An Engineering Culture Built with Agility and Heart
Q & A with Lisa Tierney and the Business Agility Team
?? Meet Auth0's Business Agility Team (BATeam), a group of coaches who embed directly within the engineering teams of Okta's Customer Identity Cloud product unit to provide coaching, mentorship, teaching, and training on agile ways of working collaboratively.?
Throughout its history, Auth0 has gone beyond agile lip service, creating an engineering culture that focuses on "innovative solutions to the right problems" and values engagement, adaptability, and resilience. Software developers tend to embrace efficiency, and look warily at processes that aren't rooted in pragmatic, measurable outcomes. The BATeam works with staff to facilitate and realize these values through coaching and training.
In talking with the team, I learned that agile as a methodology is nuanced, not one size fits all; and encompasses much more than a cycle of sprints and ceremonies. Lisa Tierney leads the team, and we spoke about how they work within the larger organization: how they interact and contribute to Auth0's culture.?
I also learned that the team plans to expand in 2024, and they'll be looking to hire a few good coaches. If you know any great candidates in the US or Canada, please send them here:
Q: Can you describe the BATeam's charter, and how you fit into the organization ? ?
Lisa:? We're part of the Customer Identity Cloud product unit, within the Delivery, Enablement, and Operations team (which also encompasses Technical Program Management and Strategic Communications & Programs). Our shared vision:?
It should be easy for everyone in our product unit (Auth0) to understand what we’re building and why. This lets us change gears quickly when we learn new things, and ensures that we all pull together in the same direction.??
The BATeam plays a key role in achieving that vision: By coaching agile practices and an agile mindset, we enable teams to be engaged, adaptable, and resilient.??
We infuse everything we do with these guiding principles:
Agile coaches are embedded in our delivery teams, facilitating key team ceremonies and offering day-to-day coaching.? Teams are empowered to use practices from both Scrum and Kanban to design their own ways of working. Coaches help the teams choose practices that fit their circumstances and achieve their objectives. Coaches also build strong relationships with team members and leaders, creating a psychologically safe environment throughout the organization.? As we coach (5 teams per coach!), we look for patterns and common needs so we can maximize our impact.
Q: How does the BATeam work together? How do you measure and evaluate your effectiveness??
Lisa: Although each agile coach is dedicated to a group of teams, we also work together on projects that serve everyone. For example, we’ve built a shared metrics dashboard for all teams, and we've developed a comprehensive library of agile content.? We do our best to “drink our own champagne” as we work. Our team Kanban board includes limits to the volume of our work-in-progress, and we start each week with a brief planning meeting, touch base daily, and have regularly recurring retrospectives.? While we try to be model citizens, we also realize how hard it can be to maintain great agile habits, which helps us empathize with the delivery teams we're coaching.?
Measuring our effectiveness is definitely a challenge! Although anecdotes are useful indicators of impact, we’ve worked hard over the past year to improve our measurement tools so we can demonstrate our impact with data. We’re just getting started with the team metrics dashboards, built with an intentional focus on throughput stability. Measuring stability of team throughput over time will give us insight into the effectiveness of our work.
Q: What's different and unique about working with geo-distributed vs co-located engineering teams??
Lisa: Traditional scrum philosophy insists that teams must be co-located in order to be effective, but that just isn’t how the world works anymore. Although the global tech workforce has had to learn how to work remotely over the past few years, remote work has been a key feature of? Auth0 from the very beginning. In my opinion, one of our core strengths is the diversity of thought and perspective that comes from having a team working from all around the globe!
When coaching geo-distributed teams, we have to hone our remote facilitation abilities.?We spend a lot of time - I mean a LOT of time - working with virtual whiteboards and sticky notes. And we pay extra attention to meeting design to ensure that team members engage and discuss, since just listening inevitably leads to multitasking and distraction. We make an extra effort to bring humanity into the day-to-day.?When working remotely, it’s easy for meetings to be our only connection with each other, and for those meetings to be all business.? We help teams build psychological safety by connecting regularly as people and not just coworkers, by initiating Slack threads that help folks open up or scheduling time for fun conversation.
Q: As a remote-first startup, Auth0 stewarded a culture of agile from the beginning. How have the core values and practices of the BATeam contributed to this collaborative, transparent engineering culture ??
Lisa:? Auth0 culture and BATeam values have a truly symbiotic relationship: Our team grew up with the company. Our guiding principles are steeped in good agile practice and in the company values that Auth0’s founders communicated so clearly, and still permeate our organization today. Building on that strong foundation, we try to live up to our guiding principles, and use them consistently as guideposts when considering change.??
We encourage collaboration and transparency by building webs rather than hubs - that is, we value connecting people to each other rather than positioning ourselves as arbiters or go-betweens. Ultimately, we want teams to be healthy and effective without the presence of a coach. We encourage transparency by facilitating a variety of conversations and retrospectives, especially when things seem contentious or vulnerable.? Plus, we are deeply invested in teaching the skills that build trust and help teams have tough conversations safely.
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Q: How does the agile process and coaching practice support engineers and contribute to productivity and well-being?
Lisa: Productivity and well-being are ultimately two sides of a coin - you can’t have one without the other!? Agile practices are purpose-built to help teams work at a sustainable pace that is consistent and predictable.? On top of standard agile practices, our team uses a Stabilize -> Improve -> Optimize model to help teams focus their improvement efforts in the right place at the right time. Teams that are stable (delivering consistently at a sustainable pace) have a solid foundation to work from as they try to improve, rather than trying to push their output to the maximum all the time.
Q: How do you introduce new engineers into the culture? What roles does the BATeam play??
Lisa: In addition to embedded coaching within teams, we participate in onboarding.? Every person who joins the Auth0 product unit? is introduced to our philosophy that teams should own their processes and are empowered to choose the practices that fit their goals.
Q: There's a great deal of rich training and onboarding material that your team has created for internal use over the years. Can you recommend some resources for teams who want to get started with agile practices, but may not have the budget or structure to hire a team.
Lisa: I personally rely a lot on the work of Lyssa Adkins . She has great things to say not just about the rules and regulations of agile frameworks, but about the human impact of working together this way.? Her insights for leaders help them understand the mindset and behaviors required to build high-functioning teams and a healthy workplace culture.
Auth0 agile coach Rachel Macasek adds:? "I recommend Daniel Vacanti for teaching the importance of flow. His book, Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability , is quite good.?
I also reference the Lean Enterprise Institute from time to time, as agile and lean methodologies have a lot of overlap."
Sarah Mitchell , another coach on the team, recommends following Jeff Gothelf , Mike Cohn from Mountain Goat Software , and the Food for Agile Thought newsletter from Age-of-Product.com . For coaches looking to reflect on and build their skills, she recommends leveraging the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel .?
News & resources from Auth0 and friends
Here are some quick pointers to new and relevant Auth0 content for developers. Check out the latest Zero Index newsletter to learn more about what we're up to on the Auth0 (aka Customer Identity Cloud) platform,, and please subscribe for our monthly developer-focused email.
In February, we launched passkeys!
Passkeys are a secure replacement for passwords that use public key cryptography to authenticate users. Here comes the passwordless future:
→ Passkeys Playground : Everything a developer needs to know to get started with passkeys.
→ An Illustrated Guide to Passkeys : Developer advocate and illustrator Sofia Prosper and a bunny called Maty demonstrate how passkeys work in this 10-minute pictorial tour.
→ Webinar: Code::Identity - So you need to build a login box?! - In this 45-minute conversation + coding, you'll learn how to? integrate with the Auth0 platform to easily build a seamless secure Identity solution for your customers. March 14 at 8:00am PDT, 11:00 a.m. EDT, 3:00 p.m. GMT. Register now to save a seat.?
Hope you enjoy these conversations with the people who make Auth0 a vibrant place to work. Please let us know. Got questions or feedback? We'd love to hear from you in the comments.
Stay safe out there.
Warm regards,
Havi Hoffman
Auth0 DevRel team?
Editor's note:? Hero image photo credit, "Nightmare" by Peter Addor on Flickr, CC by ND 2.0 DEED