June 21, 2024
871: From IDEA to EXECUTION with people, processes, and collaboration w/ Sannette Coetzee
When resilience meets innovation, you get the remarkable story of Sannette Coetzee, a trailblazer in global agility from the heartlands of South Africa to the tech giants Visa and PayPal. Our conversation with Sannette is nothing short of a masterclass in entrepreneurial tenacity and the transformative potential of the Agile framework. As she takes us through her journey and dives into the realm of virtual reality application development, we're reminded of the profound impact that fostering connections and collaboration has on the tech industry and business as a whole.
Strap yourself in for a thrilling ride through strategic alignment, where the magic of teamwork comes to life. Picture an online flower shop; it’s not just about the blooms but the flow of value to the customer that matters. With Sannette's expertise, we dissect the intricate dance of aligning product features with customer delight—skirting the pitfall of over-engineering while crafting an intentional roadmap for product and marketing strategies. The art of decision-making takes center stage, as we dissect the tools and the innate human touch required to navigate the rapid pace of business today.
To cap off this adventure, we celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit that dares to jump from the safety of employment into the thrilling unknown of business ownership. From bringing projects to life under the wire to evolving with each piece of feedback, the journey is as exhilarating as it is insightful. Our discussion blossoms into the realms of the Concept to Cash workshops, where AI meets agile and design thinking, providing entrepreneurs with the arsenal to turn visions into reality. So, tune in for a dose of inspiration and pragmatic strategies that will fuel your entrepreneurial aspirations.
ABOUT SANNETTE
Meet Sannette Coetzee: A transformative leader with over 23 years of experience revolutionizing global agility. From her pivotal role at Visa to her groundbreaking initiatives at PayPal, Sannette's expertise spans agile coaching, product management, and community building. With a track record of designing bespoke frameworks and facilitating over 2500 workshops, she's a master of driving organizational change. Join us as we delve into her journey of inspiring innovation and shaping the future of agile leadership.
LINKS & RESOURCES
00:00 - Agile Framework and Entrepreneurship Perspectives
08:51 - Strategic Alignment and Decision Making
19:47 - Customer-Centric Metrics and Agile Delivery
24:31 - Entrepreneurial Insights and Feedback Strategies
29:18 - Entrepreneurial Insights and Passion
38:41 - Support From Guests Keeps Podcast Alive
WEBVTT
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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, Brian Lofermento, and I am joined by an awesome entrepreneur.
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Today I will tell you before we even hit record.
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Today, I can tell how much incredible energy and passion she has for not only what she does, but for entrepreneurship and really for just showing up from a place of service.
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And I will say that if you've listened to this podcast and you've heard so many amazing software entrepreneurs and executives and CEOs and you've always thought, how do I start a software business?
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Or even if you're not interested in software but you just don't know how to go from idea to execution, then today's entrepreneur is really going to open our eyes.
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Let me tell you all about her.
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Her name is Sanette Coetzee.
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She is a transformative leader with over 23 years of experience revolutionizing global agility.
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The agility framework is something that Sanette is going to give us some insights into.
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For all of us, We'll have a lot of eye-opening takeaways from hearing her talk about that.
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From her pivotal role at Visa to her groundbreaking initiatives at PayPal, Sunette's expertise spans agile coaching, product management and community building.
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With a track record of designing bespoke frameworks and facilitating over 2,500 workshops, she's a master of driving organizational change.
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I'm so excited about this.
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We're all gonna learn a lot today, Whether you're interested in software or not.
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This is gonna to push the envelope to action, and that's what it's all about, so I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Sanet Koizia.
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All right, Sanet, I am so excited that you're here with us today.
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Welcome to the show.
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Good morning.
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Brian, hello, I honestly there's so much good stuff we're going to get into today.
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You have so much experience.
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I love the fact that you don't lose any energy or enthusiasm in all that experience.
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So, sanette, first things first, take us beyond the bio.
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Who is Sanette?
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How did you start doing all these incredible things that you're up to?
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If we go back all the way from to the beginning.
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So I'm from South Africa.
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I grew up on a small farm community.
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We had 100 pupils in primary schools in South Africa we don't have middle schools.
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From there I got into a software job.
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Actually, I went to university for engineering first and work out.
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I got a software position.
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I was actually putting motherboards together when PCI slots just work out.
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I got a software position.
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I was actually putting motherboards together when PCI slots just came out.
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I got let go from that job and then I took that money and I moved to the UK because you know why, wouldn't you want to go and explore the world?
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And I went back to university, actually when I was 27.
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So shout out to all the older folks that goes back and do extra learning.
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I worked three jobs, got through it.
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Once I got that piece of paper, the world changed.
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I started doing a web developer job in London and then somebody had the idea of needed a project manager and that is how I got into the work that I do now, because it was the first time that I came into this knowledge where I realized that I really like holding spaces for other people to connect specifically in technology, because I love the idea of ecosystems and how all of this work together and I from there I just went upward and onward and I have this drive to always keep traveling.
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My mom calls it ants in the pants.
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I got a job in Chicago.
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I flew back and forth.
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I basically went for a long interview for like nine months, so I flew back and forth every two weeks between London and the US and I delivered this project successfully.
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I finally got the visa and I worked at companies like PayPal and Visa and I always wanted to have my own company.
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I wanted to try new and different things and it's once I got my citizenship in the US that I was actually able to step into that.
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And now I'm developing virtual reality applications, which is meant for software teams to create more of that connection and that collaboration space.
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But I'll go back to you, Brian.
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I don't know if that intro was too long.
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No, sunet.
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It was amazing for so many reasons, especially because I think it shows what is your secret sauce, which is you really have operated in so many different worlds.
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You think a little bit like a developer.
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You obviously have been inside the tech world.
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You've worked at some of the biggest brands that we all recognize the Visas of the world, the PayPals of the world, super innovative companies that have also been at it for a while, for example, in the case of Visa.
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So I think you've navigated all of those waters, which gives you such that unique perspective.
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Sinat, combining all of that, what is it?
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I know that the Agile framework is so at the core of not only the way that you operate, but I would imagine that it also shapes the way that you see the world, the way that you see business.
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Talk to us about Agile because fun fact, in almost 900 episodes, we've only ever once before talked about the Agile framework.
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So for Sunet, for listeners who are tuning in, what the heck is so special about Agile?
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What is it and how does it shape the way you see the world?
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What the heck is so special about Agile?
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What?
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is it and how does it shape the way you see the world?
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Great question, brian.
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So actually fun fact 86% of all the companies in the world that do software development use this methodology, and that's what Agile is.
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Agile is a framework that describes a specific set of values and principles which you then turn into practices, which becomes an operating model.
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Operating model is how, what are the roles that's involved in, how you deliver your products, what are the artifacts involved and what are the activities the events like, how do people connect?
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It's basically creating a playbook for how we move work throughout our ecosystem to eventually deliver something to the customer.
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And agile the big difference from it used to be called waterfall methodology and waterfall used to be.
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We were dead set on.
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We're going to be extremely accurate when we, at the beginning of a project, spent months and months defining requirements and we estimate to our best ability and then we go and we design it and then we test it and then eventually put it in front of the customer.
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Now, a few issues with that was always.
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We were always running behind with just not that good and taking something and decomposing it and estimating it accurately what works actually better, and this is where Agile came in.
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Agile said why don't we build something small, put it in front of the customer fast, get some feedback and then we relatively size that small piece to the next piece we want to build, and now we have a historical data point that we can use to forecast from.
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So, going from waterfall to agile also introduced the ideas of not negotiating contracts which was it has to be to the letter, exactly these list of things.
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But to negotiation, where we, for example, would say if the customer's ultimate objective is to build a building contracts which was it has to be to the letter, exactly these list of things.
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But to negotiation, where we, for example, would say if the customer's ultimate objective is to go from A to B, we can negotiate.
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They didn't tell us how they want to get there.
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It can be a Ferrari, it can be a motorcycle, it can be a jet ski, whatever the parameters are.
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But now we can actually negotiate the outcome versus the output.
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And agile puts a lot of focus on people, and that's what I really loved about this.
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I tried to be the project manager that would dole out the tasks and I felt so uncomfortable.
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I really didn't like it and create a little bit of friction between myself and the team, and then agile came in and gave me a way to be a servant leader.
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We create an environment that allows other people to shine and they connect, and the reason why I have my company and why I step out is because I really want to bring the joy back to collaboration and connection.
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Yeah, sunet, there's so much to unpack in there.
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I think that we're not used to when we talk about this tech world.
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When we talk about I mean you've already mentioned developing VR apps, and I will say, as an early Apple Vision Pro tech adopter, I've got many questions for you today, sunet.
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So, along those lines, though, when we talk about that world, we don't often bring in people into the equation, and it's so fascinating to me that just in that answer there, that's at the core of so much of the way that not only you operate, but, of course, that the agile framework operates.
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And I'd love to go a little bit deeper there, because when we're talking about people, we always have people problems, and there's a million opinions, there's a million different ways of doing things I think about.
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So often in the tech startup world we've had amazing entrepreneurs on from that world where they talk about.
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Sometimes there can be a culture of ready fire aim, and a lot of that is an afterthought, whereas even hearing you talk about the predecessor to Agile, talking about the waterfall framework, it just seems like a really intentional way of going about it.
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Sunet, how the heck do we navigate the people element of all this to get everybody on the same page.
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I think that's something that all of us struggle with in all of our businesses, regardless of industry.
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I love this question.
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I am extremely passionate about this and it's actually one of the boot camps that I run is focused on the strategy and alignment and 100%.
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I think I read somewhere somebody called it meeting, tax and collaboration chaos, which is such a it's a perfect description of it, but it's actually quite sad for me that this is something that exists to that extent that we had to give it these names, because I see there's so much beauty in that connection and I feel there's nothing more powerful when people come together and they're in their flow and they're authentic and we're actually building something together.
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I was thinking about vibing.
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I know these are older words, but that's when there's real magic, when we're vibing together in this space.
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Now, I love the use of value streams.
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Value stream is there's different names.
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You call it customer value stream, operational value stream but it's a construct and I know the first time I heard that I was like I don't what does that even mean?
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But really what it is.
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It is a visual representation of how your customer and remember you start with your customer persona.
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So for me, alignment, um and cooperation and getting across barriers with people first and foremost come from creating a pool of meaning, and that pool of meaning, when you're delivering a customer or a product for a customer, should be the customer and their problems and how we're solving that.
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So if you're starting with a customer persona, which we all agree upon, so it's Susie.
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She's 35-year-old, she's a stay at home mom.
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What is her typical behaviors?
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And then what is the?
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There's a framework.
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We also call jobs to be done.
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What is the jobs that she needs to do with this solution that we're gonna be creating for her?
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You take that and then you create a value stream, and a value stream goes through the high level steps that the user, the customer, will interact with as they're using your product.
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For example, say, I have a magical flower shop, which is an online place where you can buy flowers.
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The high-level steps would be the first thing is I need to be made aware of this, so there's going to be some work that needs to be done and some campaign that lets me know there's an online portal or some advertisements.
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The next step is I'm probably going to arrive there and I'm going to browse around a little bit and I'm going to want to create a profile so I can save my preferences and make orders and all that kind of stuff.
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So there's going to be some work on onboarding.
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Then I'm going to want to place an order.
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So there's got to be a place where I can search the flowers and put it in order.
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Then I'm going to want to pay, and that high level steps in the value stream very visual.
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So there's lots of electronic tools that does it very well.
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That's actually also why I built my virtual reality application, so that we have this very tangible 3D massive board that keeps reminding us of what is the flow that the customer needs to go through.
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If you have that there and then you have conversations with your development partner, with your business, where you even bring the customer in and you start creating the work underneath of all of that.
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And here's the secret, the secret secret sauce that people miss about this Instead of building out which is what we love to do, especially if you're a developer you want to make it.
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We call it gold plating.
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So you want to put in as much as possible in there to make it beautiful and perfect.
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But that's not what the customer need.
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They don't need a beautiful registration page that's going to contain everything.
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They just need to get to the point where they actually receive our flowers.
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So what you then do with your team is, as you look across this whole value stream, you identify just enough we call them thin slices just enough in each of those steps so we can build it together put it out and put it in front of the customer and see what they think about it.
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Yeah gosh, sunet, I love that answer because, listeners, I'm going to call every single one of us out, because what Sunet is sharing with us here today, this level of intentionality, this level of strategic forethought this is something that not just within the scope of we're talking about launching products and operationally executing Sunet, but I think that this level of intentionality we need to apply to our marketing campaigns, to our client onboarding campaigns.
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I think all of this needs to come with that, and I always think Sunet.
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When I'm in this role as the podcast host, I always just try to think like a listener, and, whether they're newer entrepreneurs, whether they're experienced entrepreneurs, what they might be hearing here is a lot of decisions that need to be made in advance, and they're sitting there in advance and saying, oh my gosh, what is that going to look like?
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I am planning for things that I may not necessarily even know of right now.
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What's your advice?
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Because I will publicly call you out here, because I think that one of your secret skill sets is helping people to make decisions fast and, in a world where so many people are paralyzed by decision or indecision.
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Sanette, talk to us about decision making.
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I want to hear your perspectives on that because I know you have a lot of experience on it.
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Most importantly, I know you help a lot of other people with it.
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On it.
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Most importantly, I know you help a lot of other people with it.
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Yes, thank you, brian.
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It is a very, very good point and I can tell you what I see that haven't worked Big companies like Visa and PayPal.
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We love to have decision matrix model, so there's a weighting scoring model, which is really where you identify the factors that's important for you to make a decision about where you're going to put your focus.
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You give them each weight, Then you take your items that you need to decide and you drop it into your model.
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Now, not to overwhelm you, but the point is people feel that that is going to make a decision for you.
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But what I've discovered is you're still going to have to have a conversation, so you will have to sit down and highlight and lay out what it is, where your vision is and where you are on your journey.
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So one of the things that I help to set a direction sorry, just knock my mic over here is we use a tool called OKRs, so prioritization is another way of talking about it, but OKRR is really goal setting.
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The O is an objective and the key R is a key result, and I love this framing of it because you take it from your mission.
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So say, for example, my mission is we enable teams or people to connect, collaborate and make decisions fast.
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We do it through face-to-face conversations, workshops and technology.
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That is my mission in this world to bring that joy back to connecting people.
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And one of our products is strategic alignment, where we help them to make decisions.
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Those techniques that we use in there is we start with a mission, make sure everybody is aligned to that.
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Then we also align our values.
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What do we believe is true for us as a company?
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In agile, for example, one of those values are that we truly believe a team is the true unit of progress, not individuals.
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So when we put performance et cetera, in place, we always evaluate the team and we let the team decide and we let the team estimate, for example.
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So just align on your values.
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I would always do that when you have your leadership team, have a conversation.
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So just align on your values.
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I would always do that when you have your leadership team, have a conversation, definitely face-to-face, and then look at OKR objectives and key results, which is going to help you start setting that direction and help you figure out where you need to focus.
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Objective is what are we trying to achieve?
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So, say, at the end of the year, we want this platform to have X amount of users in these places.
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Your key results is going to be these incremental points that you put along the way.
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That's going to help you measure if you're reaching it.
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Say, if your end result is you want to reach 1000 users you might have in three months, well then I should have 200, and at the end of three months, and then so on and so forth.
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And then the work that you do is what's in the middle?
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What is the work that you need to do across your value stream and start from left to right.
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There's a sequence, there's a dependency.
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We need to build this block first.
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We can build that block, so that already gives you a sequence, a rank in which you can go by.
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So use your value stream, look at your O, look at your KR, identify the work that you need to do and make sure you've got your sequencing in place.
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Gosh Sunet, I love the way you talk about this stuff because you think so logically and in order that it makes it really easy for all of us to follow along.
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So I really appreciate the way that you articulate this stuff and when I think about key results, for example, obviously a lot of us have so many different KPIs and all of our businesses and lives that we're all aspiring towards and that we've set goals towards.
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I always really appreciate talking to people in the fitness industry, for example, because I just think the fitness industry I mean here I am wearing an Apple watch, for example there's so many metrics that come along with the world of health and fitness and wellness that we can measure.
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But some of those metrics can be deceiving.
00:17:38.337 --> 00:17:47.536
For example, when I talk to fitness people, they always say, no, I don't weigh myself, because if I go to the gym, sure I might be losing weight, but I'm also gaining muscle.
00:17:47.536 --> 00:17:50.079
So weight can be one of those misleading things.
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And in the world of business, I feel like there's so many of those things People get really hung up on.
00:17:54.327 --> 00:17:56.958
I want to hit, let's say, $100,000 in revenue.
00:17:56.958 --> 00:18:08.019
For a lot of people, that's their first target and they think that they have to measure it there, whereas where my head goes, having been in the game for 16 years, is I'm like how many leads are you generating, how many sales conversations are you having?
00:18:08.019 --> 00:18:10.943
Those are metrics that I can control and that I'm interested in.
00:18:10.943 --> 00:18:19.003
Sunette, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, because you also tie it in not only with the goal setting, but you call them those key results from the OKR framework.
00:18:19.003 --> 00:18:22.138
What are some of those metrics that you pay attention to?
00:18:22.138 --> 00:18:27.858
What are some of the downfalls of metrics that people might think are important and then shed some light on the real stuff for us.
00:18:30.162 --> 00:18:35.229
Absolutely, this is a long conversation, can be a long conversation.
00:18:35.229 --> 00:18:54.883
I've been involved in very long efforts to try and identify that because, absolutely, we love to measure things and actually the first downfall that I will say when it comes to metrics is I don't think people are always very intentional with the experiments that they build around it.
00:18:54.883 --> 00:18:56.299
What are you learning?
00:18:56.299 --> 00:19:00.461
What is behavior that you're trying to change by measuring a specific thing?
00:19:00.461 --> 00:19:02.681
So that's one thing to remember.
00:19:02.681 --> 00:19:10.102
And let me stay back a little bit and go to absolutely the measurement around the ROI for the business is very important.
00:19:10.102 --> 00:19:13.134
But I would actually start with how am I measuring?
00:19:13.134 --> 00:19:21.565
I'm solving that problem that I've identified for the customer, one of my favorite examples, and I mentioned this and I'll come back to my point.
00:19:21.565 --> 00:19:27.623
I mentioned this because if you're solving the customer problem, then the ROI is going to follow.
00:19:27.623 --> 00:19:38.498
So I would start and focus there and be very clear how you're going to put that experiment together so that when you're incrementally start delivering using that agile framework, how are you measuring?
00:19:38.498 --> 00:19:40.443
What are you measuring and how are you feeding it back?
00:19:40.443 --> 00:19:44.883
And there has to be action after you've done the feedback or you got the feedback.
00:19:44.883 --> 00:19:47.127
So my favorite example of this.
00:19:47.127 --> 00:20:12.769
There's this company called that does couch surfing, and if you don't know about them, they've been around for quite some time now and they allow or enable people that like to travel and I've traveled a lot and it's a very different experience when you hang out with the locals versus when you're staying in a hotel so this is a website that enables travelers to find people that want to meet travelers, and you hang out on their couch.
00:20:12.769 --> 00:20:14.461
Basically, they offer you a couch to sleep.
00:20:14.461 --> 00:20:20.664
They have identified that a success or a satisfaction or a happiness.
00:20:20.664 --> 00:20:31.499
Kpi a customer indicator of they're solving a problem would be that they're spending the least amount of time on their website, which I thought is brilliant because, of course.
00:20:31.499 --> 00:20:43.208
So their KPI, which they then measure in their OKR, is actually the amount of time that you've spent searching for the couch, minus the amount of time that you've spent booking on it.
00:20:43.208 --> 00:20:46.986
So if that number goes up, the customer gets happier.
00:20:46.986 --> 00:20:49.041
So start with a customer first.
00:20:49.714 --> 00:20:51.900
When it comes to agile delivery.
00:20:51.900 --> 00:21:11.619
There's this book that I love and it's the key success to influencing and it's written by the gentleman or the group of people that did Crucial Conversations, and they talk about making sure that you're measuring the correct thing so that it actually changes the behavior that you want.
00:21:11.619 --> 00:21:17.690
So, when it comes to agile delivery, we look at cycle time, which I think is a great indicator.
00:21:17.690 --> 00:21:22.146
In other words, how long does it take you to get a piece of work through the system?
00:21:22.146 --> 00:21:23.619
We look at throughput.
00:21:23.619 --> 00:21:25.065
I think is a great indicator.
00:21:25.555 --> 00:21:47.598
When it comes to individuals' performance, especially since we've earlier mentioned that we believe a team is a true unit of progress, what I see a lot of companies do is they measure the individual's performance, which is counter, because now the behavior that you're enticing by that is they want to take something and go do it by themselves.
00:21:47.598 --> 00:22:02.184
Where in Agile we said we believe that as a team, they can swarm on something, and then we can start applying that start finishing and stop starting principle, which is then going to increase your cycle time and reduce your lead time.
00:22:02.184 --> 00:22:06.027
So what I would say is again about metrics.
00:22:06.027 --> 00:22:07.412
Start with the customer.
00:22:07.412 --> 00:22:07.854
What are?
00:22:07.854 --> 00:22:10.542
How are you measuring if you're solving that problem for them?
00:22:10.542 --> 00:22:14.144
How are you measuring their happiness or the reduction in their pain?
00:22:14.144 --> 00:22:24.026
Then identify what your ROI numbers are and make sure that your metrics are tied to the values and the culture that you want to create within your organization.
00:22:24.815 --> 00:22:27.625
Yeah, sunet, I so appreciate those insights.
00:22:27.625 --> 00:22:39.582
Listeners, this is something that, as someone who gets to talk to amazing entrepreneurs all day, every day, for a living, it's a common theme is that incredible entrepreneurs, incredible business leaders, think about their customer first.
00:22:39.582 --> 00:22:55.989
So, net, here I asked you a loaded question and you acknowledged it that we could talk about that for literally days on end, but where you took it was hey, let's not make it about us, because we have a tendency in business to focus in on our own problems, but you instead turned it to how can we be of service to others?
00:22:55.989 --> 00:23:12.134
So I think that that's such a powerful insight into the way that you think and the way that you address real life business issues, and when you talk about starting and stopping, I know that this is something that plagues beginner entrepreneurs all the way through to seven, eight, nine figure entrepreneurs is that we're always idea factories.
00:23:12.173 --> 00:23:15.020
We always have ideas, we always are moving forward.
00:23:15.020 --> 00:23:16.183
We love building things.
00:23:16.183 --> 00:23:25.199
You called out, for example, the developer who wants to have the world's prettiest login page, and perfection is the enemy of done, for example.
00:23:25.199 --> 00:23:27.002
So I've always loved that concept.
00:23:27.002 --> 00:23:32.965
Let's talk about go to market, because I know it's a component, a big component of the work that you do.
00:23:32.965 --> 00:23:43.983
And obviously, we've all heard about minimum viable products and we've heard all of these things about good is better than perfect, all of these concepts that we've all been introduced to.
00:23:43.983 --> 00:24:05.996
But, sinet, talk to us about go-to-market because, as someone who not only is developing VR apps which I think it's so cool you're at the cutting edge of technology but for everyone in business, what is the point at which we can say you know what, let's get this into the world, let's start getting that real life customer feedback, what's?
00:24:06.175 --> 00:24:09.238
your thought process behind a launch of it's time to put this out there.
00:24:09.238 --> 00:24:09.878
Bubble gum and sticky tape.
00:24:09.878 --> 00:24:23.849
That's how I think about it, and you know what the interesting thing is about my journey, even though I have been teaching this for so many years in organizations and helped so many product teams get to that point, applying yourself is really hard.
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I want to make it perfect.
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I want to have all the integrations.
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