Transforming Agile Practices: Empowering Google Cloud's Agile Teams for Success

BACKGROUND:

In late 2021, Google Cloud embarked on a journey to transform its Agile practices within its teams. The teams were composed of bright and motivated individuals, yet they struggled with siloed operations, low work visibility, and inconsistent commitments. Leadership sought to bring agility, improve collaboration, and align work prioritization with business goals.

THE CHALLENGE: Google Cloud’s Agile Teams faced several significant challenges:

Teams operated in silos with low visibility into each other’s work.
Commitment and accountability as a team were lacking.
Business and product interactions with development teams were minimal, leading to misaligned work prioritization.
Individuals met infrequently, with changing commitments and poor collaboration.

OUR SOLUTION:

To address these challenges, a comprehensive, multi-phase approach was implemented:

1. Initial Phase:
Kickoff Meeting: Introduced Agile transformation to the leadership team, aligning understanding and expectations.

Role Finalization: Defined and worked with Team Leads and Engineering Managers to identify Scrum Master (SM) and Product Owner (PO) roles.

Coaching and Observations: Conducted pre-coaching observations and presented detailed insights to the leadership team.

Agile Workshop: Conducted a 2-day immersive workshop to align the leadership team on Agile principles and practices.

2. Middle Phase:
Model Teams: Finalized three model teams to serve as role models for the rest of the department.

Coaching Sessions: Regular coaching and sync-up meetings with SMs and Engineering Managers to optimize processes.

Journey Mapping: Conducted workshops to create user story maps for the enterprise product. Involved Product(valuable), Design(Usable) and Engineering(Feasible) leads.

Health Check Board: Established a health check board to monitor and share team progress on a weekly basis. This enabled the leadership to reflect on what they need to do to resolve high ROI impediments outside of the team’s control.

3. Final Phase:
Sprint 0 Completion: Successfully transitioned teams out of Sprint 0, establishing a foundation for iterative development.

Scrum Event Optimization: Worked closely with SMs to refine Scrum events and improve efficiency.

Journey Map Display: Completed and displayed the enterprise product journey map for visibility and reference.

Final Meetings: Held last meetings in December to reflect on achievements and plan next steps.

Business Outcomes Achieved:

High Predictability and Stable Velocity: All teams achieved high predictability (>85% work done per sprint) and maintained a stable velocity range, ensuring reliable delivery.
Enhanced Collaboration and Team Cohesion: Team members swarmed and performed together, with collaborative standups, planning to capacity, and engaging reviews with stakeholders.
Improved Work Prioritization and Quality: Valuable work items were prioritized for maximum impact, defect rates dropped, and backlog health improved with more functional and valued stories.
Strategic Alignment and Market Capture: Leadership established alignment via user story mapping, helping them visualize and align on the next strategic move to capture a larger market in the cloud space.
Effective Scrum Ceremonies: Teams developed a good rhythm in all Scrum ceremonies, fostering a consistent and productive work environment.

Through a structured and impactful Agile transformation journey, Google Cloud’s Agile Teams significantly improved their Agile practices, resulting in enhanced collaboration, efficiency, and delivery quality. The comprehensive coaching and strategic interventions empowered the teams to embrace Agile methodologies and achieve sustained success.

TESTIMONIALS

Mayank Upadhyay

VP of Engineering leading Google Cloud’s security controls & products: IAM and policies at scale; CISOs securing posture with SCC; developers fighting Fraud with reCAPTCHA; employees using Secure Enterprise Web Browsing. January 22, 2024

Amitabh worked with a group of 50 or so people comprising one of my teams at Google in 2022. Coming out of the pandemic, this group needed to be transformed from being a workgroup to a real team. Additionally, these folks were going through a challenging business environment requiring frequent pivots in priorities, and confusing product direction. Amitabh came aboard as an agile coach but was in the truest sense, a holistic team coach. He spent time with everyone from managers to key individual contributors helping develop them in a way that led to a stronger culture of trust and additional psychological safety. Agile practices like scrum teams, retros, and story mapping revamped the way the team interacted to communicate critical product and program management information, making the team so much more effective in problem solving and launching on a predictable schedule. I’m super proud of this team who I now view as one of the strongest performing in my overall organization.

Amitabh brings an innate wisdom when it comes to human interactions. While working with him it dawned upon me that good Agile Coaching (what I view as his strength) was all about people — it combines a sensible, compassionate and efficient way of organizing teams that harnesses every individuals’ strengths, and uses common sense ways of visual communication that make information more intuitive and digestible. I’d strongly recommend Amitabh if you are looking for a high performance coach to transform any of your teams at scale.

Ratan Nalumasu

Director at Google
September 16, 2022

Amitabh is passionate about helping teams to achieve their full potential through the Agile methodology. He coached my teams on scrum and agile methodologies. He is a patient teacher, a great observer, and an empathetic coach. The combination of friendly with calm and professional made him very effective in leading our teams through a turbulent but very productive transformation.