Connect ‘Why’ with ‘What’ Using ‘Vision To Value’ Mapping (With Lavaneesh Gautam) - Lean Agile London 24 TalkInTen

Each year the Product Agility podcast goes on tour. We get to go to some of the best conferences and interview some of the most influential speakers out there, 
and this year is no different. We kick off our talks in 10 initiative for 2024 by visiting Lean Agile London, 
lean Agile London is a fantastic community event, which has a lot of soul and a lot of energy to it. They've also attracted some of the best speakers I've seen on a lineup for a long time. Over the next few days, we are gonna be bringing you as many of these speakers talks in 10 as we possibly can do. 
Each of these episodes will be recorded on the ground in the moment, so you may hear some background noise, I hope, but that adds to the ambiance and makes it feel like you are there with us. This episode of the Product Agility Podcast is sponsored by AHA Slides, your solution for more engaging and productive team meetings. Transform your team's learning experience with our HA slides, AI powered tools designed to quickly generate quizzes and interactive content, boost engagement and efficiency in one go when. What more can you ask for? Visit aha slides.com and use the exclusive discount code prod agility 2024 to get 50% off of all yearly plans. Now, shall we get onto our talk in 10? Welcome 
to the Unity Podcast 2024 
Lean Agile London. 
Yes, again, I'm the marvelous roof terrorist and I am here this time of lah Gatum whose uh, talk this afternoon was visioned to value a really interesting topic and something which is very dear to my own heart. I'm talking 
about vision and value tomorrow, agile London. So I'm really keen to hear your take on some of this and maybe I'll steal some of your stuff, if that's quite right. Um, 
for our listeners, uh, lah, would you mind introducing yourself and giving everyone a bit of a flavor for what your talk was about? Okay, uh, so should I talk about myself as well? Yeah. Okay. That, that's fine, Ben. Okay, so love. 
So, and I'm a professional scrum trainer with the scrum.org and the trainer with the pro band.org as well. But in my, apart from the training work, I work as a product advisor in the product consultant in banks and few 
educational technology, um, kind kind of startups and the scale ups as well. So 
loving the word, uh, 
uh, something of the, both the words in and itself, I have say yeah. Uh, so my talk vision to value, uh, is about that 
finding out that missing why within our work where 
I think our 
engineers, our developers, our team members, they have turned into Jira ticket burners 
instead of the value creators. 
And that, that why is missing. So that vision to value is all about keeping things simple. We need to have a vision, 
we need to think about the value assumptions to meet that vision, value assumptions for both business as well as for the customers and the users. And then start delivering those things through the experimentation or maybe through other tools like Scrum and CanBan and all, and the keep Masing our progress towards those things. 
Simple, to be honest. 
So if it is so simple, why was your talk, what is it, half an hour, 45 minutes? Um, what, what is, what's the difficulty that people experience with this then? Because it does sound so simple, but so what is it that makes it so bloody difficult for people? 
I think, uh, 
we 
call value with the many names. I think. So for an example, if I'm using impact mapping, uh, ban, so yeah, 
one place I'm calling Impact, then I go to another framework, 
some opportunity Solution Tree, I call it as an opportunity. 
I go to something like Lean UX Canvas, they call it as business outcomes and the user outcomes. But pretty much all of these things, they're talking about the value in itself. 
Why we cannot use the word simple, which is value and using different synonyms. Product development is already complex. 
Why we have to make it more complex by using these different terminology. Why we cannot just simply use the value. And that's when the idea came into our mind, was that why we just say vision and value and keep measuring your progress towards it, job done, 
if any. I wish it was that simple, but I'm a big fan of things that leant canvas and I'm a big fan of impact mapping 
and I do agree it is confusing for the amount of different terms that we have. And it's interesting when I think of value at the moment, I, I generally lean towards actually the, the bottom line. You know, I think that the Agile award did a really good job, obviating actually what the one, uh, value really was, 
and I've been guilty of this myself in the past. 
We never connected it to the concrete thing of are we generat 
the revenue and have we got sufficient margin for that to be sustainable? But nothing was ever connected. So 
we talk about outcomes and impact and there are ways to kind of hit that bottom line. In your talk, did you talk about the, the, the, the real nitty gritty of uh, of revenue profit margin, that kind of thing? 
And that's something 
I spoke about that yes, maybe in various different tools we have been able to understand the customer and the user value, 
but somewhere 
we were not able to connect that customer and the user value with the business value. 
And we must be able to connect with that. And because of this, what happens, Ben is 
our stakeholders. They understand the business value 
and when they cannot connect the business value within our day-to-day work, 
they fall back to the metrics like velocity more, 
ate more features, 
and that strategic and the stakeholder alignment get missed 
in itself. 
And I don't, I don't think we should work on anything which I cannot connect with the business value as well as the user value in itself. If I purely and purely focus on the user value, let's say if I'm making my customers happy, 
but I cannot connect this or turn this customer happiness into some kind of the business benefit, what will happen? 
Tell me, Ben, 
I dunno, I think you'll uh, 
probably not retire early, 
but if it, it, like it does depend. If you can't tie it back, some organizations, many organizations aren't designed to enable you to tie it back. They, they got complicated to a point of complexity where they weren't designed to have conversations about the customer and tie things together. You know, they were designed with a technical, uh, architecture in mind. And so of the communication lines match up with the software architecture, which is we talk about Conway's law. And so the conversations that you have to have are conversations about solving for technical problems because you can't connect that 
messiness to the, to the customer. I think for many organizations, 
and I think value, don't take me wrong, value is not just about the profit, only 
there is a value in the cost reduction as well. So when we are working with certain likes, say technical product, like oh, we are moving towards the cloud, get it 
probably through that in the long run, we are going to reduce our, uh, maybe, um, operations cost and also, 
uh, maybe our people, they will be able to do the better job in the smaller time and as well. And that's a value. Yeah, value is not always about in the monetary terms, 
if I'm working with NHS or any government organization, probably they don't care about the profit. 
What they care about is yes, maybe the cost reduction. 
Okay. And also access of the better information to the right people in the right time and in itself, maybe that's what the value for them. 
And that's what we're saying that okay, probably we should be able to connect both the thing and if we can't, then our people, they turn into GI burners, they turn into, you know, those uh, 
hamster in the wheels 
where we are keep building more and more tickets, but 
we don't know where we are leading towards. 
I often think that a vision should be, 
uh, like should provide motivational empathy, 
you know, should allow you to connect. I think you talk about NHS, you know, I think, 
I dunno what the vision for the NHS is at the moment, but the work that I do with companies that support of NHS, you know what we, what everyone in all that organization is striving for is better patient outcomes. You know, we want better patient outcomes. And I think those, 
uh, lovely kind of real purposeful connections. Here's a huge motivational factor. It's, you know, it's nitroglycerin for the, for the heart and it makes you wanna do something. But then is there a challenge, and maybe you didn't talk about this, 
I'd be surprised if you did. 'cause I 
I not just maybe a little bit tangential, but then when you connect vision to value and then the teams realize that that vision isn't something they care about, 
you know, is that a risk that people may run? 
Is this a risk? Yes it is. But 
shouldn't we go and then update and refine that vision as well if we cannot feel connected with that? 
Yeah. 
A strategy, can we change? Yes, we can. I think 
a strategy is never static. I even, I think this vision are not static as well. Maybe they may not change the intent behind that vision may not be changed, but 
I have seen that those can get refined 
so that there is a clarity in it. There is a connection in it and as you said, there is a purpose in it. In it as well. Yeah. 
And 
that's what we need among the people as well. They should be able to get motivated, have a joy of the work, uh, in, in itself. 
And when we are handing over these solutions to them instead of the needs and the problem which they're solving for the business and the customers and the user 
some way, I think we are taking away innovations from them as well, 
which I think 
our organization need today. 
But 
we are giving them something which is taking away that organization. 
Oh, innovation. 
Yeah. No, uh, love beautifully said. I know we're just keeping an eye on the time here. We are rapidly rolling outta time. In the last kind of closing minutes, 
were there any practical tools that you or tips that you provided in your talk to help people connect vision to value? 
Yes, there are. Uh, and I can say there are many, many more. So for an example, for v uh, for vision, you can use Lean Canvas, you can use North Star metrics, you can use KR. And again, there are so many. If one doesn't work for you, use another. 
But thing is, don't become a slave of those tools and the framework. There are so many out there. Then for the value part, you can use something like the lean UX canvases there. You have got jobs to be done. You can use something like, uh, maybe the personas to understand the customers and the user value and even the value delivery part. You, we can use 
tools like Scrum, CanBan, all those tools are there. Hypothesis driven development. So I did mention few things, but thing is there are many, many more tools out there 
which can help in each and everything. But what we need is we need to keep measuring our progress towards these vision value and value delivery and the discovery as well, which were the four key part of that. 
I don't, I don't know, should I call it a framework or something? But it's just talk about four things. You need to have a goal long-term goal that drives certain value assumptions for the business and the customers. 
Then you deliver the, uh, you discover and deliver the value and then at all of these three levels you are keep measuring. 
I think it's quite simple for me. 
Yeah, hopefully it's simple for everyone else. And I would feel a missed if I hadn't, don't take this opportunity to mention, uh, friend of the podcast Radical duck, uh, radical product thinking. And you mentioned vision tools there. If you haven't read radical Product Thinking, anyone that's listening, uh, go by that book. Honestly, it changed 
it, it changed my opinion on what a product vision could be and actually superseded 
for me. 'cause now when that's my go-to 'cause it's just, uh, it's almost a fantastic companion to a radical focus, 
you know, when we look at minimizing number of K radical product thinking's. Awesome. Uh, love, thank you so much for this time. Uh, LinkedIn is the best place for people to find you. Yeah, yeah. I'm quite easy to find. There are not many people with my name, so Yeah. For type love, niche and probably you can find me very easy. Yeah, well, we'll put the link in the show notes. Thank you so much for the time everyone. Thank you very much for listening. Um, do make sure that you're following us on LinkedIn so you are made aware of all of the episodes are coming out. A Lean Agile London 2024. Thank you very much for listening and we'll see you again soon.