Episode 04

Bryon Kroger (00:05):

Welcome back. So far we've established a new goal. We've talked about the metrics that matter, and we've busted the myth that it won't work. Here we have the technical foundations, but now we have to talk about the hardest part. It's the part that technology can't solve for you. It's the part that determines whether your transformation becomes a footnote or a revolution. We have to talk about scaling. When most organizations [00:00:30] think about scaling, they think about technology first. How do we scale our cloud platform or how do we scale our agile processes to more teams? And those are valid questions, but they kind of miss the point entirely. Scaling technology is a solved problem. We generally know how to do it. The real problem, the thing that will make or break you is this, how do you scale leadership? How do you scale your influence, your vision, your ability to navigate the bureaucracy [00:01:00] and your capacity to inspire change across an entire enterprise?

(01:04):

Because if you can't do all that, all the best technology in the world, it'll eventually just get crushed by the weight of the organization. The enterprise will strike back and it will win. This episode is the playbook for the transformation leader. It's for the person in the center of the storm trying to hold it all together. And the central tool in that playbook is a concept that I call the transformation flywheel. [00:01:30] To understand the flywheel, you first have to understand your three core audiences. First, you have your employees. These are the people on your product teams, the ones doing the actual work, their experience, their tools, their culture, their sense of purpose determines their ability to deliver. Second, you have your customers. These are your end users, the Warfighters, the analysts, the people whose mission you're trying to improve and their experience with your product determines whether you are creating real value.

(02:00):

[00:02:00] And third, you have your shareholders. In the GovTech context, this isn't about stock prices and revenues and profits. This is about the people who can control the resources, the funding, the political capital, the authority to operate. This could be your program executive officer, leaders in the Pentagon, or even members of Congress, and their experience and the perception of your work determines whether you get the resources you need to continue to scale. So the transformation [00:02:30] flywheel is the interconnected cycle between these three personas and the experiences you create. And you the transformation leader, are the engine at the center. Your job is to start the flywheel and get it spinning. So how do you do it? It starts with one strategic push. And this is critical. You must always, always, always start with the customer experience first. Why? Because in the beginning, your employee experience is probably terrible.

(03:00):

[00:03:00] Your team's likely working in a dungeon on crappy laptops fighting against the bureaucracy that doesn't understand them. You don't have the resources to fix that yet. You have to find the innovators inside your organization. And here, I mean the first group of people on the diffusion of innovation curve. These are the people who are willing to eat dirt for the next six months... who are so dedicated to the mission, they will push through a miserable employee experience to deliver something incredibly valuable for a customer. [00:03:30] Your first job as a leader is to protect that small team and clear a path for them so that they can deliver that initial tangible piece of value. It could be a small app, a single new feature, anything that makes the customer's life demonstrably better. And once you have that win, once you have that great customer experience, you now have currency.

(03:52):

You have a story, you have proof. Now you turn the flywheel to your shareholders. You take that success story to them. [00:04:00] You don't just send a report, you bring the actual customer with you. If you can, you have them tell the shareholder, this tool that Brian or John or Josh and Jennifer's team built just saved my team 10 hours a week. You market those mission outcomes. You market the joyful user experience. And you make the shareholder the hero of the story. Because of the resources you gave us, we were able to deliver this incredible impact. This creates a great shareholder experience. They see [00:04:30] a return on their investment, and again, not in dollars, but in this case, in mission success or if they care about something else, say political capital, it gives you the leverage to ask for more resources, more influence, and that means more room to maneuver.

(04:48):

Now you have new resources and here's the most important turn of the flywheel. You take those resources that you just won and you immediately reinvest them into your employee experience [00:05:00] so that you can grow the movement. You buy new laptops, you get them better office space, you get them the training they need, you protect them from the bureaucracy. Then reinforce their sense of mission and purpose and show them that their hard work and sacrifice paid off not just for the customer but for them and for their ability to fulfill their purpose. And what happens next? A great employee experience leads to an even better customer experience. Your now empowered, well-equipped [00:05:30] team delivers even more value even faster. This creates a more powerful story for your shareholders, which gets you even more resources, which you can use to create an even better employee experience. Do you see that?

(05:45):

Push the customer experience, which turns the shareholder experience, which turns the employee experience. That's the flywheel. That's how you build momentum. And this is how you scale your influence. Also, as you scale, [00:06:00] you'll run out of innovators, but with the proof visible, early adopters will volunteer as the next cohort. And once they scale the outcomes and create more complex integrated systems, you'll see the early majority, and then the late majority, join the fray too. To do this effectively though, you need to focus on three leadership pillars. These are the how behind turning the flywheel. The first is vision and strategy. As a leader, your job is to articulate a clear [00:06:30] vision with relentless clarity. Identify your champions and define a living strategy that adapts as you learn and as the mission evolves. You have to be the chief storyteller and strategist. Second is operations. Great vision without execution is just theater.

(06:48):

Operations here means building a transformative culture that can actually deliver. That includes several key areas, acquisitions. You need a team that moves at the speed [00:07:00] the mission demands with contracting models that incentivize learning, speed, and value, not just compliance theater. HR and people operations. You have to become an expert at attracting, growing and retaining the talent you need. This isn't just an HR function, it's a core leadership competency. You have to build a culture where your best people can do their best work and want to stay. IT and platform. You need internal infrastructure that empowers delivery, not obstructs [00:07:30] it, from a secure path to prod to the developer experience. Your tech stack is a strategic weapon or a liability. Either way, you own it. Operations is your flywheel accelerator. It allows great teams to win continuously. And third, this is one that a lot of technical leaders, especially in GovTech, ignore, is branding and marketing.

(07:55):

You must deliberately shape perception to unlock resources, attract talent, [00:08:00] and maintain momentum. Internally, it's how you show your employees that their work matters. Externally, your're marketing your success to shareholders and stakeholders. These are your levers. Strategy defines the why. Operations delivers the how, and branding and marketing sustains the momentum. That's how you scale leadership and win inside of GovTech. And scaling isn't about adding more teams, it's about creating a system where success gets more success. [00:08:30] It's about understanding that your job as a leader is to manage the flow of energy between your people, your users, and your funders. That's the playbook. That's how you can scale leadership. But leadership without delivery is just theater. So next time we'll build an engine that makes it all real. The path to production.

(09:00):

[00:09:00] One of the first major investments that we made into Kessel Run that made our employees feel value and accelerated the flywheel was bringing them together in what I want to call the software factory. And so this was a physical environment, not on Hanscom Air Force Base, a place that was located in a tech hub, center of tech talent, a physical location that we could all come to and work together [00:09:30] with great hardware, great IT, great process, and building out our culture. All co-located. The bureaucracy has a narrative. And the only way to overcome the bureaucracy is through a counter. Narrative perceptions exist whether you build them or not. Your only choice is are you going to build the perception [00:10:00] or are you going to allow the perception to be built by someone else? And so your organization has a perception. The transformation has a perception.

(10:10):

The products you build each have a perception and a collective one, and those things all work in concert to create your success or your failure. And so you have to create a strong brand. You have to associate what you're doing with all of the outcomes and impact that you're creating, [00:10:30] and then you have to take that and market it or make it known to the larger organization so that you can get resources and so that you can fight against the bureaucracy that's trying to kill you. Now, there's also a component here that I left off because it's awkward to talk about in any intrapreneur situation, but it's sales. You're not just marketing, you're selling. You're selling what you're doing and the outcomes to the larger organization, convincing them that their investment has a good ROI. [00:11:00] This is absolutely critical. You can't fight the bureaucracy without it.

(11:11):

One of the first times I saw the power of bringing a customer to deliver a testimonial to one of these shareholder meetings was General Harrigian, who at the time was the commander of US AFCENT. And he told in that meeting to all of our shareholders, the story of how his tanker [00:11:30] planners had benefited from one of the apps that we had developed, how much it was saving him, and more importantly, how it was intertwined with his vision of the future, the changes he wanted to make to his missions to make his mission more effective, more lethal, more efficient. And how he needed software, and specifically the kind of software that we were building and the way we were delivering it, how fast, how often, how high quality. And this really sealed the deal for us. This was [00:12:00] the critical moment. Never before, at least that I know of, has an operational commander gone and advocated for an acquisitions program. In fact, usually they're doing the exact opposite. I can't do my job because of these acquisitions people. They're not getting me the tools that my people need to do the job. He did the exact opposite, huge turning point, and that's what allowed us to get that first turn of the flywheel going.