Host Intro (Gene Kim)

All right. So one of my favorite presentations from last year was a presentation from John Deere, an engineering and smart industrial organization that is nearly 200 years old.

The two presenters were Amy Willard, director of Global IT Strategy and Transformation, and Matt Ring, senior product and engineering coach. It was a fabulous experience report of how they elevated the ways of working and technical competencies across an engineering organization that has over 4,000 technologists.

They undertook an organizational change management approach that is very different than what we typically see within this community. They will share what they've been doing since then as they ask themselves a question: what do we do next?

And by the way, I gained a huge respect for Amy's clarity of thinking and sensibilities for organizational structures when I got to work with her earlier this year on a forum team. It resulted in a cool paper called "The Checkbox Project," which was such an amazing exploration of what happens when you have extremely high coordination costs, where hundreds or even thousands of people must do heroics to even get the smallest things done.

So here to talk about the continuation of the journey is Amy and Matt.

Matt Ring

Wow. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much. Good morning.

We are so excited to be here. It's an honor, and it's extremely humbling for us to be able to kick off day one of this conference. We're also really excited to be able to be back to continue our story from last year.

But we first need to get a couple things out of the way here. So many of you have probably heard of John Deere. We make those green tractors. We were founded in 1837 by a blacksmith named John Deere, hence the name. We're 186 years old. We still look pretty good for that age.

We build products and solutions for farmers and construction workers, for golf courses and homeowners. Today, we have markets and operations across the globe. We employ over 82,000 people, and our 2022 net sales and revenue was around 52 billion U.S. dollars.

And as far as our technology goes, everything that we do in tech at John Deere is focused on real purpose and real impact. We develop technology that enables our customers to provide the food, fuel, fiber, and infrastructure that our growing population needs.

And just to give you a better idea of what I mean, we invite you to check out this video.

Sweat and smarts. That's what got us here.

We are in a position of strength thanks to the dedication and character of all John Deere people. Whether we make or market, inspect or perfect, we all deliver and keep delivering. Together.

We move earth and move the earth forward with machines made of hard iron and hard data. And to keep leading, we need to take our next leap.

We'll build up tools and technology. We'll support customers across the whole life cycle. We'll make production systems that produce more, more worth for our customers with less waste.

This is no small feat. It will take all our grit and determination to create a revolution in precision, down to each seed, tree, blade of grass, each handful of dirt, each stretch of road.

It must be done. Deere proud and Deere humble, earned through our history of helping sustain and advance lives and livelihoods, from Illinois to India, around the globe. No one is more equipped to make this leap.

Ready on three. One, two, three.

All right, what'd you think of that? Good. Who was bopping in their seats, to be honest? Come on. All right. Okay.

So then, in order to meet the challenges in our digital space that were talked about there, we undertook a global technology transformation from 2019 to 2022, transforming over 500 global technology teams, shifting from projects to products, adopting new agile and DevOps ways of working, and evolving our organizational culture to be more generative, psychologically safe, and promote transparency.

We focused on changing three things, just three things: what we worked on, how we worked, and a new foundation. Three things.

So what we worked on: shifting toward more of a product mindset, a focus on value creation, and an increased focus on customer centricity. Who were we delivering things for?

How we worked: this was our introduction to agile and lean frameworks, shifting our investment models towards a total cost of ownership, adopting new team topologies, and creating new roles to support these new ways of working.

And then strengthening that foundation. So it wasn't just a technology or a tools transformation or a change that we were doing. It was that full people, process, and technology. We needed to hit on all three of those things to be able to make sure that we were having a sustainable change.

We used something we called wave immersions. You can see kind of on the top right there. This is where we would incrementally and iteratively adopt this transformation across our organizations, where we would take thin vertical slices of an organization from senior leadership down into the teams, and we would spend 20 weeks each with them coaching, pairing, mentoring on these new ways of working.

And after three years of this transformation, we've seen tremendous results: better speed to release, deploying more changes more often and in smaller batches, with happier customers, happier employees, and realizing a greater than 100% return on our investment for that three-year initiative.

Cut to the end of December 2022. We did it. The waves are done. We've raised all the boats. We've transformed.

Now what? Do we start over again? Is there an IT Revolution book on post-transformation? No. What do we do? I have no idea.

Fortunately, great organizations have strong transformational leadership that is always looking to the future, towards that next horizon.

So Amy, what do we do next?

Amy Willard

Thank you, Matt, for kicking us off and summarizing a three-year journey in three minutes. That was very effective.

The end of the waves clearly didn't sneak up on us. In fact, we accelerated those last waves so that we could finish the foundation Matt talked about and could move on to solving harder and more valuable problems.

We knew we couldn't call the transformation done. We couldn't put a check mark in that column and say, "We're good. Let's walk away." We had senior leadership support that we could and should get even better.

But our approach had to change. We had done a great job laying a foundation with our agile operating model. We built a new neighborhood together. We moved into that neighborhood over three years, 50 teams at a time. Now we have a neighborhood. Now we all live there.

So if you hang with me for just a bit on the neighborhood analogy, I'll take it a bit further. So here's how we're changing.

We moved on to improving both the neighborhood and our homes, which are the products, right, in our neighborhood, with precision and focused bets that change the whole system, maybe something like adopting generative AI; maybe improve a subsystem, replacing some sort of a legacy tech platform; or improve specific products or product families, so focusing on CI/CD, OKRs, UX research, very specific focus to those groups.

No one-size-fits-all approach handles all the homes and all the streets in the neighborhood. And that's also true of our digital product transformation.

Our intention here is clear to us. It's to be data-informed and to focus on our highest-impact bets for the next phase of our transformation. So we're changing our approach.

We also had to change our mindset quite a bit. The first part of our journey was really focused on how much better we wanted to be than a past version of ourself. So you saw in the metrics: how much improvement did we have from the last time we measured ourselves?

We're now focused on how good we want to be, how much better we want our neighborhood to be, and specifically in what ways we want to improve.

As the waves came to an end, I felt like every conversation I had with the organization had two pieces. The first part was I congratulated the organization for really impressive transformation outcomes. We did it. The three years is over. We made the journey.

And then I immediately got to also say, "But guess what? We need to get even better. So here we go again," right, as an organization. And that usually sounded something like what you see on the slide here.

We're delivering twice as much. Oh, but is what we're delivering really the most valuable thing to do?

We're delivering twice as fast, but is that fast enough? How fast should we be going?

And we've increased our digital skills. That's awesome. But how do we stay ready for the future, because those skills are moving all the time?

Moving forward, we really want to focus on delivering the right value, the most value that we can for our investments, with an industry-leading speed to value, with investment in the skills of the people that make it all possible.

And so we launched this next phase of our transformation, a next horizon that we wanted to travel to.

As I said, that didn't mean we just started another round of waves with three years of lead time to connect with all of our teams again. It meant we started focusing on new outcomes.

Last year, I said we only changed three things: what we work on, how we work, and our foundation. I also said those three things really meant we had to change everything. So now we've done that, and now we have three digital leaps that we're focused on. It's what you see on the screen here.

So they build on that foundation, and they support our company's smart industrial leaps that you saw highlighted in the video.

So Value Max is our most important leap. It's the what outcome, right? So maximizing the value we deliver to our business and to our customers towards our company aspirations for the technology investment we have. That's why we do all of this. That's the maximum impact we can provide to our organization.

Then a transformative tech stack and digital mastery of the people. Those are our how leaps, our how enablers, our accelerants to really being able to maximize value. Those are our big bets.

And so we play a critical role in enabling our company's outcomes, supporting the customers you saw in that video. This isn't just tech or learning for its own sake. We support a bigger why.

And so with that, I'm excited to have Matt double-click on all three of these for you.

Matt Ring

Yep. All right. So for the next three slides, I'm going to share the three digital leaps, our guiding beliefs on each of these things, and then two specific ways that we've worked over this past year towards realizing these.

And so, just like last year's presentation, we also wanted to share some real-world visuals with you, just to kind of get a look behind the scenes of what things we're doing here.

All right. So first, around value maximization. We believe that while we've done a good job of bringing value into the conversation for our technology conversations, we need to improve our focus on the outcomes and the business impact that we're trying to achieve beyond just releasing the software.

So two ways that we're working towards realizing this.

The first is around building a common language for value. So we're working towards creating greater transparency into the work that's happening across our organization: across our products, across our value streams, across our lines of business. Also building habits to start talking about priority initiatives in terms of the expected, measurable benefits to customers and to our business.

So to be clear, this is a change in thinking, shifting in terms of bets, "We believe this will do this thing," versus false certainties.

We're actively leveraging concepts and practices from the product management community and leader voices there like Marty Cagan, Melissa Perri, Josh Seiden, just to name a few.

The second thing is we're focusing our investments towards the highest-value work across our digital products, increasingly scrutinizing the good ideas so that we have capacity and can focus on the great ones.

We're doing some really cool experiments in this space. I can't talk about any of it. I can't talk about anything. Maybe next year.

What I can share, though, is that we are increasing the quality and the frequency of conversations that are happening between our business, product management, and technology leadership on the customer outcomes and business impacts that are being realized by our digital product investments, and finding ways to measure those even within our traditionally shared service organizations.

Second one is around tech stack transformation. All right? Our belief: we believe that software engineers do their best work when they can focus on creating real business value and solving hard problems, as opposed to doing repetitive, menial tasks and toil.

We also believe that our tech stack should be a value accelerant, not an anchor.

So two ways that we've been working this year towards realizing this belief.

Look, there's always going to be tech debt and lifecycle events that happen. It's death, taxes, and tech debt. We know some of these activities will yield more value than others, and we also realize that the value may vary by the area of the business.

So we're continuing to work towards prioritizing and focusing on a limited tech stack bets at a time versus trying to peanut butter spread all of these changes across all of our teams all at once, and wherever possible, empowering our different product families to prioritize based on their context and their level of impact or benefit realization.

The second thing is around making the important easy. This is like a variation of "make the right way the easy way," but make the important easy. Our focus here is on ever improving the developer experience of our software engineers.

So as one of our colleagues likes to say, this is the UX of DX. This is where our focus on customer centricity across all of our product families over the past three years, including our platform teams, is really now starting to pay dividends. They've built that empathy.

So this is about removing toil and waste for our software engineers so that they can focus on creating the highest value for our business and for our customers.

And one benefit from this approach so far that we've already started to realize is a much stronger partnership between our engineering and our information security areas. We're using concepts from Investments Unlimited and putting those into practice.

Lastly, digital mastery. We believe that continually investing in all of our roles across the agile operating model, not just engineering, but product, UX, agility, and engineering roles, creates a workforce that is excited to embrace new technologies, new skills, and disruptions.

Oh, hi, AI. Nice to meet you. What can we do together?

Two ways that we're working towards realizing this belief.

We're working towards aligning our upskilling efforts toward our desired outcomes. So talking about new skills in terms of: how do they enable our strategic goals? How do they enable our to-be technical architectures, et cetera? Not just learning for novelty's sake.

And secondly, we've also spent some time working on what we've dubbed these no-regret skills. So these are a minimal set of essential foundational skills for each of our roles that are broadly applicable regardless of the area of the business that they work in.

This is also positioning our employees for better portability between teams, as well as broadening their options for a career path within our organization.

In that same vein, we've done some work towards making it easy for people to learn, making it as easy and accessible, as friction-free as possible for them to learn through curated learning paths, active communities of practice, and finding opportunities to put new skills into practice as soon as possible.

And I'm going to hand it back over to Amy to discuss some of our early results and learnings from the past year.

Amy Willard

All right. So it's been 10 months since we ended our waves, so not that long yet. Our priorities are now tied to these digital leaps, and we continue to measure all those same outcomes that Matt mentioned earlier in the presentation.

So we still want to use a mindset of continuing to get even better. And we added this trending toward elite levels to the conversation. And yes, that is a very intentional nod to DORA in using the word elite in how we talk about our organization moving forward.

Beyond that, we wanted to share with you just some of our additional results.

So customer lead time continues to improve. We've also put a new focus on what we're calling engineering lead time. It's loosely the time from when a software engineer writes the first line of code to when it's deployable.

Knowing how quickly our engineers, at an abstracted level, we're not measuring individual productivity, can deliver helps us focus on areas of DevX where friction and delays are prevalent.

We're also focused on macro-level digital skills inventory so that we know where to focus our learning bets, right, with precision. Where should we really focus our energies?

We have ongoing taxonomy optimizations all the time. We believe that an ever-changing taxonomy is a good sign that we are actually continuing to shift to higher-value and better ways of working.

And like most of you, our technology investments are not limitless. And so we are quantifying the portion of our investments that we're shifting to higher-value work. So from good to great.

Data's awesome, but so is customer feedback. So we brought back updated feedback from Karen Powers, who's a senior group product manager in our supply chain organization, and Josh Edin, a director of our IT manufacturing operations, who we highlighted last year, to tell us how it's been going in the last 10 months.

So Karen highlights the transformation and its role in our supply chain being able to move through all of the change of the last few years, but more importantly, the partnership and trust that now exists with the technology function is what's really different. So product management, technology, and the rest of our business are all operating together focused on these outcomes, not technology function on the side.

Josh highlights the improvements that were being gained through precise optimizations, through aggressive impediment resolution and digital mastery. This is especially apparent in his SAP manufacturing space, where they reorganized SAP security because of an impediment that called out long lead times, complicated structures, and user satisfaction challenges between product teams.

I love these comments, but maybe not for the reason that you would assume. They are a great testament that our focused approach in the early part of the journey led to a transformative mindset that's actually a part of our DNA. These continuous improvements were led from across the organization, not from a centralized transformation org.

And last but not least, here we are, pivoting away from a wave model that was full of experimentation. We'll learn from many of you this week, and we wanted to share a few of our own learnings.

So know your why when you change. When we changed approaches, it led to a lot of challenges in people being able to understand that pivot and how we were evolving in a new direction to a new horizon. We had to openly resist the temptation to just keep getting a little bit better without direction. We needed to change our mindset on how good we want to be and not just how much we'd improved.

This leads to our second lesson. We had to relearn and repave paths that we'd become very comfortable with. There was a desire by some to just have all the answers and predict how it would go. This was true of the broader organization and my own transformation group. And so we pivoted to our own product teams, and we had to be okay standing in the storm a bit while that happened.

Third, we reaffirmed our commitment to learning from the best in the industry, not just one framework. No one framework fit us perfectly, so we use a mashup approach that hits all of our disciplines and all of our roles.

And last but not least, disrupt. Yes, absolutely disrupt. But we need to disrupt with intentionality and precision as we continue our journey. As change agents, we are tuned for disruption, and we need to use that skill with purpose to move us forward, not away from our goals.

So finally, we are so grateful to be a part of this community and to learn so much from you all the time. And also, this week, we'd love to hear more from those of you that are as focused on business value as we are, that are measuring the outcomes of your transformation bets.

You can reach out to us on LinkedIn, on Slack. And if you happen to love what you heard and you're interested in joining us at Deere, there's a QR code there on the right.

So thank you.

Matt Ring

Thank you.