Enterprise Portfolio Management with Saahil Panikar

“In a really large organization, there is still a certain level of complexity that we don’t appreciate when we look at a single SAFe portfolio and put in a Lean portfolio structure.” When it comes to key elements of enterprise portfolio management, words matter. In today’s episode, Adam and SPCT Saahil Panikar discuss the difference between value stream identification and value stream mapping, strategy and execution versus intent and contribution, and what different organizations consider a portfolio and its associated roles. Saahil shares a specific experience with an LPM engagement at a large organization and his top three quick tips for successful portfolio management.

Like what you hear? Connect with Saahil on LinkedIn.

Hosted by: Adam Mattis

Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to the SAFe Business Agility Podcast. This is the place to get advice, stories, perspectives, and updates about SAFe and related topics to help you work differently and build the future. Thanks for listening, and be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Adam Mattis: On today’s episode of the SAFe Business Agility Podcast. Coming to you live from SAFe Summit Prague is Saahil Panikar. Saahil is a longtime SAFe contributor, SPCT, and LPM guru. We hope you enjoy these tips from Saahil, and be sure to check out his talk on SAFe® Studio from this conference relating to enterprise portfolio management. Enjoy.

Good morning from day one, SAFe® Summit Prague. We’re sitting here pre-keynote with Saahil. Saahil, good morning.

Saahil Panikar: Good morning, Adam.

Adam Mattis: Did you survive SPCT day yesterday?

Saahil Panikar: Not only did I survive, I had a great time.

Adam Mattis: I’ll just take that as a win. I’ll just keep this, and I’ll send it to Chris and say, Hey, look, Joe and I, we did an OK job; Saahil said we did OK. We’re OK. Oh, man. And then, so last night we went, and we had some fun, we had a good social afterward. Were you able to crash the Partner Day dinner?

Saahil Panikar: Oh, I sure was. It was delicious.

Adam Mattis: Oh man, there were meals from around the world. There was a lot of food, a lot of food I couldn’t eat, but boy, was it good.

Saahil Panikar: I’m with you there, man. I’m not used to conferences having such good food. Scaled Agile always does it right.

Adam Mattis: I want to give credit to this hotel too. We’re at the Hilton Riverfront in Prague, and you know, a lot of the times you go to conferences, you go to hotels, and the food, anytime you serve it en masse, it’s just OK. Yeah, the food here is unreal. I mean, the things that I’ve had, I mean, so my family is Czech by nature, and my grandma used to cook a lot of these recipes. Like her goulash is not the goulash I’ve had here. Like, this is actually good <laugh>. When my grandma made goulash, it was because we were really poor, and it was all she had. So it’s a whole different experience for me. I mean, it’s really good food. The people here are amazing. I guess anytime you come to Europe, you’re exposed to these sorts of nice experiences.

Saahil Panikar: Yeah. I think our European colleagues might just say, this is how the world is supposed to be <laugh>.

Adam Mattis: No, that’s very true. And actually, I had, at the last SPCT immersion week, I had an Oscar in from Poland, and he just couldn’t get over the size of the portions that were served in Boulder. I think one night, he ordered an appetizer, a meal, and a dessert. And when it all showed up, he just didn’t know what to do with it. Because I mean, in Boulder, if you order a steak, it’s like 12 ounces. Oh, it’s massive.

Saahil Panikar: Well, Coloradans know how to cook steak, so …

Adam Mattis: It is kind of in the DNA out there. At any rate, Saahil, thank you for hanging out. Do you want to tell people a little bit about you?

Saahil Panikar: Yeah, absolutely. So my name’s Saahil Panikar. I am a SAFe SPCT, SAFe Practice Consultant-T. I have been practicing Agile since 2008 and started working in Agile transformations in 2013, and really got into SAFe in 2015. I spent some time with the United States Federal Government and then moved over to private industry in financial services and banking before really branching out to a couple of other industries like energy, healthcare, and aerospace and defense. I got my SPCT at the tail end of 2019. And I would say I probably spent the last five years really focused on value stream management and Lean portfolio management as areas of need. In industry, we just see so many organizations struggling with those two concepts. And so I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to the knowledge base on both of those topics. You can see a paper on value stream management that I published in the DevOps Enterprise Journal last year. And this year, working with Scaled Agile to publish more guidance on Lean portfolio management. And actually, today at the Prague Summit, I’ll be speaking on enterprise portfolio management and managing portfolios of portfolios.

Adam Mattis: That’s great, Saahil; thanks for the intro. I want to bring people back to something that you said, it’s your SPCT, and I want to bring people back to it because I just rebranded it, and I don’t want people to think it’s gonna be … it sounds weird, right? So the SPCT until SAFe® 6.0 was the SAFe Program Consultant Trainer, and that’s broadly when the role of an SPCT in the goal of Scaled Agile was to train everyone and launch release trains. And the mission of an SPCT was to train amazing SPCs, so only SPCTs could train SPCs. And then over the years — this is our 10th year in the program in December. Did you know, 10 years, that’s kind of cool. I mean, we’re going to make a challenge coin; it’ll be neat.

But then Joe and I took some time, and we spent time with the community last year to figure out, well, what do SPCTs actually do in the wild? We had, you know, our own experiences and our own perspectives on that, but we surveyed the community, and when we rebranded the SPC to SAFe Practice Consultant, it was natural to also rebrand SPCT to SAFe Practice Consultant. But then we were stuck with, well, what do we do with the T? We don’t want to just bring over “trainer” because that is only a small part of what the T does. The Ts actually do in three categories, right? They focus on transformation, architecture, big picture, and how do we transform an enterprise over time. We serve as trusted advisors as coaches, and consultants, and we are also trainers. And, you know, through the program, we validate skills across all of those aspects. So it’s kind of wonky, I guess, when I hear you say SAFe Practice Consultant-T. I always feel the need to explain what does T mean? Those are validated T-shaped skills.

Saahil Panikar: It looks a lot better written out than it sounds when you say it out loud.

Adam Mattis: And the acronym is the same.

Saahil Panikar: Yeah. Yes. And thank everyone for that. <laugh>

Adam Mattis: I think I went through every T word in the English language plus a few other languages trying to find a word that made sense, and nothing did.

Saahil Panikar: But T-shaped skills does. I mean, yeah,

Adam Mattis: It’s a good story in our space.

Saahil Panikar: It sure is. It might be a story that needs a little bit of interpretation for someone who’s seeing it for the first time, but the reality is that Adam is absolutely right. In my own experience, I probably spend 20 percent of my time training, and then the other 80 percent is as a trusted advisor or transformation architect. And I’ll add, you know, thought leader in there as well.

Adam Mattis: Oh, that’s another good one. I like that T word.

Saahil Panikar: <laugh>. Nice. SAFe Practice Consultant thought leader. There you go. Perfect.

Adam Mattis: Put that on your business card. So you brought up two areas where you’re really focused. And before we dive into the LPM, which is what we’re really here to talk about, I do want to touch on value stream management because I feel like since SAFe 3.0, right, we’ve done a pretty good job of providing clarification and evolving what that means. And in SAFe 3.0, we introduced the value stream layer. And I don’t know about you, but it just didn’t feel right to me. It was like, you understand what value streams are, but how does that layer fit in? And then, over the last several years, there’s been a lot of evolution with that, right? And we’ve introduced the ideas of operational value streams, developmental value streams, and the different sorts of operational value streams that developmental value streams support.

And what we’ve really focused on in the last year is moving from the concept of value stream identification for the purpose of understanding what is the best place to launch our ART given the context and constraints of today to value stream management, which is a longstanding discipline, right? That’s work that business architects have been doing for a lot of years, albeit at a higher level. So from your perspective and from your experience, do you see those two perspectives, the business architecture from a macro level and the work that we focus on that’s a few levels down, coming together to create a pretty powerful tool for enterprises?

Saahil Panikar: Yes, absolutely. So I actually really love that question because I think that there’s just a significant gap in people’s understanding of what we mean when we just talk about value streams in general because there’s so much loaded history and language out there, right? SAFe introduced the Value Stream and ART Identification Workshop. And then that kind of became conflated with this idea of value stream mapping. But value stream mapping is a Lean practice that was all about identifying your workflow and identifying those opportunities or bottlenecks and delays to eliminate waste and improve the total processing time of your value stream. Value stream identification, like Adam just mentioned, was about figuring out where’s the right place to start with launching my trains and organizing around value. Then you have this idea of value stream thinking, which is an extension of SAFe principle number two, apply systems thinking. Value stream thinking is about understanding how your value flows in the organization and making decisions based on that. And when you put all of those things together, you start to get this idea of value stream management. And so, yes, it absolutely integrates well together. And you need, especially in a large complex organization, you need it all. You need it holistically as this idea of value stream management is a dedicated function of the organization that is, if not an organizational function, a dedicated purpose of the organization.

Adam Mattis: Wait, will you say that again? A little louder to say it again? For the people out there.

Saahil Panikar: You need a dedicated organizational function around managing your value streams.

Adam Mattis: Absolutely, yes. And again, right? And I think some organizations have had this. I feel like maybe we haven’t done the best job of bringing these people to the table because they do typically, in the aspects of business architecture, work at the higher levels. Their goal is to map strategy to execution. We have this big picture idea; well, what’s it going to touch? And man, wouldn’t it have been great to have those people in the conversation on day one to help us figure these things out? I feel like some of the time we spend redefining work that’s already been done by others. And again, maybe it’s at a higher level, but it certainly is a good starting point. And these folks have a good understanding of the technology infrastructure. They have a good understanding of the business operations infrastructure, and they also have an understanding of the capabilities. That’s one of their words, right? Not capabilities in terms of large solution context, but capabilities in terms of value stream management and business architecture; the capabilities that the business has to deliver value. All of those things can only make us better and help us satisfy our mission to help the organization achieve the delivery of high-quality value faster. We’ve got to come together.

Saahil Panikar: Yes, absolutely. I can’t tell you; well, I can. It happened to me one time, and now I’ve made sure it doesn’t happen again. I did a value stream identification exercise with a large organization. They did have a group dedicated to looking at this. It was inside their Lean practice, but they weren’t invited. I didn’t know they existed. And we came to a great outcome. With the information that we had, we came to a great outcome in our value stream identification. And then, you know, I walked away happy. The customer walked away happy, and two weeks later, I get a call saying, Hey, can you come back in? We just talked to the Lean department, and there were some constraints we didn’t know about, and we’ve got to do it again.

Adam Mattis: So I’m glad it wasn’t just me <laugh>. I’ve done that as well, except mine’s a little bit different. I was pitching the idea of a value stream identification workshop, and I didn’t realize that the person on the other side of the wall was a BA. And when the person asked me, well, how long is it going to take us to do this value stream work? And I said, depending on the people in the room, maybe a day or two. And then I heard the person on the other side of the wall just throw something <laugh>. So words matter, right? Value stream identification workshop versus value stream mapping are different things, right? One feeds the other. But don’t offend your BAs, don’t offend the good work that these people are doing. Take it from us. Hard lessons learned.

Saahil Panikar: Oh yeah. Just real quick, I had a very similar experience once. I was brought in to do a value stream identification, and everyone in the room thought we were going to do a value stream mapping, the Lean exercise. So they spent about three weeks collecting all of their data. And when I didn’t ask for it, they were like, hold on, we have all this, we have our processing times, we have our percent complete and accurate. What are we doing with it? And I said nothing. And oh my God, I thought they were going to run me out of the room.

Adam Mattis: Oh, the things that we learn <laugh>. When experienced people come in the room, they always need to lead with, “And this is how many things I’ve broken to get to the knowledge I have today.” Because I always tell people I’m not very smart. I’ve just broken a lot of stuff. And we’re really here to talk about how not to break things based on the things I’ve already broken. It’s all part of the fun.

Saahil Panikar: One hundred percent agreed.

Adam Mattis: So, let’s talk about portfolio management. So you mentioned that you’re going to be talking today about LPM and enterprise portfolio management without giving away … well, you can give away all of your talk that you want. I mean, folks are going to hear this after your talk. So what’s your abstract? What are you talking about today?

Saahil Panikar: The abstract of what I’m talking about today is that in a really large organization, there is still a certain level of complexity that we don’t appreciate when we look at a single SAFe portfolio and put in a Lean portfolio structure. Look, I love Lean portfolio management. I’ve contributed to it quite heavily. I’ve implemented it multiple times, and I think it really, really works because it, as a set of practices, really drives a new way of thinking for portfolio managers. And that’s the outcome that I’m always looking for. The challenge is, in a large organization, what I found was when I work with a portfolio, we can structure it super well. We get great outcomes. They’re flowing work through the system, and it is beautiful. But then I go to another portfolio, repeat the process, and while the two portfolios are independently optimized and are executing well, there’s someone in the organization over both of those portfolios, and they’re unhappy because while both portfolios are executing well, they’re executing in different directions, and they still have some level of enterprise strategy that’s not being executed against. Or it is being executed against from the perspective of each portfolio, but our enterprise lead doesn’t see it that way.

So that’s the core thesis of the challenge that I was trying to solve. As I was implementing portfolios in this massive organization, I had the opportunity to work with the leader of the portfolios and their boss. And there was a disconnect between what the portfolio leader was trying to achieve and what their boss was trying to achieve.

Adam Mattis: So the portfolios you’ve worked with Saahil, what altitude do you typically interact with? I mean, are you working with general managers who have fiduciary responsibility for a part of the business? Is it maybe a level beneath that where there are several portfolios contributing to a P and L? Like, what level in your experience has been most successful? Where have you learned the most lessons?

Saahil Panikar: Yeah, so there’s probably a vocabulary distinction we need to make right now, right? Because SAFe calls a portfolio a collection of development value streams that could support a single or multiple operational value streams and have a common governance and funding approach. That’s not what most enterprises, in my experience, define a portfolio as. So when they look at a portfolio, they think of it as an investment portfolio; they think of it as what are the things inside my organization that I am funding and receiving some ROI on? And frequently, what I see is they have someone they call a portfolio manager or a portfolio lead that we call a scaled-up business analyst. They’re someone who’s got oversight, they’re tracking metrics, they’re governing, and they have a lot of value, but they’re not the fiduciary, they’re not the person that’s making decisions about which way the portfolio is going to go next.

So when I am trying to implement a SAFe portfolio, I usually end up at a level where I am working with many of those portfolio leads or portfolio managers and then with the business owner or fiduciary that’s funding the things that they are managing. So that could be a general manager in an energy corporation that’s a GM. But in a bank, that’s a director, right? And a director in a bank oversees many VPs and SVPs. And so this person probably has at minimum a few million dollars of responsibility and organizational investment. And in a couple of the super large portfolios that I worked with, over a billion with a b, they generally report themselves to a business unit head or an executive, depending on the size and scale of the organization.

Adam Mattis: So like an EVP of a bank, an EVP of some significant component of the business, or, you know, depending on the size and scale of, in this example, a bank, it could very well be that that person is it, right? If you think about a credit union or a bank, that’s just a bank. So I think the distinctions you made around the level of people are important because director means something different everywhere, right? Director can mean senior person, you know, in a lot of organizations they call a manager. So when we talk about the level of people, I think what’s less important is the title, because in every organization it means something different, right? In some banks in the US, everyone’s a vice president, but no one’s actually a vice president, right? I mean, those people have a different title.

In some organizations, a director is a senior executive, and in other organizations is a junior role. So I think what’s important is the amount of money under management, the size of the budget under management, and the number of people that they’re accountable to. You see what I did there, accountable to? They don’t, it’s not people that report to them, but the people they’re accountable to. So thinking about, again, the size and the scope of what a portfolio is, I think a lot of people that struggle with portfolio management and standing up a portfolio discipline is that they’re working at the incorrect altitude. Either they’re trying to take on way too much, or they’re working at a level too low in a way that they can’t really impact strategy execution. It’s hard to have the conversation around money because, again, they’re just at the wrong level.

Saahil Panikar: Absolutely. So just to put a little bit of a specific example on it, the story I’m going to tell today, I started off in a single portfolio in this organization implementing Lean portfolio management, and that portfolio had about 10,000 people and $120 million of organizational investment.

Adam Mattis: Just a little bit of cash.

Saahil Panikar: Just a little.

Adam Mattis: Just a little. Not as much as that B example you gave, but still <laugh>.

Saahil Panikar: Well, so that’s where I’m going to build up to is as we start to then look at a portfolio of portfolios, and you know, the story is that as I was working with the head of this single portfolio, I had to do some interaction with her boss. And her boss had a different set of goals and outcomes and multiple what I saw as portfolios in the organization. The organization wasn’t there yet. And it took some coaching to get them to see it that way, but at his level, you know, he actually has 32,000 people and $7 billion in his portfolio. So there’s a big, big scale, right? And I say his portfolio is really his portfolio of portfolios.

Adam Mattis: Absolutely, man. And that’s such another interesting topic to dive into because when we talk about the complexity of the problems that a lot of us address when we work with SAFe, it’s not little stuff, right? And that’s kind of what makes our space unique, is that we’re focused on challenges or solving the world’s most challenging problems addressed by the world’s largest and most complex systems. And our goal is, of course, simplicity, right? Every time we walk into a room, anytime we talk about architecture, anytime we talk about business architecture, portfolio management, or any of it, the goal is simplicity, right? Let’s unwind a lot of the technical and organizational debt that exists because we can only move as fast as those bottlenecks allow us to. But no matter how simple you make the construction of an airplane or how simple you make the management of a large and complex financial institution, it’s still going to require oversight. It’s still going to require coordination. You just can’t two-pizza team your way into those solutions. So it does require some thought. I mean, our goal is always simplicity, but you could only make some problems so simple, right?

Saahil Panikar: Exactly. So that’s exactly the question you need to be asking: what is the minimum level of simplicity that is responsible in this context? And where we can start to really play is you can have oversight and coordination and do it in a Lean, Agile way that makes it lightweight but still complex to execute. And, the reality is, when you start to talk about that level of coordination, there is a disconnect because at my business unit head, you know, 32,000 people coordination level, we’re just never going to deep dive into what’s happening on one of those pizza teams, right? But we create the artifacts and the structure to create a simple flow down of … and I actually have to credit a friend and colleague because I struggled with some of this language for a little while because I keep talking about strategy and execution. And so it was actually Sean Lowe from Accenture.

Adam Mattis: Sure, I know Shawn very well.

Saahil Panikar: Oh, he’s brilliant.

Adam Mattis: For a lot of years, I’ve worked with Shawn. He’s a great guy.

Saahil Panikar: Brilliant, brilliant man. And so I was describing this problem to him, and he said to me, you know, what you’re actually talking about is not strategy and execution. You’re talking about intent and contribution. So you’re talking about a portfolio or portfolio intent. So my business lead has an intent, an outcome he’s trying to create. And what we’re asking is for the portfolios down to the teams to contribute, to make a contribution to that intent. And that gives them a structure for, OK, well, I can go from two completely randomly independent portfolios to the portfolios still having the freedom to execute how they want to, as long as they can articulate how they’re executing is contributing to the enterprise intent. And that right there gives me some flexibility because then I can say, look, you don’t have to coordinate to the level of looking over everybody’s shoulder and making sure they’re going in the same direction. You’ve given them their alignment opportunity. And now, I’ve made the coordination more lightweight because if I can’t trust that they are moving in that direction after I’ve communicated my intent, then I have a different problem to solve. It’s not a portfolio coordination problem, it’s a people problem.

Adam Mattis: Yeah. So there’s something that you said there that I think is really important, and that’s what the portfolio provides to the organization. I think people often view the portfolio as something that drives the value up or back to the enterprise and is accountable back to whoever is giving the financials to that portfolio to drive execution. But the portfolio also serves the people within it, right? It’s meant to provide that vision, that concept of where are we going. How do we intend to get there over the long term? And I feel like a lot of people that we interact with, especially in the beginning, that’s a problem they have. They just don’t know. I mean, they know generally what they do, but they don’t know why they’re doing it. So I think that’s a really cool distinction to make. And I think it’s important to show the servant leadership aspect of the portfolio to the people within it. I think a lot of times, people view portfolio management as this body of governance and don’t really view, you know, kind of, well, what’s in it for me, right? They don’t view it as this thing that serves the ARTs and the team members, when in reality, if they’re doing their job correctly, there’s as much value flowing throughout as there is up.

Saahil Panikar: Yeah. I mean, you can tie that back to what is one of the longest-lasting SAFe core values, right? It’s alignment. And we did a great job at communicating the need for alignment at the team, train, and ART level, right? Everything we do at PI planning is about creating alignment. It’s about the business vision, the architecture development guidance, and then even during the breakout sessions at PI planning, you’re trying to create alignment on how are the teams going to, well, to borrow Sean’s language, contribute to the intent of the business in that PI. So we have all these structures in SAFe that provide alignment to the teams, but then there was that little bit of a, OK, now how do I connect the trains to the larger enterprise goals? And that’s where SAFe portfolios came from, right? They came from this idea that we need to coordinate all these trains to align outcomes.

And you tie that back to Daniel Pink, I need autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Well, purpose comes from alignment, right? If I can effectively communicate what I want to achieve and why it’s valuable, that’s the part that a lot of organizations forget, right? Because even when we go and implement a good functioning portfolio structure, a Lean portfolio structure, they’ll flow down intent, they’ll flow down epics. There’s clear guidance on, you know, the funding, and you know what expectations they have from governance. They don’t always communicate the why, right? Why did we make this change to the funding? Why did we make this? Why are these the metrics that we’re pursuing? Why is this the prioritized portfolio epic that we’re investing in in the next three PIs? And there are some structures for that, right? A well-written portfolio epic obviously has a business outcome tied to it that you can say, well, that’s why. Yes. But is that on its own consumable and meaningful to a developer on a team? Maybe or maybe not, right? Chances are it’s written at a level where it’s consumable to the head of the portfolio, or it’s consumable to the business owners, the fiduciaries, maybe the product managers. But just like if you get a chance to listen to my talk on PI objectives,

Adam Mattis: It will be on SAFe® Studio immediately following the conference.

Saahil Panikar: Perfect. Just like we want PI objectives to be written from a business perspective because they’re frequently written from the engineering perspective, we need business outcomes to be relatable to engineers. And it is unfair to expect that only engineers have to learn how to speak business. We need to meet in the middle.

Adam Mattis: I mean, that comes back to the idea that every business is a tech business, right? So there’s this distinction between tech vs business. It needs to go away, right? Every person in engineering needs to understand the why of the business. Every business person, every person, you know, defining strategy needs to understand how tech delivers, that it’s the same. So first off, I think Sean owes you dinner at Gus’s for all the love you’re showing him, but it looks like it’s about time for Chris’s keynote. So Saahil, to help wrap this up and to give the people some value, what are your three best quick tips for success with portfolio management, implementation operation, your three best sale tips?

Saahil Panikar: You know, no one’s ever actually asked me that before.

Adam Mattis: You don’t have them ready to go?

Saahil Panikar: I think I could come up with something <laugh>.

Adam Mattis: All right, let’s do it. You’ve got 35 seconds. Go.

Saahil Panikar: All right. Number one absolutely, definitely is visualize the work in flight. That’s the first thing I do when I’m asked to help launch a portfolio, is I can’t start with something brand new. So I take a portfolio Kanban structure, and I say, just put your in-flights on here. And the in-flights don’t have to be written as epics. Part of transformation is turning that into a meaningful Agile language. But it could be a project, it could be a program, it could be just a business case, but put your in-flights into a visualization that I can see what’s currently executed, what’s being analyzed, what’s in review. And so we can at least understand the current state.

Adam Mattis: If people are apprehensive about the value of portfolio management, I find that that exercise on its own can be enough to tip some people over just because they don’t realize the sheer volume of stuff they have in flight. So absolutely that exercise of visualizing all work is super important.

Saahil Panikar: It’s absolutely critical. And then number two is probably understanding what your current guardrails are, right? So again, it’s not starting with transformation. It’s we have this idea of Lean budget guardrails, and I love them. They’re brilliant. Chances are there’s already some decision-making framework that your organization has been using. It may not be formal, it may not be published anywhere, and it may just be in the head of, you know, the portfolio managers. But get them to articulate, well, how have you been making your trade-off decisions thus far? And then you can map that to the Lean guardrails and start to look for what are the unique guardrails we’re going to need to add in this context that, you know, are not covered by this abstract set of four. But again, it’s understanding the current state and what opportunities you have for future success.

And then the third tip is probably: you cannot do this without the teams and the trains, right? No matter what portfolio structure you put in place. If you think of it as creating alignment around enterprise strategy, the question is, who are you creating that alignment for? And so my third tip for success is you need to start involving representatives from the teams and trains or, you know, in the portfolio language from the development value streams earlier than you think you do. And that’s not to say they need to come up and start dictating strategy to you, but they need to be in the room. They need to be able to ask questions and offer their perspective to the portfolio leads.

Adam Mattis: So those are good tips. Thanks for the time.

Saahil Panikar: Absolutely. I love talking about this stuff, and I love collaborating. Anytime we can have a conversation, Adam, I’m happy to come back.

Adam Mattis: All right. Well, I appreciate you, my friend. Have a good talk this afternoon. Good luck. Let’s go see what Chris has to say.

Saahil Panikar: Looking forward to it. Thank you.

Adam Mattis: Cheers.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to our show today. Be sure to check out the show notes and revisit past episodes at scaledagile.com/slash podcast. Relentless improvement is in our DNA, and we welcome your suggestions for the show. If you have something to share, send us an email at podcast@scaledagile.com.