About this podcast episode

🎙️ Delivering value starts with alignment

We are excited to introduce you to Jonathon Hensley, CEO of EMERGE and Author of Alignment, to share the importance of delivering value through alignment and how it can lead to successful product development.

Jonathon and Bill explore the concepts of alignment in the context of value creation to create products that meet customers’ needs. By sharing stories and real-world examples, Jonathon shares the four levels of alignment and the importance of each.

Here is what you will learn:

✅ The importance of individual alignment and how it contributes to employee engagement and motivation

✅ The role of team alignment in solving problems effectively and delivering on product promises

✅ The significance of organizational alignment in prioritizing efforts and empowering individuals within the organization

🎉 How market alignment focuses on understanding customer motivations and creating genuine connections with them

Transcript

(transcripts are auto-generated, so please excuse the brevity)

[00:00:00] Intro clip

[00:00:00] Bill Raymond: I can’t tell you how many efforts I’ve been on where once we see that everyone can be flexible all the time, you realize very quickly if a team does not feel like they’re delivering value then the output is of poorer quality, and you’re going to have to pay for that.

And who’s gonna pay for that the most? Is gonna be the customer.

[00:00:20] Jonathon Hensley: Absolutely, and I think another key thing that you hit on is the output will be poorer. Is that organizations that shift from output focused to outcome focused, are the best set up and usually have the strongest set of alignment across the organization to achieve the best outcomes.

[00:00:37] Podcast intro

[00:00:37] Speaker: Welcome to the Agile in Action Podcast with Bill Raymond. Bill will explore how business disruptors are adopting agile techniques to gain a competitive advantage in this fast-paced technology driven market.

Podcast interview [00:00:50]

Bill Raymond: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. Today I’m joined by Jonathan Hensley, CEO of Emerge, and the author of Alignment: Overcoming Internal Sabotage and Digital Product Failure. Hi, Jonathan, how are you today?

[00:01:04] Jonathon Hensley: I’m doing great, Bill. Thanks so much for having me. I’ve really been looking forward to this.

[00:01:08] Bill Raymond: Yeah, me too. And we’re going to talk about an honest assessment of delivering value through alignment. But before we get started, could you introduce yourself?

[00:01:18] Jonathon Hensley: Sure. So as you said, my name is Jonathan Hensley. I’m CEO of Emerge, and I’ve been in the product space for a little over 25 years now, and have really been working with startups as well as Fortune 100 brands to help leaders deliver value through their products and services to meet the needs of customers.

[00:01:36] Bill Raymond: It would be useful if we just had a broad stroke overview of the topic about delivering value and alignment before we get into the conversation.

[00:01:46] Jonathon Hensley: Sure. So when we talk about alignment, In the context of value creation, what we’re really looking at is how does a business create a product that meets the actual needs of customers? And when we talk about their needs, it’s not just what they need to do, but how they want to feel when they do that thing, how they are actually able to fulfill using that productwith the way that they interact at work, the way that it helps them do something at home. And so we’re always looking at what is the time to value in leveraging the product? How do you get more value from using that product again and again? And what kind of value reinforcement can a company bring to develop that loyalty for the product?

That gives us an affinity to build that relationship with a brand.

[00:02:32] Bill Raymond: And what do you mean by alignment specifically?

[00:02:35] Jonathon Hensley: Business and developing great products is an incredibly complex set of processes. And when we talk about alignment, we’re looking at how do we actually establish product excellence? How do we build an organization that is capable of delivering great products in a timely fashion that genuinely is fulfilling those needs and expectations of customers?

And so we look at what are actually the drivers of that level of performance, what actually helps a team solve problems better and more effectively? What will help them essentially have a competitive advantage in the marketplace? And the foundation of that is how they build alignment. And so we look at alignment at four fundamental levels.

The first one is individual alignment. Which is all about understanding how someone’s individual contributions to the business actually matter. How their work makes a difference in the lives of their colleagues and in the lives of the customer that they’re serving. And this is incredibly important when you think about

businesses of all sizes dealing with how do we engage our employees? How do we give them meaning to what we’re trying to achieve and why these goals are important? How do we motivate them to bring their best to, to the work that we do? So individual alignment to the intentions and purpose of the company become absolutely fundamental to the potential success that they can have.

And it also has a huge implication of the career trajectory that an individual can take. The second level of alignment is around team alignment, which is about how do we bring our unique expertise and life experiences together to solve problems effectively and deliver on these products and services that we’re promising to customers.

And so it’s really about unifying a team in order to bring the collective focus and help them bring those skill sets together to achieve the goals that we set out to achieve. The third one is around organizational alignment, which is really looking at, every company has a unique perspective instead of insights of expertise and life experiences that come from their their team.

And they have to look at how do they take that incredible resource of talent coupled with their financial resources, the timeline that they have, and the known constraints of the market, and deliver something that will provide a result in the market and really drive value. Every organization at every scale has this dynamic of resource and opportunity constraint where they have to look at where they need to prioritize their efforts.

And so that being in alignment with what you’re asking your teams to do and how you’re empowering the individuals within the organization is absolutely critical to success. And the fourth one then is market alignment, is our organization aligned? All the way through from the org level, team level, individual level, and through all of the things that we do and how we operate as a business to serve the needs of the market. It protects our competitive advantage and makes ensuring that we’re relevant to our customers, and most importantly is we’re tapping into not just what they need but why they need it.

We’re really digging into understanding what is the motivation for these. The demand for our product or service that is going to allow us to really make a genuine connection with that customer.

[00:05:55] Bill Raymond: What are some examples of delivering value? I know you shared some really good examples with me when we were talking before this podcast. I’d love to hear you share them with our audience as well.

[00:06:06] Jonathon Hensley: Sure. For those listening, I have no personal relationship with these brands, but I’m gonna use them as examples. The first one that always comes to mind that I love to share, the example, I think is a Volvo. Volvo sells safety. That’s really the psychological value that company imbues into all of their products.

And over the last five decades, when you look at the vehicles that they’ve produced, safety has been the fundamental thing that they’re selling to their customer who values safety above all else. When they provide those vehicles, even though the technology and safety mechanisms and all of the other attributes of their vehicles has completely evolved over the last decades as new things have come out.

The core value that they’re offering hasn’t changed. Yet the functional value of the vehicle is constantly evolving. Now does it work with my smartphone? Can I stream music in it? Can I use it as a hotspot, for the wireless devices for my kids in the car? All of these different things that are functional, value in innovation in the vehicle, but aren’t necessarily going to be that long-term differentiator that we’re building the affinity to in the market.

In comparison, you have companies like Toyota that also provide an incredibly safe, wonderful car, but their core value is focused on reliability. And reliability cannot exist without safety. But there’s a hierarchy to those value deliveries and what they emphasize, and you see that difference. So at the end of the day, Toyota and Volvo are competing for different customers.

Volvo focused on the family that wants safety and Toyota focused on the individual who is emphasizing reliability first, safety as a, as an absolute necessity to that reliability. And so these allow us to differentiate, to connect with people with where they’re at and find ways to connect our product to them.

And that maybe it’s a stage of life that they’re in, maybe it’s a transitional period, maybe it’s an evolution of their career, whatever that event in their life or that, helps them understand their priority. That’s where that is looking to make that connection. In those critical moments.If I use a really great, software as a service provider example, I think Dropbox does a phenomenal job about illustrating this. They early on really understood that. In order to create the ability to share documents across a team, what they really needed to do was enable a product that built community.

And so that was a really big anchor point to their strategy for growth, which was a bottom up strategy. Get the tool out there to individuals who could then start sharing files and start collaborating with their peers that created the use case to go and start paying for that product. Cuz it already had developed a sense of community and connection, with their peers that they’re working with.

And that created the use case to make, to be able to monetize that value and to be able to grow and scale that business. And so every product has, at some level, a psychological benefit to its customer and as well as the functional value of the problem that you’re essentially solving, and the way that we do that can be distinct and unique, but it requires us that we’re aligned very clearly with that customer’s needs and intentions.

[00:09:22] Bill Raymond: It always feels to me like when we start working towards alignment. We always do start at that sort of, if you will, base level the individuals and then the teams and then work our way up. Sometimes I wonder if that’s the wrong direction to go. Cuz if you get your teams aligned and they feel like they’re aligned, but then they’re also in different divisions, they may not be because you need all these senior leaders that are driving things from their various business units and or however they’re organized.

And sometimes we do see this, right? Even a senior leader, and this is, I’m not trying to be mean to senior leaders here, but very often what happens is you see them focused on what their OKRs are or their objectives are for the next quarter or whatever it might be, which might be diametrically opposed to those of their peers.

[00:10:12] Jonathon Hensley: Yet, they’re still sending these different messages down to the teams. So what are some of the methods that we can do to help senior leaders align with each other more effectively?Bill, this is. A great question, and I think before I get into answering, I just wanna highlight one aspect of something that I think you’re touching on that is so critically important, which is, as we’re focused on what’s in front of us, our OKRs, and it’s very hard to step back often and understand what our responsibilities are cross-functionally to the organization.

It really is on you as a leader or somebody who’s maybe a, an emerging leader within an organization to figure out how do you build those relationships and that connection. And so when it comes to building alignment and closing the gap that you’re describing, one thing that’s really fundamental is that leaders at all levels, especially at the top of the organization, understand the roles and responsibility that they have in making sure that alignment permeates the organization and there’s clarity.

And so there’s a couple of really key things that stand out usually in, in most cases. One is when we look at the vision for, let’s say a product. Is that vision actually doing the work that it needs to do? In many cases, it’s spoken about as this aspirational, inspirational thing that an organization wants to achieve, and that’s true.

That’s a part of it. But oftentimes what’s missing is the specificity. And something that’s measurable.

And so it really starts at the very, very top of that process. Do you understand what a great vision requires what the job of that artifact is in your business and how critical that role is in driving alignment and helping you ensure that you’re moving forward. So in its most simplest terms, a vision needs to be a clear articulation of the long-term objective you’re trying to achieve.

It needs to be not just aspirational, but specific and it also needs to be measurable in some way. And that measurement is something that you as an organization are defining. What does that mean? And ideally you’re choosing a leading indicator, something that is customer centric, not organizational centric.

So a good example of that would be is a lot of times I’ll see we want to be a billion dollar company. Okay, that’s great, but you’re not telling me what you’re gonna do for customers to get to a billion dollars. What do we have to replicate? Where’s the meaning behind that

that billion dollars? Am I doing that for your benefit? As the CEO, that doesn’t feel very substantive to me as part of the team. So these things are, are misconstructed often to actually create the effect that executives and leaders across any size of organization are actually looking to achieve.

If we get this right, then you can really look at then strategy and what it’s meant to be, which is how are we going to achieve that vision? And when that vision is specific. You can develop much stronger and much more effective strategies because you’re looking at how do we achieve this thing? Where are we gonna play?

What problems are we gonna focus on prioritizing? How do we think we can solve those more effectively than anybody else? And what value are we gonna create in the way that we solve those that is distinct. And provides a competitive advantage, something that’s repeatable and scalable for our organization.

And so that becomes another critical piece to building alignment. Cuz if we all understand what we’re working for and we have a shared understanding of that cross-functionally, we all then can start to get in the strategy. And then what sits below that, to your point, are objectives. Are those objectives going to help us move forward, our strategy, will that help us take a step forward towards realizing that vision and enabling that to take place? If the answer is no to any of that, we’re working on the wrong things. And so those are critical quality checkpoints.

I’ll give an example.

A client I work with who’s in the manufacturing space. They distribute their products in many different ways through direct to consumer b2b, strategic partnership wholesale, and if you start to talk to people across the organization, what you would hear is different definitions of who the customer is.

So at any given time, You might get a different interpretation of who the most valuable audience is that the organization needed to serve because there wasn’t a common language around who’s the customer or how do we differentiate between the term customer versus partner versus channel, as an example.

And these are simple examples, but they’re really common challenges that organizations run into where now all of a sudden, finance is being asked to do something for a customer, but a customer of what type? What does that mean? And so what we happens is we start to create a fracture, how we can collaborate more effectively.

Now, if we have really clear alignment in everybody’s very clear on, we’re talking about this type of customer. In finance, we need your help to do this to serve and deliver on our promises. We wanna make it as easy as possible for them to work with us. Then finance now understands where they fit in, and not just collecting money, but actually enabling the customer experience to drive the outcomes the organization is looking for.

So we can change this dynamic of where things are happening, siloed to aligning the organization around the customer intent. Which of the organization, which is what will drive the vision of the product or service that’s being created and the purpose of the organization forward. And so these nuances are really important and is a critical responsibility from the board of directors all the way through to your frontline leaders that are supporting this process.

[00:16:05] Bill Raymond: That’s a great example. Thank you. We understand what the customer is, we understand what the market is that we’re targeting. And we also have a sense maybe of what some of those other internal objectives are getting to that billion dollars.

But the getting to the billion dollars is that constant focus on who the customer is and what they desire, and making sure that you are aligned to that or what they may not know that they desire so you can build something new. And I completely understand that. Let’s talk a little bit about this alignment.

We can say we are aligned with the team with the individual, with the team, the organization, and the market, but how do we get all of that to come together so that you can then start delivering value? Because very often what we see in an organization is all the ideas come from leadership, and the teams just have to implement it, and they’re unclear as to why they’re doing it.

Because we have some lo lossy focus there or for example, the other direction is that the teams are going off and implementing these, but we’re not necessarily sure if they are fully aligned at the organizational level, at the leadership level. And so while we can do these individual pieces of alignment, how do we now get that vertical alignment between the individual’s, teams org, and customer?

How do we institutionalize that? I guess is the question.

[00:17:29] Jonathon Hensley: I think there’s a couple of key things there is one, this goes back to, taking an agile, iterative approach to the way that you work. And so you really have to have a couple of key pieces in place. Once you have a very clear vision in place and a strategy that you can work from, you can start to then say, okay, we prioritized this problem.

Now, how do we institutionally start to progressively solve that problem in the best possible way? And as you said, oftentimes an executive might have an idea and then the product team becomes more delivery focused than value focused. And the challenge there is that they’re, you’re taking the most brilliant people on the front lines who are creating the product, who might have the most

insightful knowledge of how to serve the customer or solve this problem in the most effective way out of the equation. And so the best way that I’ve seen any organization, especially those with product excellence maturity, who are really doing this the fastest, most iterative way possible, is that they’re focused on leaders are very clear.

My job is to help understand the problem as much as possible. Teams are responsible for solutions. And so there, there’s this challenge that organizations face of and, and happens and product all the time is that there’s. The problem space, which is all about I need to understand the scope of the problem and I have to start creating solutions and I’m gonna start running experiments and tests.

But keeping leaders in, like in the space of right now we’re in learning mode and now we’re in solutions, is a very complicated thing to do. In an organization, it’s just human nature. We love to solve problems. We all have that creative or engineering mindset that loves to start to tackle things.

And so it’s really important that we don’t do that. Cause what happens is we start to introduce our own biases to the, what those solutions should be. And they may or may not actually resonate and connect with the market at all. So what organizations need to do is to make sure that there’s a customer feedback loop. A continuous process of discovery where they can validate their thinking as well as I identify the gaps and challenge their assumptions in the process.

And so some of the best organizations that I see actually ensure that the most senior levels of leadership where they’re engaged at the customer level. Whether that means working in the retail locations a few times a year, or sitting in a call center listening to customer complaints. You need to close the gap between leaders and the customer.

And the best case scenario so that they have an intimate knowledge of the customer that the organization is there to serve. And teams need to be doing that collectively together. So this continuous feedback loop and iterative process really allows you to produce more value.

And so what we’re trying to do when we look at value is not just again, what that customer needs to do. But how do we tap into actually what motivates them? What’s gonna get them to not just consider our product, but adopt it, use it and retain the use of that product over time? And so some, companies are excellent at doing this.

And it’s really a powerful mechanism because that value is not just being introduced. It’s not just being delivered, but it’s being reinforced through every step of the customer experience. And the product teams that are the most sophisticated are looking at continuous improvement from the perspective of how do I amplify that value?

Not, How do I put more things into the product, but how do I actually create more value and reinforce the core fundamentals of the product?

There’s some famous, anecdotal stories out there about how, apple is an example, doesn’t do customer research cuz they wouldn’t know, what the next innovation should be.

And that’s not true at all. Companies like Apple do a lot of research, but it’s to understand the motivations, to understand what the desires are. Apple might be introducing new possibilities, new ways to do that that customers weren’t aware of. But you can go back to, video clips of Steve Jobs talking in the, mid eighties and he got it.

It’s a masterclass in customer experience management. And it’s, and it’s not just marketing and we’re talking great product management and delivery of understanding we have to serve our customers. And that experience and how we serve them is intricate. And it requires this multidisciplinary approach and not a solution oriented approach that is focused on, top-down kind of order taking.

Can you go through a few examples? Maybe some, I think I like to call ‘em signposts, that show that maybe you do not have alignment with your organization?

[00:22:19] Bill Raymond: Sure. So some early signposts that I think that. Almost anybody can recognize and, has experienced at one time or another is, when you’re seeming to have constant meetings and you’re talking about the same problem again and again, and it’s not getting resolved and you’re frustration or tension is building within a team or maybe across the entire company even.

[00:22:39] Jonathon Hensley: That’s a telltale sign a misalignment has happened. People don’t feel heard. They’re people aren’t being empowered to solve the problem. And usually it’s because there’s a misunderstanding at some level. So when I talk about the customer definition example, it’s very difficult to create a great solution if you don’t actually understand things in the same way that the rest of your team does or the other parts of the organization that you depend on.

And so these are fundamentals in communication, great collaboration. Being able to be focused on the right things at the right time is making sure that there is that shared understanding. And so these tend to be early warning signs that appear in our day-to-day activities other cases are where you can look at the vision or the strategy for your product or service and look at it.

Is it in is there ambiguity there? Do you have a clear sense of where you’re going and why?And oftentimes what’s happened is, is that information may exist, but it’s living with, one key executive or a handful of people that know. But they haven’t yet been able to communicate that or they don’t know how to communicate that out to the broader team.

And so it creates a fragmentation where you have maybe leadership getting frustrated that it’s not getting done, but you have the people trying to get it done with the best of intention that aren’t being given the information to do it. And so there becomes to be this challenge there. And this is where

when you see misalignment is really a shared responsibility. Every single person at every level in the organization has a personal responsibility to question things. If there is misalignment taking place and to, ask for that resolution, I have rarely ever seen where somebody is asking a senior leader to provide clarity and see that pushback.

And the, when that does happen, it’s always been the same reason, because it’s putting somebody’s ego in check. That’s not a bad thing. We all deserve to work for good people and most people out there are pretty good people. So I think it’s important that we have the confidence to take on that responsibility, know that it is our responsibility, and that most people will honor that and really deeply appreciate it.

[00:24:51] Bill Raymond: I was thinking about an effort that I was on recently, and we were trying to get a lot of work done in a very short period of time because we had a very particular

date that we needed to meet in order to meet a sort of a market target. And, so things changed a lot. And I think the team was super flexible on that. We said, okay, this is really important. But then we had to pull back from that thing and say, it’s still important, but we’re just going to deprioritize it.

And there’s these short periods of time where you can be a little elastic, and allow those things to happen. But then what I have seen also is where organizations see, oh, we seem to be working really well in that kind of a mode. And I can’t tell you how many efforts I’ve been on where

once we see that everyone can be flexible all the time, we do that and then the product ends up not being quite as good as you had hoped to the market. And what you realize very quickly is that if a team does not feel like they’re delivering value and all they’re doing is just shifting directions all the time, then the output is of poorer quality, and you’re going to have to pay for that.

And who’s gonna pay for that The most is gonna be the customer.

[00:26:07] Jonathon Hensley: Absolutely, and I think another key thing that you hit on is the output will be poorer. Is that organizations that shift from output focused to outcome focused, are the best set up and usually have the strongest set of alignment across the organization to achieve the best outcomes. Outputs granted are important when we focus overly on outputs because they give us a sense of security. They give us a sense of accomplishment and completion. They’re easy to track in a project plan and say, yep, we’ve got that done. We’ve hit that milestone. But to your point of staying, agile, adaptive, being able to, flexible to how we might get there is, when we are

so precise about the activities and the outputs that have to take place. Then we remove the ability for creative problem solving. What happens often that I’ve seen is, we have these constrained resources, so how do we get through and start shortcutting these steps?

And it’s like, well wait a minute, we have constrained resources. These steps may not be the right steps anymore. How do we best solve this problem now with the resources we do have so we can get to the best outcome? And that shift is huge in our organization. You really see that when that happens, there’s a massive shift in the company’s ability to solve and redirect resources in the most effective way.

I think a lot of times people listen to the podcast and they say what’s some takeaways? Tactically, what could I do right now to help make that shift in my organization?

[00:27:38] Bill Raymond: Do you have a few ideas?

[00:27:39] Jonathon Hensley: Absolutely. So there’s a couple of things that I’ll say. And I’m gonna focus on kind of individual level. Start building the muscle of asking for verification. So one of my favorite things to do when I’m in a conversation with somebody is to say, what did you hear? Or I’ll repeat back to them what I heard or how I interpreted what they said.

And building in a process of verification in the way that we communicate is an incredibly powerful tool with individuals and teams cuz you start to build a process of establishing alignment in real time. So if I, start talking about how I want to approach something in an agile method and, you repeat that back to me, I might hear something different.

And then I can say, oh, actually what I meant is this. And we start to reconcile that language and we start to reconcile the gap in real time together. And we improve our communication and our ability to collaborate in the strength of our relationship. And so that, that’s a mechanism that I think anybody can start to use immediately to build alignment at any level in their careers.

And that’s one of my favorites. I think the next one is you have to look at, if you’re looking forhelping your team achieve outcomes, is to look at how is the work being organized Are the outcomes clear? Oftentimes, we set up initiatives or objectives around

we need to redesign this thing, or we need to rebuild this piece. We need to do X, Y, Z, whatever that may be. But we don’t define clearly what success looks like. What’s the outcome of doing this well, so that we have that? And is that an alignment? If is that outcome then in alignment with the

the team’s objectives, maybe your departments, mandates, maybe that, departments, how it fits in with the broader, business strategy as a whole. These are things that need to be in alignment and stitched together. And no matter where you sit in the organization, you have a lens on this information to start to ask those questions.

And just if you see a disconnect to call it out. I was consulting with a firm that was investing into a major piece of software to unify

eight different companies that they had acquired over 25 years and under a one kind of operating system, if you will, they didn’t bother to engage any of the subject matter experts in each area of the business that they were creating. And that seems crazy on the outside maybe to hear if you’re listening to this, but I can’t tell you how common it is.

And they are hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. And it’s a staggering cost and unfortunately that story is pretty common. There’s a lot of those types of mistakes cuz early on, somebody says that’s good enough and we have to take the time to understand no, what is it?

What is it required in order to keep us true and on track? And so I think everybody has an immediate opportunity to look at what their responsibility is and to look at what they can do with that. And the third one, I would say immediately is look for the siloed information. What are the dependencies that you have to be successful in your job?

And start building relationships. This was something that one of my early mentors taught me in something that, in the research for my book was, It was a huge thing that every single leader who had been successful, not just once again and again, reinforced the value of building cross-functional relationships and knowing how to communicate the value you were working on and how it connected to the value that they were working on.

That last one’s a great example. I have to say, there are oftentimes, folks that sometimes feel like they are trying to actively hinder the work that you’re doing, and so you put yourself in the mindset that’s what they are doing.

[00:31:17] Bill Raymond: But sometimes having that empathy for what they are going through and really starting to understand what that problem is, you’ll very often find that they’re not trying to scuttle your project or anything like that. Actually, what. You need to do is put on a different set of ears that listens to what their challenges are and how they’re doing the work.

Because sometimes it’s just that communication, isn’t it?

[00:31:40] Jonathon Hensley: Yeah, absolutely. I love IT teams I’ll start off with that but a lot of times for other functions in the organization, IT is an invisible force, in the organization or it can feel like a barrier because they control all these systems and there’s all these compliance things that they’re being asked to do.

And it’s a really tough role to be in, especially right now with cybersecurity and other considerations. IT is on the defense all the time and trying to maintain legacy systems, protect, security, protect the integrity of the company’s information, protect the integrity of the customer’s information and so forth.

The more you can understand what they’re up against, the more you know how to collaborate with them effectively and they are gatekeepers to so much critical information and potential in your organization. And this just happened for me earlier this week. IT is holding the data that’s gonna make AI for this one potential client, a huge strategic advantage, but that data has to become accessible to the rest of the company.

For security reasons, it’s never been. So they’ve got a real thing to work through there to make that possible cuz the of that AI is contingent 1000% on the quality of that data. And so they now need to have a partnership unlike anything they’ve ever had before. And the best way to possibly do that is to come at it from a point of alignment in building a shared understanding of how they can work together to achieve a common goal.

[00:33:04] Bill Raymond: Before we go, I do wanna make sure that folks can reach out to you if they’d like to. How might they be able to do that?

[00:33:11] Jonathon Hensley: I appreciate that Bill. If anybody would like to reach out and connect, I’d recommend reaching out to me over LinkedIn and love to connect with you and have a conversation. Also, you can get in touch by visiting emergeinteractive.com, and there’s a ton of wonderful resources there for all facets of building alignment and building great products and services that are completely free.

And I’d also recommend checking out the book on amazon.com.

[00:33:39] Bill Raymond: Thank you and I just,finished your book. I will sayit’s actually a very easy read. It’s well written. You did a great job in making it very relatable, and I appreciate that.

I’ll make sure that your LinkedIn website and book are all available on the https://agileinaction.com website. And of course, I’ll also make sure that those are in the show notes, the description of any podcast app that you’re listening to right now. Jonathan Hensley. Thank you so much for your time today.

[00:34:07] Jonathon Hensley: Thank you so much for having me, Bill.

[00:34:09] Outro

[00:34:09] Bill Raymond: Thank you for listening to the Agile in Action Podcast with Bill Raymond. Subscribe now to stay current on the latest trends in team, organization, and agile techniques. Please take a moment to rate and comment to help us grow our community. This podcast is produced in affiliation with Cambermast LLC, and our executive producer is Reama Dagasan.

[00:34:31] Speaker: If there is a topic you would like Bill to cover, contact him directly at bill.Raymond@agileinaction.com.