Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Gene Kim explains that Agile and DevOps were heavily influenced by Lean and the Toyota Production System. He says his work with Dr. Steven Spear explored what Agile, DevOps, the Toyota Production System, and other management systems have in common, concluding that they are incomplete expressions of a greater whole. He frames this session as a chance to see how Toyota Production System culture helps when senior leaders are deeply trained in those norms. He introduces Toyota Connected North America as the service providing emergency assistance to more than 12 million vehicles, and introduces Kevin O'Dell, Director of Engineering, and Lisa Frey, Agile Services Manager, who will discuss the capabilities they set out to deliver, the difficulties they had, what they did about it, and how the Toyota Management System enabled them.

Kevin O'Dell and Lisa Frey

Kevin greets the ETLS audience and says the conference is his favorite because attendees leave with tangible takeaways they can put into action. He introduces himself as Director of Engineering at Toyota Connected North America. Lisa introduces herself as Agile Services Manager at Toyota Connected.

Kevin describes the setting: Toyota Motor North America's campus is in Plano, Texas, near Dallas-Fort Worth, but Toyota Connected works about a mile away in a facility with a Silicon Valley feel. Toyota Connected was created in 2016 as a Toyota company focused on engineering, innovation, connected technologies, and software-defined vehicles. He explains Toyota Connected's work in the cockpit: the "Hey Toyota" and "Hey Lexus" voice bot was built from the ground up before ChatGPT; the head unit, multimedia, and navigation areas were designed and developed by Toyota Connected North America; and the vehicle data services process CAN data, tire pressure, diagnostic data, and other streaming sensor information.

Kevin narrows the talk to Safety Connect, a service Toyota Connected brought in-house after previously using a third party. He describes the SOS button in Toyota and Lexus vehicles, automatic collision notification when airbags deploy, enhanced roadside assistance that sends vehicle data to a roadside provider, vehicle locator for stolen vehicles, vehicle activation when vehicles roll off a production line or enter a port of entry so they stay connected for the lifetime of the vehicle, and destination assist.

Kevin says that beneath those services is the asset he also manages: service operations and more than 300 safety agents. The agents are trained around Omotenashi, which he defines as hospitality: treating customers as you want to be treated and anticipating their next need. He plays examples of agent calls: an emergency notification from a vehicle, a 911 handoff after an automatic collision notification, a crash at a guardrail requiring police and ambulance, and live vehicle tracking for a person who had a stroke, has dementia, left in a vehicle, and may endanger themselves or others.

After the recording, Kevin says the work gives him goosebumps. The agents are there for Toyota customers and Lexus guests. He says the platform has almost 13 million active vehicles, launched in 2019, has handled 600,000 safety-related calls requiring medical assistance dispatch, and 35,000 vehicle-tracking cases. Stolen vehicles are 80 to 90 percent of that work, but Toyota Connected also handles missing persons, kidnappings, carjackings, homicides, and self-harm situations.

Kevin says that, from an engineering perspective, what they build must be reliable, durable, and built in quality, just like Toyota and Lexus vehicles. In a crash, two streams come out of the vehicle: a voice call and a data send. The voice call goes directly to the call center, where they use Twilio and Salesforce to provide agents with a full stack for customer needs. The telematics services behind that use technologies including AWS, Kubernetes, MongoDB, and RabbitMQ. The outcomes include getting someone medical assistance, a tow truck, or support for subscription needs. For medical response, they must integrate with 6,000 different 911 centers to send data and information and connect customers.

Kevin says the platform has more than 200 microservices across the vehicle lifecycle, about 50,000 lines of custom code in Twilio and Salesforce, redundancy like a vehicle, a 99.99 percent uptime mandate, and a requirement that a human respond and talk to customers within three seconds. Engineers deploying code to production cannot mess up an emergency call. Toyota Connected uses a "you build it, you run it" mindset, deploys four to five times a week, and deploys during the day so people are present if something happens.

Kevin jokes that if he said Toyota Connected had the whole DevOps thing figured out, it would be a lie. When the platform went to production, it was a march to production aligned to a three-year vehicle milestone with no option to push the date. Tech debt was piling up, automation was broken or absent, prioritization was out of whack, and the organization was unsettled while growing from a small company into a more midsized company. Then Lisa showed up.

Lisa Frey

Lisa says they built it, and then had to figure out how to own it. She joined Toyota Connected and the Drive Link family about five and a half years earlier, about nine months after vehicles began coming off the line with the new platform. The teams were proud of the product and had reason to be: they had replaced a vendor-created solution with an in-house platform that saved Toyota money. But after eight or nine months of supporting and operating it, they wondered what came next. She met proud, wickedly smart engineers who were lost and unsure where to go. Her job, with others, was to help them retain the startup mindset while learning to operationalize it.

Lisa presents five key takeaways, with a sixth sprinkled throughout. The first is to create a waste-loving culture. She quotes Gene Kim: you cannot fix what you cannot see. The point of waste is seeing what is wrong so it can be fixed. Her first move in Drive Link was to help the teams see the work in flight. With one small Jira change, they found 25 major themes of work, or major outcomes, running at the same time across four teams. It was impossible to complete, created long cycle times, and caused heavy context switching. Once they added organization so leaders could see it and make decisions, leaders had more purpose and teams felt alignment.

Lisa says they also had to make everyone see the waste together. No more silos: product, engineering, design, and service operations, which manages call center agents, had to be in the room together. Early planning days used walls full of sticky notes, even if the walls needed tape to hold them. At first the work was stressful and uncomfortable, but that discomfort became the place where the teams grew. They iterated on the planning approach. It helped them prioritize, see what to start, and more importantly see what to stop. They also started evangelizing the safety and convenience services they provided.

Lisa connects this work to the Toyota Production System. Sakichi Toyoda's loom was created to make his mother's life easier, faster, and higher quality, and the idea of removing waste and improving the loom became a foundation for TPS. At Drive Link and Toyota Connected, they do not memorize TPS, but many elements are woven tightly into the culture. She explains Just in Time as delivering the right things at the right time with the right amount of quality and safety. They did that with the platform, but then had to keep iterating. She describes Jidoka as automation with a human touch. Engineers are hired to call out problems and make the system better. Around 88 percent of Toyota Connected employees, out of fewer than 400 people, are engineers, and the rest support those engineers.

Lisa explains that Toyota Connected cannot bring a vehicle into the office, so teams test on test benches. Getting a prototype vehicle in a three-year production line is difficult, so they need these test approaches. They can stop the line at any time. She describes the Andon cord from manufacturing, where anyone could stop automobile development to prevent quality defects. Toyota Connected does not have physical buttons, but it has the mindset of pulling the Andon cord: if there are no problems, that is a big problem. They need to call problems out. She quotes managing engineer Nate Marshall's idea that authority should be where the information is. Engineers have the smarts and should help make decisions. The teams had a culture of seeing and acknowledging waste, but could not see the waste; Lisa helped them see it and let them fly.

The second key takeaway is to measure value and change the measure throughout the product lifecycle. Early on, they measured call volume. They reached a million calls about ten months after the platform went live and now have more than five million calls. That is worth celebrating, but there is more: call quality, call duration, and the data inside the calls. Lisa suggested bringing call recordings into stakeholder meetings. No one had done that before. The recordings were powerful, beautiful, sad, and impactful. Bringing them to engineers was the magical part: every sprint review now includes a summary of calls from the past two weeks, so every two weeks engineers hear more calls, more purpose, more value, and more happiness.

The third key takeaway is to lead with vision. They had clarity about waste and stronger metrics, but were missing the North Star. Kevin cared about people and engineers, enabled them to grow and fly, and that culture helped realign leadership around goals. Drive Link became one of the first groups at Toyota Connected to use OKRs and true goals to measure large outcomes for the entire product.

The fourth key takeaway is that to innovate, sometimes you have to standardize what you have already built. Lisa describes Toyota Kata: kata means process or routine, and the Toyota Kata method is similar to the scientific method. It helps them understand what is happening and make changes in the space they are observing. Leadership and teams use it continuously to improve what they already built.

The fifth key takeaway is to kaizen the Agile delivery role. Lisa says the word coach can be a bad word, but Agile roles are necessary for team growth. Teams need planning, messy planning, and shared eyes on the same things to make a difference with the product. Toyota Connected's Agile services team includes people who have been engineers, product managers, and testers. They have the smarts to lead with teams, participate in demos, and often represent product in stakeholder meetings. Toyota Connected renamed the role from Scrum Master because there is more than Scrum: XP, Kanban, flow engineering, value stream mapping, product management, and more. The team must be ready to pull from all of those at any time.

Lisa says they kaizen the role and also continuously improve the metrics. Because the vehicle generation program is three years and tied to physical vehicle safety, it is not iterative in the normal software sense. They had to change metrics to align to milestone progress. Milestones and dates are not their favorite things, but they had to adjust or the role would become obsolete. They also created measures of success for ideas before teams received them, so leaders could see new ideas and change requests from creation until readiness for the teams. Jira did not provide that visibility unless they changed Jira, so they did.

Lisa says she loves DevOps and its culture, partly because of Kevin and partly because of the community. She points to books that formed her as an early Scrum Master and helped her realize they needed to be better and change. She says she doodled The Unicorn Project and that it shaped what she knew the Agile team could be at Toyota Connected. She warns against the Agile circus: do not let Agile team members become coordinators, meeting note takers, or merely facilitators. They should facilitate events with engineers, but they also need to learn, lead, and grow into Agile leaders with their teams so engineers can produce the best outcomes for customers. She summarizes the takeaways: waste-loving culture, measure value, have goals, OKRs or something, standardize so you can experiment and innovate, avoid the Agile circus, and sprinkle DevOps across the top.

Kevin O'Dell

Lisa says they have not talked about AI and turns back to Kevin. Kevin says Toyota is big into AI, from manufacturing to software development to the in-car cockpit experience. From the call-center perspective, Toyota Connected is on the path to using generative AI in the call center space. He does not want AI calling into a vehicle during an emergency because they need the human touch, but there are many other things AI can help with.

Kevin says one big question, after hearing so much at the conference, is "vibing" with AI in the SDLC. It is scary and powerful. Toyota Connected is there to learn what other organizations are doing and what guardrails they have. Because he has a mission-critical safety system, he asks how much he can trust AI to develop code that he will put into that system, and how to do that safely without harming customers. He closes with Toyota's grounding principle from Akio Toyoda: make ever-better cars and make customers happy. That is what they ground themselves on every day at Toyota Connected and Toyota overall.