Exclusive Trusted Magazine Q&A with Denis Salnikov, Organizational Design Consultant & LeSS Coach.
How could you describe your career path in a few words?
Thank you for having me for this Q&A. My name is Denis Salnikov, I am an Organizational Design & Agility Consultant and founder of the “Agile Expat” consulting firm based in Krakow, Poland.
My journey in the IT industry started in 2014. It took me a while to discover my field of interest. I started in Sales, then transitioned to Account Management, ending up as a Project Manager. That is how I got involved in discovering customer needs and problems and turning them into working solutions.
I got inspired by the magic that sparks when a group of talented people, united by a common challenge, come together and deliver the result. I wanted to understand how it works and what can I do to make it even more efficient. As a result, I enrolled on the Master’s program in Project Management at my local university, where I discovered the topic of Agile.
My professional journey led me to live in four countries over the last nine years. That enabled me to contribute to multiple Agile transformations. I also helped to organise efficient Product development at a scale of up to 50 teams at various startups and enterprises in Europe, North Africa and the US, including “unicorn” startups N26 (Germany) and PandaDoc (USA).
How do you think agile practices have transformed companies over the past two years?
With the COVID-19 pandemic and later economic downturn, there were two key trends to follow across the industry:
A welcoming approach towards remote/hybrid work modes;
A series of massive layoffs aimed at cutting costs due to increased uncertainty.
The companies I worked with over the last four years switched to a fully remote setup. The agile practices, with their focus on cross-functional collaboration and quick feedback loops, prevented the emergence of a deepening chasm and siloing between departments and individuals.
However, this was achievable only in workplaces striving for agility, continuously iterating on their work methods and organizational culture. Simply changing job titles and introducing artificial “ceremonies” were not enough. The companies who had to take the layoff path soon realised that better than anyone else.
Since the beginning, Agile promised to enable better business results with fewer investments. This was meant to be achieved with customer-centric product thinking and improved collaboration between the business and tech. Again, that required a deep and meaningful change in the Organizational Design. The reality many companies faced was the opposite - an increased burn rate with mediocre business outcomes and ROI. Fixation on 'hypergrowth' and intense talent competition only exacerbated the situation. As a result, they had to do massive layoffs.
What successful cases of agile transformations have you had the opportunity to observe that have particularly stood out to you?
Right now, I am inspired by the PandaDoc’s journey over the last four years. The company made its way into the document workflow automation industry's “heavyweights” division, competing with established competitors such as DocuSign and Adobe.
I spent the last three years supporting PandaDoc as a Head of Agile Practices. Together with my fellow Heads and Scrum Masters, we helped the company leadership to establish a culture and structure, which enabled the ability to successfully deliver the Product and adapt priorities according to the business needs. The list of challenges included the transition from isolated component teams to a truly agile organization; fostering cross-functional collaboration within and across the departments; addressing quality and performance issues; and much more.
The company was able to sustain a stable double-digit growth of the business YoY, receive a $1B evaluation and grow from 12 to 50 in-house teams in less than three years. Each of these results is great in itself. But when you combine them all together in such a short period, it is just phenomenal! I highly encourage you to learn more about this transformation using publicly available materials.
Will agile practices continue to generate interest? What challenges do you see in the context of deploying these practices?
When it comes to “traditional” agile practices, such as the Scrum framework, the times of Early Adopters and even the Early Majority have passed. Finding a company that has not tried at least some agile practices is unlikely. However, not all managed to reap the promised benefits due to the superficial nature of the change I mentioned. As a result, we have two groups: those, who proclaim “the death of Agile”, and those, who oppose these views.
That leads us to the second question, which bears a part of the answer. A deep meaningful change requires a thoughtful transformation across all company layers. The first step in that direction would be for business owners and leaders to stop “renting the change” by hiring Agile experts only to deploy practices to Product & Tech. The systems approach holds management accountable for Organizational Design and requires them to “own the change”.
A more demanding economic environment and competitive business landscape may drive more business leaders to realise the need for systemic change. If it happens, we will be able to overcome the existing polarization by completely dropping the A-word from our narratives to shift our attention from “buzzwords” to meaningful outcomes. We already see the rise of new tools and methods, that declare themselves to be “framework-agnostic”, such as Org Topologies®.
In the end, the initial promise of Agile was enabling higher organizational adaptivity. And the main purpose of adaptivity is survival - be it in harsh weather conditions or a competitive business environment.
