables where everyone uses laptops. Their ‘flexi-space’ hotdesking office allows employees to work face-to-face as needed. The office has focus pods, where employees can escape the buzz of teamwork to concentrate on their work in silence for up to thirty minutes a session (before they have to reschedule the pod).

“Our teams, or Guilds, use Scrum. Well, a version of Scrum that fits DisruptoVision. They have Sprints, daily stand-ups, and all the other Agile ceremonies. Each team has an Agile Guild Lead, kind of like the Scrum Master. They make sure the team doesn’t have any blockers, run the Retrospectives, and facilitate the demos.

We ditched Waterfall some time ago. Our CEO was never a big fan. Plus he got us a great deal with FutureConsultants to help implement our transformation. It’s great, we’ve seen a huge productivity increase since using this method of Agile.”

A robust Career Development program exists so that everyone has the opportunity to grow. Pauline Vobard is the Human Resources Lead. She says that without the people, the company wouldn’t exist, and it’s important that that’s reflected in how everyone is cared for.

“We love recognition. We reward people for their hard work. We handed out thirty $500 gift cards to different employees last year for their contributions to DisruptoVision. One Guild member got an award for helping out a new employee in Marketing when they really didn’t have to! Another got an award for exceeding their annual performance goals. Each employee gets an HR Buddy, who helps them build out a career plan that fits their needs, with personal goals, personal training, and a reporting system in place to help make sure they are happy.”

DisruptoVision has recently invested a lot into a new product, a mobile application simplifying business to business financial transactions. The Head of Product, Jack, describes it as the product that will make DisruptoVision known worldwide. “It’s a great product, a really great idea that we’ve been thinking about for some time now. We eventually got the investment for it and progress has been great. We’re on our sixteenth Sprint. The MVP is nearly done and the first release should be soon. Because we’re Agile, we’ve been able to adapt our requirements to changing stakeholder needs so that we can give them exactly what they want.”

DisruptoVision Guilds work on a two-week Sprint cycle. This is a standard across all of the teams to ensure coordination and keep dependencies manageable. The intention is to help keep Guild velocity stable, and although recent vacations, changes in personnel, and bugs have disrupted velocity, most Agile Guild Leads are confident things will level out soon.

​Guilds usually start developing the products after an initial discovery period. “Discovery usually lasts a couple of months. Some of our Business Analysts, our Agile Guild Leads, and some key stakeholders get together and visualize all the requirements for the product. This helps us create a flexible Product Backlog and enables our Guilds to finish up other projects while we get our ideas ready for them. It’s amazing what Agile facilitation techniques look like - we have a mountain of post-it notes afterwards!” Jack laughs.

​Not everything is perfect at DisruptoVision. Like any company, it faces challenges here and there. Thad says, “Oh yeah, we have things we have to fix. But that’s part of being Agile, I guess, learning to fix problems. But we have great people to help us find solutions. Every now and again, we’ll hire an Agile Coach contractor to come in and fix some of the bigger issues; but for the most part, we’re able to do it ourselves.

A great example of this is the loss we were making on our Pivo3 product. There were so many bugs and quality issues we were losing customers. So we hired Tom, the ‘QA dude’. He’s set up a better reporting process for each Guild so that bugs are escalated to leaders faster. Now the work can be re-prioritized accordingly. We’re confident customer retention for that product will improve in the next few months.”`

​When asked about his future, Thad is very thankful for his employees’ hard work. “Being CEO of DisruptoVision has given me the passion to help other companies, too. What we’ve done here looks great on my CV. I really want to thank everyone at DisruptoVision for helping me get to where I am. Being able to share that with other organizations would be a dream.”

Executive Synergy

Executive Synergy Inc. (ESI) is located in Dayton, Ohio. It sits across from a strip mall, where, pre-COVID, you’d often find its employees stopping for lunch at Subway. Ted Bernstein, founder and CEO of ESI, is in his late sixties. His office sits on the 2nd floor in the corner, with two windows overlooking the intersection of two main streets.

Everyone at ESI had a cubicle. Everyone would wear a suit, or something formal, even though it's not required. Since the COVID pandemic, however, all employees tend to work from home. The office has shrunk to only the second floor for special meetings - the first floor is now leased out to the public and other businesses for special events. The majority of ESI’s employees start at 8:30 AM and finish at exactly 5 PM. Events outside of work hours are uncommon.

There is no Career Development program at the moment. At ESI, employees have an average tenure of five years, with most remaining in the same position they were hired into.

ESI has one core product: WeConnect. WeConnect helps people to register for and take part in local government events and programs. Ninet, a member of the team that develops the product, explained a typical project. “Our projects use the Waterfall model to help create value. Each project has a planning period, the team will analyze the things that need to be done, a bit of design occurs, development happens, and testing. Sometimes things go back and we repeat some of that to meet our project’s objective.”

Interestingly, ESI projects are quite short. Ninet explains further, “our projects are no longer than one month. We just can’t take the risk of our assumptions about customer needs or architectural design, and so on, being wrong. So each one of our Waterfall projects is usually about three weeks but it’s never more than a month. Each project starts with a Planning Phase in the form of a team meeting, no longer than a day, and each feature that we work on goes through its own ‘waterfall’ so-to-speak, and can be released independently.

Our time to market is incredibly short. We often release many times in a single project. These short projects are valuable because they enable us to validate our assumptions about the product.”

Success at ESI isn’t based on completion of a project, however, it’s the value of the product and the learning made along the way. “We often get our projects done within time and to budget, allowing for scope to adjust, but that’s not really the point. We’re more interested in what we learn and the value our project contributes to WeConnect. For example, two projects ago, we were pretty confident that upgrading WeConnect with a more robust architecture would improve the performance and thus keep our end-users engaged more frequently. We tested this by redesigning and reworking a small part of our architecture first. We were wrong - despite an increase in performance, there was no evidence of change in customer behavior. Fortunately it didn’t take us longer than three weeks to find out. The insight we gained on that was hugely valuable because we were able to pivot to more valuable projects afterwards.”

Every day, the team comes together to look at the progress of the project against their project schedule and plan - which is created using Microsoft Project. If something doesn’t look right, or if they’re falling behind, they adjust the project plan.

At the end of every project, the team meets with stakeholders to discuss the results. They discuss the lessons learned about the product, review data supporting these insights, and decide on the next valuable project. The team then meets to discuss how they can improve their ways of working. The Director of Product says, “We often recognize that the way we write our contracts could improve. We work with the government, so our contracts are often lengthy, but we identify waste in them and work with those government departments to cut back on the waste next time.

We also find localized team improvement opportunities. Last project we realized that our scheduling tool was becoming too cumbersome. We decided to try out a new tool for the current project. It’s much more lightweight and allows us to collaborate as a team much more effectively.”

Crystal, one of the Quality Assurance experts says, “We’ve all been working here so long. We have such a good team. We know how we all work, we’ve built a lot of trust.” The lack of career progression support is misleading, explains Crystal. “It’s not that we don’t progress in our careers, it’s just that we often do it while keeping the same role and job title. I started here knowing very little about Quality Assurance, I’m now an expert at it - apologies for the lack of humility. Why would I want to get promoted to a position where I no longer do what I’m great at? That’s how we treat career progression here. People do what they love and are good at and they grow in that role. We of course have the option to shift if we want, but most of us love our jobs. We get paid based on the value we deliver; if our product succeeds, we get paid more.”

Shirley, one of the longest serving Project Managers explains that her role is quite different today to what it was before. “Some of the other Project Managers left because they didn’t like the changes, but I love it. I’m less hands-on, less micro managerial now.

I take a leadership role; I help unblock our teams, I trust them because they’re transparent, I share information they need to make better decisions, I help them understand the barriers in which their ability to get work done can flourish. My role is no longer about command and control, it’s about facilitating and leading.”

When asked whether ESI considers itself an Agile organization or a Waterfall one, Shirley responds, “I know that Agile’s quite popular at the moment, but we don’t bother with labels, so we never really think of ourselves as Agile or not Agile. We naturally follow a Waterfall model for each project. Some planning, some development, some testing, some re-work perhaps, and finish off with some closure and lessons learned. We just have minimal change control processes, minimal governance, and very lightweight management from top-down.”

“I never really bought into the whole Agile vs Waterfall argument,” Shirley continues. “Apples to oranges. I know plenty of companies that claim to be Agile - whatever that means - therefore hate Waterfall, run the greatest Retrospectives, and have wonderfully decorated workboards to visualize their work, but take years to release a product. Meanwhile, we have our product enhancement ideas on a blend of Excel and Project that trickle down our Waterfall approach to development, and we release several times every three weeks.”

Ted Bernstein concedes that his organization might not be optimal, that surely there is waste, that there are always ways to improve, and perhaps contemporary concepts like self-management would be beneficial. But, Ted insists, while his competitors “horse around with collaborative tools, relative estimation, and bean bags for employees”, ESI is continuously pumping out a high value product to happy customers.