Project to Product Summit with Planview’s Jeff Keyes

This is Textron tv. Well, it the great pleasure today of being joined by kind of an old friend and colleague. You know, somebody I've known for some time.

Jeff Es, who is VP of Product Marketing with Planview. Welcome, Jeff. Thank you.

Excited to be here. It's always fun talking with you. Um, introduce yourself.

Tell folks about Plan, plan View, if they happen to know who you are. Um, you bet. Look, I've been a, a marketing guy around the DevOps space.

I started off as a, as a programmer, made a lot of mistakes that made me passionate about fixing a lot of those mistakes. So in the world of, of, of software development and digital product, uh, delivery, been passion around it, with experience between Pluto helped start the value stream management consortium. Spent some time at Atlassian working with, uh, the Jira Align team and here on Pluto with planview, um, working on digital products, um, and, and all the solutions that that covers, including our value stream management, um, with planview vis hub for interconnecting tool chains, um, agile plays, roadmaps, OKRs, and, and leading team of teams and, and team level development all required for delivering digital products in the enterprise.

Mm-Hmm. Well, and, and what Planview does, I remember using it myself in, in prior lives. It's kind of the heartbeat.

It's at the center of all this stuff going on, right? In the software team. All, not just the developers, but really entire process.

That's exactly right. You know, um, managing and planning, uh, the investments, the capacity, the results, the outcomes, the teams, um, that's been at Planview's core for, you know, 30 years now. And the fun part about planview is there's been a new investment, um, a number of acquisitions brought together a, a suite of pools that offers a more comprehensive solution around building and managing all these in investments in the enterprise itself.

So it really does act as the central heartbeat. Um, uh, M**k, Kirsten, our CTO calls it closed loop planning where, you know, there's all these investments made, and then you can watch what happens. You can manage the efficiency and effectiveness and use that information to, um, inform future planning cycles.

Very nice. And, and hopefully the outcome is what you were wanting or, you know, what you're expecting to get at the end of those processes, as well as the feedback loop could definitely be Principle, you know, that really is the point. We've gotta stop thinking of planning for deliverables and planning for outcomes.

Mm-Hmm. Um, you know, who, who cares how many widgets you produce? Did you, you know, make more revenue?

Did you get more people to adopt? Did you, um, you know, achieve really the business goals that you are working on? That's the point.

Yeah. Yeah. Could we, could we move into that new market, launch, that new product, et cetera.

Speaking of product, you've got a great event coming up in October, um, project to product someday. Loves the name, of course, remember of the book. It was a great book too.

Be back on. Yeah. Tell it's funny, um, I was just talking to a customer who their, um, executive team decided to go reread the book.

And if you're not familiar with Project to Product, the book was written by Kirsten, our CTO, um, six years ago. And a lot has been said and had, but the, the, you know, the, the crux of the book is to say, stop thinking of the world of software development is projects. You need to think of these as many product teams.

They need to be autonomous, they need to be smaller. They need to, you know, break dependencies and, and all these different things. And focusing on the efficiency and effectiveness, um, that resulted, uh, resulting in the flow framework being introduced.

And, um, you know, after six years, a lot has been written and, and said about project product. It's been a hot topic, you know, agile. It's kind of gotten a little bit of a, a, you know, a, a, a black eye, if you will.

It's like, well, it's more than just agile. It's more than just, um, you know, DevOps. You've gotta think about these teams differently.

It can't just be where a bunch of people get certified in certain, uh, way of doing things. You've got to change organization, you gotta change the way you fund. And then when you, you the rise of product management, how does product management work?

Uh, effectively is big enterprises. As these larger enterprises look to be, um, be and operate more as software companies gotta think and act like software companies. And that's the whole point of creating this conference around project to product.

So the summit, which is what it is, is actually two conferences in one on October 8th and ninth. There's a virtual conference for, you know, really the leadership of digital products. Um, and, um, it will be, um, online, um, just sign up.

It's free to attend, um, and, and come and participate. And I can tell you a little bit more about some of the people there. Also, on October 8th, we created, because of the interest we got, we created a, uh, exclusive event for executives.

Um, and that will be in New York City and, uh, you know, in person and just, uh, uh, you know, m will be there. We'll have a networking session. org.

And, uh, the chief methodologist from Scaled Agile, Infosys TT mean it, there's some really cool stuff Happening. It good head all, any one of those could be a headliner. It, it is really, you know, and if, if, if you are an executive and you come to the exec experience in New York, you'll sit and see what methodologies work.

Uh, one of the sessions I'm particularly excited about beyond just mixed keynote and, um, being in the room there is, um, Mike Carr from Vanguard's gonna talk about their project to product shift and how it's gone at Vanguard Mm-Hmm. Because they've done some really incredible things. And so, um, he is, as the CTO has led the effort and, um, you'll get to not just listen, but ask questions and, you know, have follow on conversations to help your organization as it goes.

So, you know, if, if you're an executive, I would invite you to sign up, um, just, you know, get signed up. You know what, what's nice is good foresight. I'm sure you, you, you've experienced this as, it's one thing to say we wanna go from projects to product, but knowing that at a leadership level and how to make that change, how to make that organizationally process people, maybe some culture just thinking about what we do a little bit differently, maybe very differently.

And it's hard to do that on your own. You wanna learn from other people that have been down that journey, down that path, maybe made the, some mistakes you're just about to make so you can avoid those or, or learn from them quicker. You know?

Um, Mitch, you're so spot on. Um, feels like the industry is really focused on, on, you know, we've done really well focusing on DevOps. How do I get code from, you know, the time I check in, reduce the amount of time it takes and the reliability it take it, you know, it, it has to getting to production, which has been great.

A lot been done on the planning, the iterative cycles of planning. But at the end of the day, there's some key areas that are not addressed enough. And that's something we're looking to bring together here.

So, you know, P two P Summit is not another agile conference. There's not another DevOps conference. Mm-Hmm.

It's, um, really focuses on, um, product and portfolio leadership, product leadership itself, uh, transformation executives, um, and, and the engineering leadership itself. Um, with how do you implement this product operating model, if you will, this new way of working? 'cause it's a new operating system for how to, how to work Mm-Hmm.

You can't just, you know, send people in, like I said before, they'll get certified and they sticky and, you know, off to the races, but you still report the same structure. Now it doesn't work that way. There's this rise in product management.

There's, how do you do investments and capacity across the teams? How do you realize results? How do you really measure value, stream flow and the efficiency effectiveness and what kind of organizational design requires that?

All those are tracks in the P two P summit, and we have speakers, um, from each areas. Now, you know, interesting enough, Mitch, when we got started on this, we, uh, reached out to some, you know, I would call them, um, strategic community partners. Um, people like Matthew Skelton from Team Topologies, Helen Beal from the VSM Consortium, um, Carlos Gonzalez from product school, um, VOSA, sorry, I always don't say his last name.

You know, um, um, j from, you know, comparative agility, Klaus Leopold from Flight Levels. You know, stop me when you've heard, you know, uh, John Smart from senior, safer, happier, uh, Laura Bernard, um, from, um, PMO strategies, uh, Mike Buroughs from ship. I mean, all these people are one conference.

Wow. And addressing the various dimensions, because they're all experts in that particular dimension. What's cool about this is it brings it all together under a single umbrella that, um, you know, gives people the opportunity to attend.

I'm curious and learn a lot because that's all they've been doing. Each of these areas, You know, we could pull on any one of those threads. I have about 20 questions for each one.

We don't have time for that, but I'm really inter interested in what you said about the rise of product management. Um, 'cause in my career, you know, they're really good product managers, maybe others that were struggling a little bit, but it seemed like it wasn't really clear what product management is. And we really needed some, I don't know if discipline doesn't, I don't mean they're not disciplined, but just really some guidance on what is it to be an effective product manager and how does that work with you in the organization.

Yeah. And, and you know, it can't be a, a model where by what product management's opinion. I'll give it to them.

Um, the, the core of the culture and the operational, you know, that, that's why it's an operating model. It's a way of working that has to change. Um, I love how JPMC came out with an article a couple years back, few years back where they talked about hiring 25 mini CEOs and, and creating their business much more as, as a software startup.

I know in my time at Microsoft, that's very much how I felt. If we didn't have a hundred million dollar business. It's like you're on the chopping block and you report up to corporate with how you're going to deliver all these, you know, amazing features that gonna ultimately result in revenue.

Um, product management has to be the center of that. And if it's not organized in a way with cross-functional team, where product management is really driving that, um, it's never gonna work. And it, well, anyway, it sort of reminds me early on my career as a developer.

I remember somebody told me, don't go work at a bank as a programmer. You'll never, you know, do anything interesting. And what they're really meaning to say, now that I understand it better, is that in it, organizations of big companies at that time in general, really didn't take products as, you know, something you advance.

People didn't feel a connection to what they were working on. They didn't see the results, per se. It was just a list to stop, go get it done.

You know, spend that project down. Go do the next one. A product team is different.

People are highly engaged in, in the results that they see with their customer base. And product management acts as that leader bringing together this cross-functional team, um, to achieve those results. That's the point of what we're doing.

Taking these project teams where there's disconnected, um, um, results into product teams that are building real value. Amazon is still my favorite story of how this came to be. What a brilliant concept of product management taking things forward that had enormous value, thus was born, born AWS and the various services that are there from a online book company.

How cool is that? You know what I mean? Mm-Hmm.

It is amazing. Wow. Yeah.

I think of how many projects it projects people are on that at the end of it, whenever it, whenever it ends, say, well, I kind of wasted my time. Nothing got used or didn't have the outcome or, and with the right leadership, product management, some, some real decision making around what should we be doing? What's the outcome that we wanna have?

So people can direct their work towards it and they know why they're doing what they're doing. Okay, I know how, why my testing work is gonna contribute to this goal of where we're headed with this. So absolutely, all exciting stuff.

Really good stuff. Who, who should do, who should attend each conference? What kind of folks, um, are typically attracted to both?

Well, You know, if you're in bold in, look, if you're in transformation at all, um, this should be a key topic because transformation is, requires this kind of shift. It's proven. Um, we've got results.

If you haven't come and see the 2023 state of project to product, you should, by the way, a little teaser. We're refreshing that it's gonna be coming out shortly, that 2024 state of project to product and, you know, talks about, um, a whole lot of things about the people involved, but who should come, um, head of engineering head, uh, if you're involved in the office of the PMO, please attend this. This is a way to reimagine what the, um, what should be a value management office does if you're in product management or product leadership, how to install that operating model, if you will.

Um, anywhere on the value stream side by value stream architects, um, coaches, uh, engineering leadership. It's really for all. You know, and I'll just to take a moment too, I, I want to talk about something else.

I know that I'm a marketing guy. Um, don't hold that against me. I'm passionate about these topics.

And when we first started thinking through this conference, we created some fundamental tenets, uh, what we wanted to have, because we created this, and frankly, as we were talking about this, Mitch, we were like, let's, let's do this for us. Let's make this be the coolest conference we've ever been to. You know, I, I know I rattled off some, some names that I think are really amazing, and they really are.

They're fantastic to listen to. But the fundamental principles behind this are, you know, one that's free. There's no reason to not, it's your time.

And come join, listen, there's a whole agenda. You go through all that. Two, there's no vendor pitches anywhere.

This is not where you're gonna get sold. Now, that's hurting me on the executive experience because I said it's free and there's no vendor pitches. And I get the side eye from many an exec that's like, wait, what am, why am I attending?

Because there's gotta be some kind of pitch or something. No. Um, three, the third principle that we're going on, it's exclusively the, the, you know, the, the practices and methods.

It, it's a, it's a mix of experiential and expert talks. Period. End of story.

Um, who wants to attend? That's it. If you've heard of any of the people I've talked about or any of the areas I've talked about, and you have an interest of how to be more effective in delivering digital products, you should attend.

It truly is for all. If you're an executive and you want to achieve better outcomes, come rub shoulders with people that have done it at scale. It's not as simple as, let me just, you know, go, you know, run an agile tra.

It's not that this is beyond just that. 'cause you have to think about funding and you have to think about, um, looking at the, the outcomes. Interestingly enough, one of the stats we asked on the, I'm, I'm to totally stealing thunder from a future show, but, um, you know, the, the state of project product, we ran a survey.

We said, how did, how do you measure success? One of the most predominant answers was, we didn't blow up production, we didn't ship bugs. You know, Woohoo.

Mm-Hmm. So what you're telling me is I have to, I could ship comments and claim success. Yeah, I was gonna say, that's not an outcome.

That's a side effect. It's a side effect. Interesting.

Well, I, I am just picturing, you know, like if I was going to this myself, I would be going with the 20 questions I've always wanted to ask somebody else, but those people are not around me. Right. I'm busy in my company doing my job, working with the folks that I work, and we're a better place to share, learn, engage with other people in those other roles too.

Not just the same role that you have. So, yes. Fantastic, Jeff.

Um, we'll put the, we'll put a link to each, each of the two, the virtual as well as in person in New York in the description for the video so folks can, uh, sign up. So I hope you have great attendance. I'm sure you will with a lineup like that.

How could you not? Um, yeah, I have to say, we've seen fantastic response. Um, and um, the only part that's like a little bit prejudice is like, why, where, where's the pitch?

Because the value is massive and, you know, the no free lunch keeps coming through with people, but it really is, it, it's, it's a free lunch. I mean, it's your time, but there's been a fantastic response and it's a great way to, to interconnect with more people in the industry. You won't find a better, uh, conference and better summit on this ship of becoming a, you know, a product company than this.

This is all the elements I'm sold. Ready to go? Let's go.

All righty, Jeff, it's been a pleasure talking with you as always, and, uh, I hope the conference, I know the conference will go off really well and, uh, be fantastic, enjoyable. Thanks, Mitch. I'm excited.

Look forward to seeing you there. You Bet.