CLIENT STORY
CHANGE AND CAPABILITY
UPLIFT
Trade Me’s Classifieds business wanted to reorganise delivery teams and uplift capability at the same time. Jaime Conley, Head of Delivery Classifieds, explains how HYPR helped them meet the challenge.
CONTEXT
The challenge
“As Head of Delivery for Classifieds, one of Trade Me’s three business units, I’m driven to improve the way we deliver value for our customers. We had a common challenge across Trade Me in that our delivery teams were too passive, lacked autonomy and weren’t close enough to the customer to deliver great experiences.
“We had particular issues with the Delivery Lead and Delivery Manager roles which meant teams weren’t set up for success. We had been working through a major initiative to reinvent our delivery model and bring greater autonomy and decision-making power to the people doing the work.”
Clarity and capability
“That initiative focused on reviewing how different delivery roles needed to work, redefining role descriptions to ensure clarity around what we expected from our people and identifying the skills gaps in our capabilities.
“It became clear from this work that Classifieds had two key challenges:
· How to align people around the new model and bring them on the journey
· How to bridge the skills gaps we identified
“Meeting both these challenges at the same time is hard. It’s a balancing act trying to get everyone to accept changes to their roles and then get them motivated to learn and apply new skills.”
Bringing HYPR onboard
“HYPR’s Megan Barnes had been engaged by Trade Me’s Consumer Marketplace business to help them design and implement the new delivery model called ‘SAM’. I’d seen the impact Megan had made and, as her work was finishing there, I wanted her to help us take our people on the journey and engage them through the role transitions and build a deep understanding of their new responsibilities.”
Megan Barnes, Agile Coach, HYPR Associate
THE SOLUTION
Competency matrix
Recruitment with a clear purpose
“We had a strong belief that if we were to bring in new talent, they had to have capabilities that could demonstrate to our people the differences between how we’d done things in the past and how we needed to do them now. The Product Owner and Agile Lead roles were our focus here and Megan was central to ensuring that we hired right.”
Capability uplift programme
“Our most important work was designing and implementing a capability uplift programme. To make it real, Megan created a programme with content tailored to our work. The content was delivered through training workshops, coaching, documentation, artefacts and tools.”
Workshops and coaching
“Megan’s theme-based, context-sensitive workshops were run every week. Because they were super-relevant, people could put the learnings into their daily work immediately. Megan focused on showing how principles were applied in our practice in a way that people could understand. She supplemented her workshops with optional one-on-one coaching and mentorship to further embed new practices.”
Taking people on the journey
Creating the right expectations
“The competencies matrix was critical in helping them understand the differences across the roles and the expectations required in each role. It helped people see why – with a redefined role – they had to give up some of the responsibilities they once had and learn a new set of skills. It showed the contributions they would each make to improving the value we delivered to customers.
“I believed that creating manageable change with very clear steps was essential in creating confidence in people who might have felt overwhelmed or anxious.”
“It also revealed to some people that they did have skills and abilities to do the role, but they just didn’t realise that they needed to be doing it. It was a lightbulb moment for them.”
Instilling confidence
“In respect of the capability uplift programme, Megan delivered training in a way that really resonated with people. She painted an easy-to-understand, consumable picture around each role and showed how achievable and unambiguous it was for people to learn their new skills.”
THE OUTCOMES
People engaged in change
It’s real! Embracing opportunity
“It’s been a fantastic journey for our people. They bought into what we were trying to achieve and they were really engaged in the workshops. I believe much of that was because Megan was able to make it both real and achievable for people.”
Focusing on customers
“We have some pretty capable and competent product owners running our value streams now and that is exciting because it means we’re truly beginning to deliver for customers.
“We have significantly more capability – and better organised capability – across the teams. We’re much more customer-centric and value-driven when we’re thinking about outcomes.”
Learnings
DIY! The journey doesn’t end
“Creating our own context-sensitive training really worked. It’s far more effective than sending people on courses where they learn principles but then have to figure out how to apply them.”
External expertise matters
“Bringing in HYPR’s experience and expertise was invaluable. Megan, with her infinite positivity and can-do attitude, coached me how I could make this change and support our people through it. We simply couldn’t have made the same impact without Megan.”
WHY HYPR?
We’d love to help you on your journey to build a world-class product engineering practice. We’re obsessed about delivering the outcomes you need and confident that we will deliver. Here are the things that make HYPR different...
- Systems thinking – We take a systems-thinking approach to avoid local optimisations that contribute little to the whole.
- Transition not transformation – Your enterprise operates in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world.
- Focus on your people – Technology and people are one system and two sides of the same coin.
- Focus on flow – Progressive enterprises focus on finding and removing delays from their system through the practice of Value Stream Management (VSM).
- Our people – We’re a diverse team with shared purpose and values.