Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Gene Kim: So last year, Levi Geinert spoke here at DevOps Enterprise Summit, and he presented with two of his colleagues back when he was Director of Engineering at Target, sharing the continuation of the DevOps journey there.

Since then, he has moved to U.S. Bank, where he is now SVP and Head of Agile Technology Experience, supporting a top-level strategy around customer obsession, simplicity, and business agility being driven by the senior leadership team.

He and I were talking a couple of months ago to brainstorm about potential topics, and when he brought up the possibility of co-presenting with his leader, Werner Loots, EVP of Transformation, who comes from a business leadership background, not technology, I almost leaped out of my chair in excitement. They are going to talk about all the amazing things they've been tasked with, what they've achieved, and what they have learned. Levi and Werner.

[Brief walk-on music plays.]

Werner Loots

Werner Loots: Hello, everyone. I'm Werner Loots. Thank you very much, Gene and IT Revolution, for the invitation and for the opportunity to close this amazing event. Everybody's looking very alert. I'm very impressed. Las Vegas lifestyle isn't always conducive to late-afternoon productivity, but this is an impressive scene.

I am so excited to be here. Like Gene mentioned, I'm not from a technology background. This is my first DevOps conference, and you're an intimidating and impressive audience. There's a lot of substance in this session. I've really enjoyed it. And then there were the lightning talks last night that, honestly, were as strange as they were phenomenal. I now will never be the same. So expect to see me back here.

I'm really enjoying it, and I feel like what you're grappling with here is really at the heart of the most critical competitive capability that every large incumbent business is trying to build. So it's really a big honor for me to learn from you and to be here, share some of my experiences working with Levi and the rest of the team at U.S. Bank, and hopefully compare notes as we go. Thank you, Levi, for having me along.

Levi Geinert

Levi Geinert: Thank you, Werner. Last year, I presented on this stage from a different company. I started with U.S. Bank shortly thereafter. It's been a fun ride. It's been a fast-paced transformation.

I wanted to thank Gene, Courtney, and the program committee for the opportunity to share how healthy business and tech alignment, and lean, agile, and product principles and practices, can have impact while you're working to rebuild your engineering culture and onboard those practices. This is one of the factors for me joining the bank.

Having come from an enterprise DevOps company, I really want to see DevOps succeed, and so we're definitely trying to foster and encourage these practices at U.S. Bank. We love the community and love to give back in any meaningful way, and we hope that we can help. So feel free to reach out.

Werner Loots

Werner Loots: Thank you. A little bit of context on the transformation work, about U.S. Bank. Hopefully there are a lot of people here who are actually from the U.S. When I present internationally, it's sort of annoying to be a U.S. bank called U.S. Bank. It's terribly confusing to explain to people where I work now. I'm like, "No, it is the U.S. Bank." So, fifth biggest bank in the country. The point is, we are big enough.

We're not the biggest institution that has shared at this conference, but we're big enough that obviously we're not inherently agile. We had to take a very concerted effort to try and figure out how to move an organization of 74,000 people. We are largely domestic in our banking operations, but we have international businesses in payments processing, trust, and treasury services. So it is a large organization and very spread out across the U.S.

Every organization has a chart with accolades to explain how they're the greatest organization in their industry. We have one too. We have a lot of compelling evidence on this. The point is really, as much as I think we are more focused than anything on learning and getting better, this institution of U.S. Bank has a legacy of real excellence. The ethics, values, and performance of this bank have led the industry in the U.S. in return on equity, return on assets, and efficiency year over year for a decade. Highest global debt rating. It is a very well-run institution.

It's still extremely focused on building new skills. Just from the most recent presentation and so many of the others at this conference, that's shared context: these are organizations that are coming from a position of strength and taking very little time to celebrate that, while aggressively trying to hone new skills. That's what we're in the process of doing.

A little bit about how transformation got started. Where did it get its energy? How do you transform an organization that, by many relevant metrics, continues to outperform the industry year over year?

One of the things we did is we tried something early on when U.S. Bank last year hosted the Super Bowl. We're lucky to have a beautiful view from our offices of U.S. Bank Stadium, where the Vikings play. We recognized that the Super Bowl was quite a big opportunity for us to be on stage and drive awareness, and we put together a cross-functional team to address the fundamentals: how ready are we for people attending the Super Bowl and learning about U.S. Bank through that to use our app to learn more, search, get information, and be served if they're interested in doing business with the bank?

This had pretty heroic impact in our ability to move quickly and make use of a key date on the calendar, saying, "How do we quickly make the most of this and hustle and just work in a different way?" It gave us the idea that we should probably work like this in a lot more of what we do. We don't need this big calendar-driven event to force it.

With this idea, this quote has been attributed to very many different people, but I think we all feel it: the pace of change at the moment feels so fast, and we recognize objectively that it will never be this slow again. There's a nervousness, a very healthy and productive nervousness in our organization, to prepare for a different era, where we feel like if we work the way we do today, a couple of years from now we will be in a bad position. So we are actively working on this great machine that we're trying to accelerate, using examples like the Super Bowl experience and our first foray into agility to try and drive that.

Then the transformation started in the consumer and business bank, which is the point we'll make throughout this. This was not initially a technology-driven transformation. It was very much driven by the business, and it was at the heart of the strategy. There wasn't a transformation and a move to agility as an initiative somewhere in the business, and then a strategy somewhere else. The new leader of the consumer and business bank came in, developed a strategy for how to build that business and what the next era of the business looked like, and built right into that was the transformation. It was effectively, how do we execute the strategy that we have?

Many organizations have pretty similar strategies, and in the end, how you execute it makes all the difference. If you read strategy material about U.S. Bank and our consumer bank, where this started before it went enterprise-wide, you won't miss the relevance of agility and the transformation and what we're doing, because it's actually assumed in the strategy. Those aren't two separate things. This idea of powering human potential while becoming central to the financial lives of our customers is attached at the hip with the principles of customer obsession, agility, and simplification, which is what we're trying to make real across the enterprise in transformation.

Levi Geinert

Levi Geinert: This is "enter the Experience Studio." We've talked about a lot of similar concepts. In our case, we called them the Experience Studio. We have experience teams in there that break down into journey teams. It's nomenclature that's slightly different from one organization to the next, but all signifies the same idea: putting together smaller teams around the core components of product engineering and design, and also every other function needed to get something out the door and drive customer behavior.

We're saying we need that in a new environment where we can have a community of teams that work together in a new way and can compare notes on a new way of working. You need something to coach to in order to change. You can't just say, "We're going to change from what we had." We hope that over time, this becomes much more natural, but we actually need a pretty explicit model to coach to, and that's what we set up in the Experience Studio. What you're seeing here is our fancy new digs, having built out some room for the studio, and we'll give you a glimpse of where we started beforehand.

One of the things that, in retrospect, we look back at the principles of the Experience Studios, and we noticed there were some similarities. On the left you'll see the U.S. Bank core values, and on the right you'll see the Experience Studios values and principles. They align very well, which is one of the reasons why we feel good and why we think the transformation has done a good job taking root: we're not telling them a tool or a practice. We're just telling them what we care about, and it aligns with our core values, and it helps us gain agreement or buy-in with our stakeholders and partner teams.

Werner Loots and Levi Geinert

Werner Loots: I think we both hit it. I'll go back a second. One of the things to know about Levi is that he has an incredible throwing arm. The picture on the left is the original Experience Studio, where we just went to a floor that corporate real estate wouldn't even tell us existed because they were so nervous about the condition that the floor was in. It was an empty floor with seven different types of carpet and a lot of '70s furniture that we pulled out of various storage holes in this giant building. It was nice because we were open, and we got a little mini Tykes kids hoop that we competed with to see who could get the ball through the hoop the furthest.

In the end, we actually ran out of real estate on this page because it turns out Levi is a relatively gifted athlete and was able to stand against one wall and sink a hoop on the other side of the building up against the other wall. So that unfortunately ended that competition for us because nobody could compete against him.

Levi Geinert: Yeah, Werner quit and went home after that.

Werner Loots: Yeah, I was very angry.

You get a little bit of a sense from how we started this. There was quite a bit of planning on the front end in order to get going, but you can never get everything in place. Real estate is just another example. It really was a relatively horrific space. We had fun in there, but this was what it was, and there was no team. I showed up. I had an assistant. We're like, "We're going to do this." This was January last year.

Levi Geinert: I would add that this is kind of the namesake for our talk: just get started. It wasn't like we had a bunch of money right out of the gate. We were getting scrappy. We chose a floor. We had 100 types of chairs. We were having Post-it notes. We didn't have whiteboards necessarily. Over time, we added those things because the values were in alignment. People wanted change. They wanted to be empowered, and these cross-functional teams were really compelling and empowering to work on. Even with that space, employee sentiment was really high because they had never worked that way in the past at a bank.

Werner Loots: It's a great call-out. One of my favorite ideas in this comes from a talk that General Stanley McChrystal did at one of our events. He made the point, "You can't steer when you're standing still." You have to start moving and make adjustments, otherwise you'll never get the momentum. It's such a beautiful, simple idea, and we got going.

Then, truly against any expectation that I could have had, we didn't have a goal to make the studio big. We just started two teams and wanted to see how it went. By the end of that year and at the start of 2019, we had exceeded 20 new teams. We created them in five different cities because we're a very spread-out organization, and we like to be close to the business leadership for every set of experiences we're building. The studio grew to over 600 members who are dedicated and co-located in their teams in these five locations, and then many more supporting outside of that.

What we found interesting as well is the cultural impact of doing this. The number of people who wanted to come see the tour, who wanted us to come talk and explain what we're doing. We created some training. It really was enough for a big organization to see. As many as 600 people is a fair number of people; it's definitely relatively hair-on-fire, but it is not 74,000. But the message that we were able to send to the rest of the organization by moving this quickly, working in a new way, was substantial.

As we're standing here now, we're at 32 teams. We have a couple more locations. We have 1,000 people in there. The work that we're doing at the moment, where we'll close with a couple of words and why this is such a timely event for us, is that going forward we don't think we just continue this pace of growth and change. We need to substantially accelerate it. We are really looking to build a way of working here that we can scale across the enterprise and make sure that we can apply a lot of the disciplines that will make this better going forward.

There's the idea of nail it and then scale it. I think we nailed some stuff. I wouldn't say we nailed it before we scaled it like crazy. So we've got a lot of work to do to shore this up and then grow it much faster going forward.

One other thing to mention is we have the studio teams, but part of this positive spillover is many other teams in the organization came to us and said, "Can you help us tackle XYZ?" Many of those problems had nothing to do with technology. They weren't building anything. They were trying to figure out how to accomplish a particular business goal, enter a new territory, solve an employee problem. But they recognized the power in, "Let's bring people together in a room. Let's get the right people to actually look at each other in a room and facilitate it in a certain way." They weren't funded to create a dedicated and co-located team, but they still wanted to work in this way. We've had over 60 engagements like that where we are supporting initiatives across the bank where people recognize the power of the working style, regardless of whether they are actually able to field a build team.

Levi Geinert

Levi Geinert: This is one of my favorite examples, because this cross-functional team greatly reduced the amount of information that was requested from our customers and streamlined the process by getting a cross-functional team together, a whiteboard, sticky notes, and going from over 100 data points to just twenty-some data points. They're continually improving that.

The other significance is a small business owner can now go on and fill out an application and get money in their account in typically less than 15 minutes. Recently, we had an example where a $50,000 bank loan was deposited in the customer's checking account in 13 minutes. Seven of those minutes was data entry on their mobile phone, and one year ago that took 11 days.

In this studio, many of the agile practices are taking hold. Some of them have been delivered with or without DevOps practices and tooling, some with a tightly coupled architecture. But by having a cross-functional team aligned on a shared goal, they're able to have significant impact like you see here. This is why we're so excited. We look at DevOps as the next step. It can only get better as we continue to invest in those practices as well as the tooling.

Another example is our home mortgage team. We are the first major bank to validate both income and assets and evaluate creditworthiness at the time the application is submitted. The significance of this one is, again, this is not a technology-led initiative. This is a partnership with a vendor. But by working together and co-creating in an agile working model in a space in St. Louis, we're able to co-create and have these incredible outcomes that you'll see here.

No digital transformation would be complete without a mobile app. Since the debut, you can see we've had a lot of insights delivered through the new mobile app. This is significant because it was built with co-creation with our customers. The direction was not how to do it, but it was, "Talk to the customers every sprint. Bring them into the studio." The significance of the studio is that we have customers coming in every week. That wasn't a typical thing that you would have seen at a bank. Again, this is a new concept. We continue to improve our delivery skills around our mobile app. The DevOps practices and tooling will come and will continue to improve.

Werner Loots

Werner Loots: There are a couple of things to call out on these. I want to make the link between these three examples of what we've built, but also how we built them and how quickly we grew. As we say, we started with two teams at the beginning of last year. We have 32 now, and a whole host of them outside the studio. That really is not characteristic of the tradition of the bank, to move that fast on anything.

I think it's a combination of some of the themes that have come out in the sessions that I've attended the last couple of days. Very good top-down support on all this. The executive team definitely owns it. There's a lot of trust. Safety and permission to fail has been demonstrated in very powerful ways, and then the bottom-up impact of the teams.

We build good things, so obviously, most importantly, the results are good. We're building new things that are very different from what we've been able to put out to customers in the past, and that makes us feel good. We have top-down support, but bottom-up, I think, ultimately was the biggest thing here.

The people in these teams: it is extraordinary for me as a new person to the bank to look at how people talk and have these teams be a combination of vendors, contractors, some new hires, but largely our traditional employee base, people who have been with the bank for 10, 20, 30 years, and call their time in the studio the most rewarding professional experience they've had in their careers. That's incredibly humbling, and it is just such a message around powering human potential, which is the mission of the bank. It applies to customers and employees, but the motivational impact of working like this is phenomenal.

This visual is what made me think of it: a hand-drawn thing on the left and then something on the right-hand side. What's the significance of that? This audience knows that. I was walking in the studio and talked with our team about this, and they said, "Yeah, it was great because we drew the suggested flow on the board, and then five weeks later, we had it live-coded, user acceptance testing, ready to release from the room." Just to hear them explain to me what that meant, it wasn't simply a breakthrough in terms of how we work. They felt completely different about their work.

It feels very different being a cog in a wheel in a giant machine from, "I actually can see my handiwork." I can see, within a reasonable amount of time that I can compute, the link between what I'm doing day to day, any given Wednesday, and what happens to customers. What can I talk to my friends and my family about, about what I built? This motivational loop has been by far the most powerful fuel for the effort overall.

Levi Geinert

Levi Geinert: In June, we were able to have a special event for U.S. Bank. It was our first, what we're calling Transformation Day, where we brought teams together to educate, collaborate, and celebrate. This was important. We brought all of the studio teams across those five locations together.

Again, the significance here is we didn't have a super-great idea about how we were going to do every specific thing, but the excitement and the interest organically happened, and you can see that we're going to have some positive outcomes to share here in a second. On the left, you'll see our friend Courtney Kissler from Nike, who was our closing keynote. It was very special for us, talking about the new role of leadership, how she cares and promotes a continuous learning culture, and the 90-day approach to taking her new job at Nike.

Ross Clanton joined us to talk about the top enterprise transformation lessons learned, and we were joined by Archie Miller, Jeff Patton, Felipe Castro, and Dion Stewart. This is an event where they came together, demoed, learned, and celebrated at the end of the day. It was approximately one year after the studios launched, so it was definitely time to celebrate and have the teams come together.

I'm going to show you pictures in a second, but I'd love to show you a video that shows a little bit more about how the bank has changed and the embrace around learning. Run the video.

[Video plays.]

As you can see, we're very proud of that event. You'll see some pictures here from the event as well. But what's better than pictures? Metrics, right? We'll share with you some awesome metrics. We had 540 people attend across the bank. Very well attended, lots of excitement. Many of the leadership teams planned their visits to make sure they could attend this event.

436 people took part in the conference application. There were over 11,000 engagement actions: likes, comments, shares, pictures, et cetera. 1,400 contributions and over 10,000 minutes of app use. So maybe not the most productive thing, but again, we're investing in learning and sharing and collaborating with our friends and our peers, and we're very excited that we're going to continue to have these. We've been talking about potentially doubling in size, and we'll see where it goes this year.

We noticed that it impacted a lot of people outside of the studios and outside of technology. Again, it's starting to change the way the bank operates, including internal conferences and events. We're starting to do demos at all of the other events that are occurring at the bank. Please be on the lookout for an invite to join us in Transformation Day 2020 at U.S. Bank. Clearly the culture thing is taking root. People are excited. It was great to see this feedback from Russell, a longtime banker. He was clearly very impressed, so we were very happy to show you this.

Again, we care about giving back to the community. We also host events inside of the studio where we invite industry friends to come and share and collaborate as well. If you want to hear more about that, please reach out as well.

Werner Loots

Werner Loots: It's fun to share the video. Just a moment of reflection on that, again, for me as part of thinking about my first DevOps conference. It was interesting for me to come to this and realize that I'm going to spend time with this very tech-credible set of thought leaders and wonder, what would the content be? It was fascinating to see how much of it in the end, as much as there was amazing guidance here around real execution and technical expertise, was about people and just getting organizations to work properly.

Seeing that full circle has really been our finding here as well, which is why when we talk about the happier portion of the outcome of transformation and agility, this is what it comes back to for me. If I have a cynical moment and my seven-year-old daughter asks me, "Hey, what is work? What do you do?" I'm like, "Work is where thousands of dedicated, talented, well-meaning professionals get together to frustrate each other."

It's amazing how hard it is to get a big organization to work, get stuff done for customers, and be a fun place to work. Every single function, every department in the business is necessary and required. But passing the baton, re-litigating things down the line, not being able to stay on the same page, and cycling through it can be really brutal, even for the most dedicated professionals.

That's why this has been so fun. You see a little bit of the vibe of the transformation. It was so great to go from our feral start with Levi throwing balls through the net to hosting our CEO and hosting the board on the floor and being able to talk with them about what they've seen.

Our CEO came back from his visit where, per our principles, he just visited a studio team, and the developers on the team and the workers got to present and answer questions. He came back, and I walked him back to our headquarters, and he said, "The most amazing thing to me is that was clearly a team, and I have no idea which parts of the organization they're from." People discover their colleagues in other functions, and they understand for the first time that we're all trying to solve the same thing.

That is really something that you see in the vibe. After the transformation event, our management committee had their regular meeting and had an impromptu debrief on this event because many of them attended, and they're like, "Have you heard the buzz about this event? What was it?" I'm like, "It's fundamentally the positive energy that comes out of powering the potential of your own people by getting out of the way and allowing them to relate."

Levi Geinert and Werner Loots

Werner Loots: So, challenges ahead. We're obviously trying to scale this. As I talk about, the demand for this is extraordinary. We really are in a very fortunate position where the organization is reaching out, and we are trying to figure out how to make what we've shared here, and our growth from two to 32 teams, simply the way of working across the organization. Easier said than done, but you can imagine the amount of work that goes behind how we scale this model, keep the idea consistent, while we have a model that allows many, many more people to step into it and make this the default mode of operation in the bank.

Levi Geinert: Agile and DevOps versus ways of working. Sometimes people get lost in the words agile and DevOps. We really love Jonathan Smart's take on better value sooner, safer, happier as a guiding principle to continue to drive our transformation, so we don't get lost in the tooling, buzzwords, and things that don't have as much meaning as our core values.

People and talent model: we now have people in the studio who are having this amazing experience that we've been touting, but they will work in a studio away from their solid-line report for a long period of time. You could be in your studio team, where really that's your reality for years, and we haven't yet adjusted what a talent career development model looks like for perpetual studio activity. That's a big item for us.

Governance versus guidance. Last year, I spoke about this topic. It's a little more challenging at a bank than at a retailer, I'm not going to lie. But I'm excited to hear when our partners continue to speak in the similar sense, where they're looking to move away from their traditional governance roles to help provide guidance.

I was especially excited at this event to have all the insights shared by our partners, John Willis, Topo Pal, Jonathan Smart, on how we can move toward a continuous compliance model as a way to support our transformation. I'm also very excited to share the audit panel video with our friends in audit, compliance, and risk. So many good insights to share there.

Werner Loots: Terrific. Just to close out, we feel we should explain the fashion here: all the red shoes. Thank you for some of the other presenters and attendees here who have worn the same and who have been helping us fly the colors here.

This is something that grew very organically in the studio. You're often a little bit nervous when you start these big events with these accoutrements, having some cynical senior leader say, "Ah, you put people in jeans and sneakers, and you give them table tennis, and then productivity ensues." So we try to be very circumspect about this and how much you drive these things. This just fully organically came from the first teams in the studio, where there was an individual that would just wear these red shoes. As is my habit, I used it as a way to poke fun at him and explain that he was a grown man who dressed like a child.

Then as we had the conversations, it turned out he had a very thoughtful and quite profound model for what he thought it meant: that we were working in a completely different way, team sport, agility, logging many miles; that solution and creativity can come from unexpected places, including the person in the red shoes. It has completely taken off.

Our very formal annual all-employee meeting of 74,000 people: our head of consumer and business banking went on the stage for the first time ever without a tie and wearing red sneakers. It seems simple, but it's difficult to overstate the ripples that sends through an organization, the number of questions it generates. When the CEO visited the studio, he put on his red sneakers. There's something about the leveling and saying, "Hey, we're all on the same team," that you get from a symbol like that. If something like that emerges, we would definitely say embrace it.

Levi Geinert: I know these are a U.S. Bank symbol, but I think it's relevant for our whole community. I saw quite a few people wearing red shoes in the last few days, and I was originally going to ask them if they worked at U.S. Bank, and then I realized that these are just people who are comfortable being bold. This community knows that we need to be the advocates for change, and being bold and wearing red shoes is one of the ways to accomplish that.

We give them to anyone that's part of the U.S. Bank transformation. Because of this, we have a pair to give to you, Gene, for being part of our transformation. We hope that you'll wear them, be bold, and we know you work hard for the community and log many miles. Following the event, we'd love to take a pic.

Werner Loots: We're happy to celebrate the totally unintended parallel with the red shirts in your book. So red is the color. Thank you very much, everybody.

Levi Geinert: Thank you.