Advocating for your team

Austin Bagley

All right. Welcome to the next episode of Transformation. We're super excited to have Melissa Davey with us today, as well as the Pizza Heet. This is our first time actually doing it in person, which is awesome. Usually we've been doing this remote over the wire, so this is great to actually be here together.

 

Austin Bagley

We're currently at navigate the annual pull side event where we bring together engineering leaders and transformation leaders together to talk about what's going on and to kind of preview of the latest in the platform and really to learn from you all in terms of like how to run best in class engineering teams. So we're excited to have this opportunity to film an episode of transformation, a quick intro. So both Naveed Zahid and most of Davy come to us from Manulife. Manulife has been in business for over 135 years, so they're definitely not cloud native. It was a long transformation to get to that point and these two were very much in the middle of that transformation.

 

Austin Bagley

They have over 4000 technologists, engineers and their teams. And so it's a huge job to move such a large organization who takes care of over 35 million customers to really, you know, move the technology in the right direction. So we're going to learn a bit more about how they've done that and also how they've advocated for their team. Quick BIOS, real quick for both of these two. So Naveed has 20 years of experience in software engineering.

 

Austin Bagley

He currently runs the engineering transformation organization at Manulife that includes Manulife University as well as entering excellence and and really driving a lot of the initiatives that really propel the entire technology organization at Manulife forward. On his team is Melissa Davey, who specifically takes care of flow and is in charge of implementing that across the entire organization, which is hundreds of teams. And so it's a huge job that you have done and you've certainly learned the art and craft of really enabling, entering metrics across such a massive organization. So we're super excited to have YOU 2 here together because this is great time to like really learn from 2 professionals here. So with that out of the way, intros wise, let's kind of lay some groundwork here.

 

Austin Bagley

So there's a reason you two are like here today, and that's you've essentially written a book on successful transformations. You give us a little bit of like a preview of like what that entailed at Manulife.

 

Naveed Zahid

First of all, Austin, thanks for inviting us. This is great writing the book on transformation. I in no way would I ever say that I've written the book on transformation. I think if anything, when you take a look at transformations across organizations, it's nothing but like a series of successes and failures. If you really think about it, the difference is that when you're focused on transformations, it's.

 

Naveed Zahid

What did you learn from that failure? And when you take a look at your successes, you obviously always ask yourself, could I have done it better And that's how you essentially drive a transformation. And when I take a look in the history of my experiences, I think it's just been one of those circumstances where I've always been in positions of driving transformation. So whether it's an agile transformation in a team or something as bigger as and we have to modernize our application, How do you do that while? Everyone's using it, so how do you, how do you modernize while a product's in use?

 

Naveed Zahid

So for me, I'm I've had that opportunity to understand. It's not an easy exercise coming into Manulife though it's it was a slightly different experience of driving transformation where I'm not implementing or driving the change I'm helping to and actually involved with the transformation I'm trying to influence. Our organization to be transforming and so for the from that it was a very different perspective that we have to take a look at it. How do we enable our leaders as well as our engineers to drive a transformation for an organization that is 135 years old that has been doing things a certain way for so long and we have some really huge milestones. And so that's how you know we've been looking at driving transformation through our various programs.

 

Austin Bagley

I love that and and for you, Melissa.

 

Melissa Davy

Yeah. So my experience is a bit different than Naveed's. I've not been involved in the large transformations that he has, but where I think my experience comes in, I've been a part of those teams. So when Manulife first decided to roll out Agile in 2016, I was part of one of the first groups that were a part of that put up my hand and say, yeah, I want to do that, I want to be a part of that. So I've always been working within the teams and I think that's why.

 

Melissa Davy

We've had so many successes is because I know how teams work and I've been embedded in teams. I've been the Scrum master, I've been the engineering leader. So I can relate to teams. As we're driving through this transformation, I.

 

Austin Bagley

Love that. That's actually one thing I learned. And for those kind of listening in, we just came out of a breakout that you guys hosted and navigate talking about your transformation journey, which is a great watch, will be available in a few weeks. So. But one thing that I loved about that is that like your entire group is all made-up of.

 

Austin Bagley

Like tenured practitioners at Manulife who not only know how work was done, but how work should move forward. And I think that's a really incredible kind of thing that you've done with this with Orgas. You've you've built it up with people who have sat in your seat, done the things now like this is what we need to change. So I love, I love that perspective that you bring with us. Yeah.

 

Naveed Zahid

Bringing add something to it, I think that's the that's the secret of our team. It's we have individuals that understand the journey. That the organization has been through and they've helped to drive it. So now that's how do I pay it forward to our other teams within our organization and we understand how difficult it is at times. And so you have that empathetic approach on transformations aren't easy.

 

Naveed Zahid

We're here to help you get through it. I think that's the that's the real value of of our team.

 

Austin Bagley

I love that. I love that. So question to you and now I've laid the the groundwork for this. Let's kind of dive into the subject at hand, which is advocacy and so. To kind of start this part like we think of advocacy, like what are different stakeholders when it comes to a large transformation?

 

Naveed Zahid

Yeah. Actually I'd love to answer this question. So I think when we were thinking of advocacy and who the the key stakeholders are, I think for within Manulife, I think and and particularly under engine transformation, how do we enable advocacy? We have to take a look at it a little bit more holistically. So the obvious one are the individuals, the engineers in our organization.

 

Naveed Zahid

They're the ones that are actually driving it. How do we represent them effectively on our team? Because we are involved with not only coaching and and empowering our engineers, we're also empowering leaders. So for the individuals, it's also our leaders within our organization. How do we train them to be as effective in how they advocate for their employees?

 

Naveed Zahid

But then how do we also get them to advocate other leaders as well that might be reporting into them? So it's. It's it's like it's multi layered and to be able to understand that that's that's pretty critical. But then obviously the for us because we're driving transformation, we have to make sure that our leaders are and our organization specifically is a stakeholder as well. We want to make sure that we are aligned to sort of the vision that our organization's going through and by.

 

Naveed Zahid

Making sure that they understand the work that is being done by our engineers, by our leaders to drive that vision. So when we're taking a look at advocacy, our stakeholders are multi layered. It's just you look at it slightly differently every single time.

 

Austin Bagley

I love that. I love. So we've established like these three layers, this individual and the manager, which is actually, I think on second glance is a lot more complicated than maybe you you think of it the first like you're. They have multiple jobs to to advocate for within their own, you know, responsibilities and then obviously the kind of like the business or executives or you know essentially like where are we actually going to as organizations. I love that and you guys have really come behind the glue kind of help facilitate a lot of that.

 

Naveed Zahid

It's also dry. Like we drive the awareness of here's where organizations are complex, right. So it's all how do we make sure that every aspect of an organization? Is is recognized for the work that's driving an organization successes. So we I think we're at a slight advantage of as engineering transformation to be able to tie it all together for the for the organization itself.

 

Austin Bagley

You know, I love that. Let's let's kind of, let's dive deeper into the individual since that was the first group you mentioned. Like how do you advocate for individuals in Manulife? How does that work?

 

Naveed Zahid

Yeah. No, that's a that's a really good question as well and I. What I love is that Manulife is coming to the forefront around that. How do we make sure that we continue to showcase recognition? So we have a program called Podium.

 

Naveed Zahid

Anyone can nominate anyone, whether it's, it could be your leader, it could be your peer, it could be someone that you just happened to be doing some work with and that's how they could nominate you. And you get some points and after you collect your number points, you can get something from our award store. And so we're just driving that that recognition culture. At Manulife, which I think is beautiful, but one of the things, and when I take a look at myself, former engineer, sometimes it's really hard to showcase what you're accomplishing. I know it.

 

Naveed Zahid

I was guilty of it when I was an engineer. And it's one of those habits I'm like, actively trying to break. Yeah, it's an opportunity for me to be able to showcase on my successes, but that's where I find like a tool like Flow. Is such an amazing and powerful tool for leaders because you will always have individuals that want to hide in the shadows. Don't want to always say that they're they've done great work and they have and it helps to surface that in a much more easy way when you're having your one on.

 

Naveed Zahid

Ones with your employee say, hey, I just noticed that you accomplished this. It was had an impact, great job here. Some podium or an equivalent mechanism to show recognition. And I think that's one of the powerful aspects of a tool like Flow to be able to do that and fully realizing that that's the the behavior of not always showcasing or shouting out that. Here's why I look at everything I've accomplished.

 

Naveed Zahid

It's realizing that you don't want anyone to be outside of their comfort zone. But still, as a leader, it allows you to be impactful from from driving the culture of the team by still recognizing that we have to showcase. Successes. And when I take a look back and I'm going to say this is one of my brilliant ideas as a leader in our organization, as a leader, and I'm.

 

Austin Bagley

Just joking about.

 

Naveed Zahid

That I know. She's just laughing. She's like, yeah, OK, he's clearly overcome his inability to showcase successes. So one of the things that that I did was as a leader you're not always, especially when you start having larger and larger teams, it's really hard to start recognizing. Everything that everyone's doing and every quarter my team meets and and this is an idea that I had of it's not always like I'm not always visible to the day-to-day work.

 

Naveed Zahid

So one of the ideas that I had was we I was not allowed to vote for this but the entire team started nominating an individual for something that they accomplished that the team recognized and that's a different mentality. It's and I didn't have a say in it. It's like the team is at the ground, they know it. And they recognized the work that this one individual did and after they they voted and decided this is the individual, I gave them podium points and that's how you showcase recognition. And so that was one of those key culture changes that we are bringing in engineering transformation that sort of elevated.

 

Naveed Zahid

You can see everyone was incredibly happy that now it's not just what your direct leader sees, but what your peers see as well. So I think that's one of those. Really great success stories when it comes to showcasing recognition.

 

Melissa Davy

Yeah, I think there's a couple of additional areas that Manulife actually recognizes individuals as well is we have a Stars of Excellence. We didn't really talk about that, but they have a Stars of Excellence program where managers can nominate teams or leaders can nominate teams or individuals for something that they've done well. That's been a huge impact for the company. But coming down a few levels, it's one of the great things about flow and and the ability for leaders to recognize people on their teams or engineers to advocate for themselves. When we roll out Pluralsight Flow and couple instances this has happened where we've been training leaders and there's been individuals on their teams that are just really solid.

 

Melissa Davy

They, you know, have really good engineering best practices. They collaborate well, they review code really well, but they're not very vocal within their teams. They don't really say much. They're happy to be in the background, just doing what they do and doing it very well. We like to term those people silent ninjas.

 

Melissa Davy

So we have these silent ninjas in teams, people that are doing really things very well, but they're just not very vocal and it gives leaders an opportunity to to talk about them. You know, use that work to showcase all the great things they're doing, and then share that knowledge across other members of the team as well. So.

 

Austin Bagley

And I love that. I, I love that story in terms of just, you know, you know, not really getting recognized because not everyone is good at talking about themself, right. It's it's not something that comes naturally, especially I think in that specific role. And so to actually have an empower leader to say no, you're doing great, here's how the impact you're making is is impacting all of us. It's such AI think much a powerful thing that we've talked about in multiple episodes of this series especially with with Kat and Carol on the dead success Lab of like this is what they need to feel like you know recognize and actually that recognition has a direct correlation productivity and and success as a team.

 

Melissa Davy

Yeah, I think it also like helps them be more confident, right. And and if they're being recognized for that, it's it's that feeling of you know, maybe I am doing a really good job and maybe. Maybe I can be more vocal. It gives them the confidence, if you will, to be a little bit more vocal.

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah. And you've been a big part of rolling out Flow and I think that's one thing I've really impressed with is this transformation from a really subjective way of of looking at teams to being a very objective. Like how is that? Like, does that matter? Like how does that like come into play at manual?

 

Melissa Davy

Absolutely. I think having data is key and using data really changes your conversations and when we we coach teams and and we coach leaders through Pluralsight flow, it really is about having the information but the context to go with it right. So you can't have one with the the other. It's the two things together that really are the most powerful and you draw the best insights from SO. So really working with leaders to understand, you know how it applies to their teams, what it matters for their teams, because team A will be different from team B will be different from team C, but what matters most to the team and how as a leader you can influence some of those metrics.

 

Melissa Davy

So having the data behind those conversations I think really drives those conversations further and deeper within a team.

 

Naveed Zahid

And I think it also just empowers not only the leader but also the individual right when a leader has this data at at. At their disposal, they will be able to make better decisions on how the team should be structured or organized. Where are opportunities for improving things are like how do you improve their overall engineering efficiencies? And then for that individual, it's hate. Now my leader sees things.

 

Naveed Zahid

I'm empowered to be able to do better work or being even more productive because now it's not. I'm not hiding in the shadows. I I know what my leaders looking at and how do I drive our overall team success as well.

 

Melissa Davy

Yeah, I think what I think what's key with Flow as well is that it's showcasing the information to your team and then stepping back and listening to what the information they give you back. And I always tell leaders that you're going to get so you can get a plethora of information back, like really great data. But just ask them the question, show them, ask them, ask them the question, show them the data, ask them the question. Then take a step back and see what they tell you. You'll get great ideas because they have them.

 

Melissa Davy

They're just not.

 

Naveed Zahid

Feeling safe sometimes to voice those and isn't that like the foundation of advocacy anyways? Like you, Ashley can advocate for your employees because you actually know what they're accomplishing and and you're asking them how do we make things you know better you're you're allowing them to be autonomous and how they drive their own success.

 

Melissa Davy

Right. And then letting them do that, so for leaders. We've had in training sessions where you know, maybe their time to first comment in time to merge is a little bit high, but they work with their team and say, OK, how can we make this better? What does that look like for our team? And it's coming up with a team agreement.

 

Melissa Davy

It's not the leader saying you will do it here and you will do it here. You'll do it once in the morning and once in the afternoon. But really, what works for your team, what works for the individuals and how are you going to best work and still maintain that high level of collaboration?

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah, I love that. I think you've really shown how to how to recognize. I think as I think about advocacy, there's like these two components, there's this recognition component of advocacy. There's also how do I support you with what you need. And I think one of my favorite things is we were talking about this conversation before, before we filmed was, you know, the massive amount of resources that have gone into building Manulife University, you know, and that's such a cool, like, you know.

 

Austin Bagley

You know, benefit to helping engineers really thrive at work. I love to kind of maybe you know, to sit down, maybe take a beat and like let's actually explain what Manulife University is because I think it's really impactful what you've done with this program to really up level like the entire organization versus you know, doing it in pocket.

 

Naveed Zahid

No, absolutely. So essentially what Manulife University is, is that it's a homegrown training program that we've built within Manulife. It is been focused on how do we address the the upskilling opportunity that we have in our organization as we were evolving through this transformation. So the team consists of around 10 engineers and these are truly unicorns because they are not only effective communicators, they are strong engineers from all different aspects and disciplines. When we first started, Manulife was changing this technology stack.

 

Naveed Zahid

So what what the team was doing was focused on that software engineering skill set showcasing how do we use technologies like modern JavaScript, React, Node and built the contents as well as the labs associated with it. And the program itself is unique because while employees are going through and it's around three to four days depending on the course they would go through learn concepts, but then the labs would solidify it and more importantly it's how we use it within Manulife. So not only are we teaching them concepts and they're applying it, they now also understand how we leverage these technologies in our organization. So we come in with two lenses and then our final day, which is always the fun day for our team, it's a final evaluation. We're going to give you a test.

 

Naveed Zahid

Let's see how much of that content that you truly understand. So this is all homegrown. We build the curriculum, we build the labs, we build the the the final exam as well. And then we also create a scorecard or a rubric at the end of it, where we provide feedback not only for the employee but also for their leaders. In that way, that leaders empowered to create learning action plans for the employee.

 

Naveed Zahid

And the employee is also empowered because not only are we telling you what your strengths are, here's where your knowledge gaps are and here's how you can help fill that gap by additional train that you can take on your own during in Pluralsight on one of our skills days. So that in a nutshell is what the Manulife University program looks like. We've expanded over the years where it's not only now just software engineering. We're taking a look at content around reliability, quality engineering and test automation around our cloud adoption. So teaching our organization as we were moving and shifting from cloud platforms, here's the information you need to know to be able to lift and shift your applications from one platform to another.

 

Naveed Zahid

Security engineering is the key one as well. So now we have this huge portfolio of applications and it's just part of that that culture within our organization to continue to learn and Manulife University helps to support that.

 

Austin Bagley

And what's really incredible about this is it it costs real money. I mean you talked about you got this team and that is Unicorn. So these are obviously highly experienced people who have had a lot of tenure. They you're you're throwing a lot of really talent at that but also on the other side you're taking people and giving them the time and space to go and do this. Has it had like like you know has it paid out?

 

Naveed Zahid

That's I mean the main question there, absolutely. So when you take a look at let's, so it all depends on the on the course that we want to take a look at. So every single course that we create is tied to a business need within our organization. We're going to take the most easy, easiest example, which was our our movement from cloud platforms for us. We had a road map of when we needed to to lift and shift through our menu Life University program partnering with the cloud engineering team, we were able to create content that was relevant and we were able to realize that lift and shift to make sure that we realized some of the cost savings that we were trying to strive for.

 

Naveed Zahid

And so that was one of the key successes. You can see that across all our course curriculums because we are not doing it in isolation. It's very much what does the organization need and how do we empower our engineers to be able to achieve that. I think that's one of the key value of Manulife University, which is why we're still in existence after five years. The organization realizes that this is a critical piece for how we continue to do our modernization in our organization.

 

Austin Bagley

So I imagine a lot of people like listening on this, probably. Art Quite the size of Manulife from from an entry perspective and question to both of you. If I'm seeing Hey Like There's this Manulife University was successful for you, I want to go and try to implement some of the principles there. Where would you recommend they start?

 

Naveed Zahid

Yeah, that is a great question, so I'll tell you about the journey of the program. It all starts with creating incubators really. So when we first started the journey, it was focused on the software engineering aspect. We identified individuals within our organization that could provide a feedback because the only way this program was going to succeed was it needed to evolve as we were maturing. There's things that I think that's one of the key tenants of our program as well is that every time we deliver a program, we get feedback from the from the employees that go through it.

 

Naveed Zahid

So we constantly keep it up to date. The the thing that we always say to every cohort you're getting the best version of our program because the cohort that came right before you told us our opportunities to improve it and we've implemented those changes and that you're getting the best possible version of Manulife University. And so that's sort of the the foundation and how you lift and shift this or how do you bring a program like Manulife University up within your organization. It's a first the the investment in the organization to realize that the transformation is only going to be as effective as only. It's only going to be effective if we start building the foundation to drive transformations, which is you have to have that learning culture in place.

 

Naveed Zahid

Otherwise, no matter what you do, if your organization isn't willing to invest in that learning culture and the willingness to experiment, it's never going to succeed. You're always going to have something that's going to be a barrier so that learning culture is key and our leaders have to be bought in as well because your leaders will only create time and space for your employees to actually go into the program if they understand the need and the and it's critical to be able to drive a transformation. So once we had the foundation of we identify key individuals who can provide honest feedback, they also became Co coaches for us. So it's a volunteer basis and that was one of the key things that especially in our initial few years of our Manulife University program, there were some individuals in our organization that were leaders in this area. They they were exceptional engineers, but they had this mentality of well, I want to, I want to help others and it's it was great to see that.

 

Naveed Zahid

And that's one of the reasons for the success is that we would sometimes just ask our partners of like it's it's great if you can help out and we start building a community to support one another. And that was sort of the foundation. And since then, it's just always been, even when we're building new curriculum, it's always like who's our partner that we're going to to engage with because now they're going to help us create content that's meaningful because they're experts in this area. And then the employees that go through it, they're asking questions to the experts. And you're now fostering a community again because now they're engaging with the teams that are driving sort of the standards and the new technology directions in our organization.

 

Naveed Zahid

And we just help foster that through the Menulife University program.

 

Austin Bagley

There's this like really cool theme kind of seeming to come up here from both your conversation earlier today as well as right now is this idea of both incubation as well as community building like that. Those two kind of go hand in hand. And I, I love the story you shared earlier today about how with like kind of going away from annual Life University, go back to flow, where to do flow data you were implementing that you were initially doing with like 100 people at a time. Yeah. And you changed.

 

Austin Bagley

Why did you change?

 

Melissa Davy

It wasn't working. It was. I don't think there was this safe inclusive environment that we were hoping for. So imagine, you know, 100 liters in a room looking at flow data that didn't matter to them. There was no what it what's in it For me aspect to it, they're looking at like demo ish data that was hard for them to relate to.

 

Melissa Davy

It wasn't their people, it wasn't their teams, it wasn't the flow of how work went through on their team, so. We weren't getting the traction that we required or that we had hoped for. So we took a step back and and that's when we took a page out of amuse book and said let's create smaller training groups, let's have it be a more safe environment, 6 to 8 people, leaders in a group that are all used to working together anyways. And then we started to see an increase in collaboration. I said during the session like to go through one report, 4 metrics on the team health insights.

 

Melissa Davy

It would take us an hour and it's not because we're slow coaches. It's because the time and the explanations and the collaboration and the talking and the that was coming from within the group and the hey, I'm seeing this, can I share my screen and and help me understand what's happening right. Within the first hour was was amazing and that's how we started to build that community around Pluralsight Flow for leaders.

 

Austin Bagley

And what's been the impact?

 

Melissa Davy

Huge. I think they, you know, they continue to collaborate. We'll continue to grow it in 2024 as we create more communities of practice. But knowing I think that there there's somebody else there that is also looking at the data and just being able to have somebody to bounce ideas off is huge as well.

 

Austin Bagley

That that's actually a great segue is because we talked about individual advocacy and and helping individual helping them in their career, which obviously Manulife is very, very good at. So there's other side in terms of how do I connect people to where the organization is going because sometimes you can get feel very disconnected from what matters most from the company perspective. So let's talk a little bit about that. Like how do you help kind of advocate the other way, advocate for the organization to help people feel connected to the business?

 

Naveed Zahid

Yeah, I can start on this one. So I think it was alluding to this already when I was talking about the Manulife University program. But essentially that is the conduit for the organization to drive awareness amongst our our individual contributors. Manulife University is very much tied to that. So I'll give you an example.

 

Naveed Zahid

It's always better when when I when you get, when you make it real. So one of our courses which is around reliability engineering, it just didn't come out of thin air. We didn't just say well we understand the importance of it. How did we make sure that it aligned with sort of the direction and the need of the organization. And that's where we had a leader that was calling it out explicitly to say, hey, like there's a there's a knowledge gap, we're modernizing.

 

Naveed Zahid

But how do we make sure that we monitor our applications using the observability tools that Manulife is now prescribing to because everything's changed? How do we make sure that we are addressing the need? Because we do see some some some issues around how long it takes for us to recover. Everything's brand new. Maybe there's a worthwhile need for MU to start driving the awareness on reliability.

 

Naveed Zahid

And that was the foundation of making sure that we've built a program and then we socialized amongst that community of engineers that we've been, that we've been building over the years to let them know that, hey, our organizations also focus now on reliability. And we're now offering this as an educational opportunity to start making sure that we address this gap within our organization. And so that's one of the mechanisms that we're using to be able to drive awareness of the the need of the organization and advocate for the organization to our engineers.

 

Melissa Davy

Manulife University. Great for upskilling our engineers, those that are actually, you know, developers, coders. But we run other skills events through Pluralsight Skills a couple of times through a year for the entire technology organization, which is about 5500 people. And we we look at things like our Tech Skills day. So we always a piggyback on Pluralsight Tech Skills Day I think which happens in April.

 

Melissa Davy

We always run an event around that. We're involved in our women in technology. We always have technology focuses around you know women in tech and and what might be important to them. And most recently we ran an event in September for Skills Week and we typically try to do that once a year as well and we focus on key Manulife priorities. So this.

 

Melissa Davy

This past time it was on Gen. AI, cloud and dev SEC OPS. So we curate channels specific to content around those themes and it's a wide range of content. It could be down deep into courses and really technical content or executive briefings for somebody who's not familiar with the content so that they can start to become familiar with it.

 

Austin Bagley

One of the things that you know you've likely identified with full data is that often times teams. Likely need more, like more resources or better processes. You know, they identify this need. You know with the objective data, How do you go about, you know, rallying the, you know, the resources you need across the organization actually make those changes happen.

 

Melissa Davy

Yeah. Again, I think Flow is so powerful in, in helping to surface those conversations. In one of our trading sessions we actually had a leader who was struggling with her team being pulled into production issues, so. You know, coding days was super low. You could see the trend, it was up and down.

 

Melissa Davy

It was up and down and her leader happened to actually be on the call at the same time and she was able to again first hour of training say look, see this is the impact these production issues are having on my team. And I believe right after that training they were able to go away and start to make some some changes, look at what was happening. How do they mitigate those risks of that up and down for that team as well as? That leader being short resources because they're always being pulled into different direction.

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah, just having and here. Here's what it looks like. You can see it now. It's not just me complaining or me talking about it. It's like you can actually see the objective side of this.

 

Melissa Davy

Yeah, absolutely. It was like, yes, the data shows what I've been telling you. Look, you can't dispute it anymore because it's right there.

 

Austin Bagley

And then they in turn are armed with that. So they can go in and in the meetings where you're going up against finance or marketing or sales and they have their numbers, you now are armed those numbers to say here's. Here's what we need.

 

Melissa Davy

Yeah. And in another case, there was a team that that was struggling, they needed resources. They were looking at going out and and hiring staff, staff augmentation for a brief period of time. But by looking at flow data, there was another team that had a bit of capacity. They were in a little bit of a lull.

 

Melissa Davy

So taking members from one team to another still within the same sort of overall business unit. So it wasn't a big deal, but starting to use shared resources a little bit to prevent that extra cost. Plus the trouble of onboarding.

 

Austin Bagley

Which is much more impactful. Someone who's been to Mayo Life University. Someone who knows the tech stack. Someone who's you know, who's ready to go on day one versus finding someone who doesn't have the context yet.

 

Melissa Davy

We continue to find use cases like that using Pluralsight flow in the data and showcasing it to the leaders.

 

Naveed Zahid

And I guess when you go back to the conversation around advocacy, the fact that as a leader you are advocating for your engineer to be able to try different experiences and to just level up from moving between team to team, they're going to gain so much more experience and confidence. And chances are probably using a completely different technology stack or building new business knowledge, which makes them so much more impactful and useful for that business unit and organization as well.

 

Melissa Davy

Yeah, I think, you know we talked about advocacy and employees that are there, but even advocating for new employees, which I think is so important as well and flow helps to be able to make sure. That person is being onboarded. So they go through Manulife University, they learn all of these great things. They come to a team, how do we continue to make sure that they have a great experience, right? And it's looking at things like making sure they're doing paired programming, making sure they're involved in a code review process.

 

Melissa Davy

Even out of very early on, there's so much data and impact there by getting them involved within the team and immersing them in some of those team activities right from an early start.

 

Austin Bagley

I love how you you're just expressing all these things you've done to just. To engage these teams to iterate and be better, that's something that I feel like I'm also sensing is the third thing maybe this conversation is, is what you've done to iterate and improve. And I think oftentimes we, we get into initiatives and you know it doesn't necessarily have every single thing we wanted out of it. And so we kind of move on to something else. But what I love is you're 7 years of the transformation, five years in the manual life.

 

Austin Bagley

University probably looks a lot different than it did on day one, but it's still there and you guys stuck with it. I think that's something that. I've heard from conversations, you know, even episode one with David talking about, you know, stable stability and long running teams. And I just, I think I'm seeing that in effect here at Men Life as well of just sticking with it and going after those iterative wins, You know, incubating to your point of what's just keeping growing and getting better and better.

 

Naveed Zahid

I think when you look at transformations in general, like you can't do it Big Bang, it's like a recipe for failure. There's no way you can transfer the entire organization after a month. It's more of well, how do you start small and keep building on top of that. And that means you need to know what are the the, the stable investments that we're committing to that will help drive that change and things like Manulife University, even our investment on driving engineering. Engineering productivity and engineering intelligence, those are like those foundational pieces that our organization realizes that unless we keep these critical components in our organization, one from how do we continue to upskill and B, how do I measure that effectively, it's hard to know if the transformation's really working.

 

Naveed Zahid

So I think that's that's one of the key things and then making sure that you are constantly evolving and I think that's the that's the crux of the success is that you're you have to constantly pivot. A transformation never ends. So then why should any of our programs ever end and not evolve. So it should just be it's just that continual cycle of let's take a look at what was working before. It might have been working before, but maybe our organization's direction has changed or maybe we decided that use a new technology stack.

 

Naveed Zahid

What's the implication around that? Well, we got to change curriculum or we need to start measuring something else. What impact did it have on our overall engineering metrics and realizing that that's just part and parcel for a transformation. And ultimately, how do we advocate for our organization and the direction that's going and what impact that has for making sure that our engineers are supported through those journeys?

 

Austin Bagley

In a very like intentional way, which I think is really cool.

 

Melissa Davy

I think we all, we do it to our own team as well. I think it's not like the programs we iterate on. Naveed's group iterates on, you know after every training session, how can we make it better. My team does the same thing. But us collectively as a group, we're always thinking about what's next, what can we do better, how can we pivot?

 

Melissa Davy

What does it look like Even so much as we look at our OK Rs on a quarterly basis, what worked, what didn't work, How can we adjust this one? What should we include next, right, like we're always thinking about?

 

Naveed Zahid

How do we just improve and not only the programs that we offer but us as a team and whenever I coach the entire team it's always about hey we're so we're we're we're change agents within our organization and to be successful change agents we have to be comfortable with change as well. So we're people are in our organizations are always looking at us to say, well, how did this team address this new pivot in our organization and to be fearless and not being afraid of, well, we got to try it. If it works great, If it doesn't also great because now we've learned something from it. And I think that's just the culture that we breed in our team because that's the culture of our organization and in fact all organizations.

 

Austin Bagley

Yeah, exactly. This has been an incredible conversation. I love it. We could probably go for hours more. You've already spoken multiple times today, which is great.

 

Austin Bagley

So thank you so much for the time. A parting question. You know you're addressing a, you know, a new entering leader, be it a director of VP of engineering or whatever it might be. What is the one piece of advice that you give to them as they embark on these transformation efforts?

 

Melissa Davy

I'll start, I think, be bold. Don't be afraid to take risks. Don't be afraid to ask the tough questions. And then step back and and listen to the answers that you get. I think that really, you know, like I said, be bold, ask the questions.

 

Naveed Zahid

So for me, because it's almost like I'm going to talk to my younger self when I started this transformation journey and it's all about be patient, Transformation takes a while and you got to start small. You can't change the world immediately. And it's absolutely critical to listen and pay attention to what's working and what's not working. And the only way you know that is by having constant conversations with your employees to make sure we just tried this, didn't work. If it did, great, let's keep doing it.

 

Naveed Zahid

If it didn't, well, let's, let's change course. And so I wish I told myself that when I was an engineering manager being asked to. We have to modernize our technology. And rather than just going head in, you do small changes and see the impact and you constantly don't stop making changes. If you want to go up higher, I think it's just realizing very similar, you know, advice to a leader that is driving a transformation.

 

Naveed Zahid

Don't try to change everything all at once, because if you do, then it's going to be harder for individuals to adopt the change. And I think it goes back to that whole point around advocacy of your engineers. If you do too much, you're going to burn out your employees. Advocate for them. Make sure that you understand that we can't do it all at once.

 

Naveed Zahid

Have a journey, have a a road map of what that transformation should look like. And it's all about planning effectively.

 

Austin Bagley

Great. Well, thank you so much and we'll see you all next time.