Large-scale transformation leadership opportunity? Be cautious.

# Introduction

During the past several years, I have had opportunities to act as one of the transforming leaders for a few businesses. The businesses are industry-impacting and impact millions to billions of customers directly or indirectly, so they are mission-critical and can easily be on the news.

The transformation journey can bring immense rewarding happiness, as well as personal and team pains. Those learnings have been with me for a while, and I want to document them for future references.

Looking back, the key to transformation is understanding the current business, culture, and execution procedure. From an outsider, the benefit is not to carry any legacy thinking, so you have an opportunity to define a new picture and realize it.  

I have failed (a company aka River) and successful transformations (a company aka Game). In this document, I will try to share them.

![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/6v_ZUqv-ZPhHroAqCYZzHZNdUr1uZrypgQN3L3PlxIYPNRNuPe18nJpxjmNDfzDQSxRho2mDVoJrKFxjhKhX33BXF6a4gMKhlP19ZNvlUXD7mSyGyNqaC568WqomW6eSxBVnOHMEqTWCw-2TxmrvgP5nI1k-6D47avJtp8ZHfXzRX5fTwfkp5SAx9Q =400x400)

The document will divide into several parts:
-   [Large-scale transformation leadership opportunity? Be cautious.](https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/2928180620906399337/6853774654012328719#)
-   [Transformational challenge: Create a vision for everyone](https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/2928180620906399337/6853774654012328719#)
-   More

# Before the landing
During the River journey, my former manager reached out. This is a leadership position to help him transform an industry-impacting business. He needed me there because of my passion, technical skills, and trust.

But I didn't realize, according to reports, that only 16% of the transformation succeeded. Statistically, the change typically fails.

Transformation is hard. It starts from business goals, then ends up in different projects. It begins with a small group and ends with the entire organization.  

In the first transformation journey, It didn't succeed. All the people the manager brought in ended up leaving the organization, including himself.

It is hard. This memo is trying to help and create a thinking framework to deal with all of these in a group. 

You can't do it alone. Nobody can.

# Understand the business
Transformation is about the current and the future of the business. Running a large-scale business is challenging. A change to the business means changes to the products and ultimately impacts the customers.Understanding the business both external and internal can help.

Understanding the products through external helps you walk through the industry impression, rate 1-5, and what the image is. The River transformation we are in is rated probably two according to hacker news and Reddit. Competitors in the industry are growing fast, and the competitor's performance sets the business goals in the planning process. A typical customer question is why the competitor supports A, but you are not.  

Understanding the product internally helps you understand why A is not supported. The River is about technical debt, so a production line could not produce fast enough. When there is an execution problem, It is a typical sign of a problem with the production line.

# Understand the leaders
The business is run by the leaders. Any business change will require agreements from the leaders; understanding and working with them is vital at the early stage.

Talk with people about their concerns about the business and what opportunities you can work with on their business concerns. Identify those concerns and tell them that your job is to address those. It helps you create trust and support for future vision and roadmap definition. In River, by then, most managers worried they would lose their jobs, and several leaders had already switched jobs, so making them stable was my manager's top thing. And that didn't end well.

Paying attention to different leaders' behavior also helps. 80% of the language is through the body instead of wording. Understanding their level of interest is essential for your time spent. People are motivated by self-interest, and people are more interested with politics typically does not have good understand on deep knowledge; people who want to get things done will not care much about politics. Be aware of that.

# Understand the current culture
People's behavior formed the culture. Leaders have a crucial influence on the culture; leaders may not be Managers/Tech Leads, but leaders could be one of the best influencers among the people.

Understand the culture of each business process and how the team behaves. In the River team:
* During the planning, the River team planned more on the minor incremental changes, but it ended up adding more and more technical debts; The bigger changes are bold but disconnected, not ground up;
* The debt is too much during the design session, and only old and experienced engineers can discuss details. We kept * talking about every detail and ended up ruining the design session;
* The legacy tech lead is incapable of designing large-scale elegant systems, reputed badly among engineers, and ended up developing systems that took years to deliver and never achieving the business goals;
* During the execution phase, the technical debts added up, caused deployment issues, and could not go out according to the timeline;

# Understand the legacy architecture
When the systems can not operate well, it becomes a management problem. Ultimately, management wants to achieve autonomy to make everybody's life easier.

However, there is no magic in the engineering world. Everything is code written by engineers. In the river team, the code base is 7 years old, and the engineers have switched jobs to different organizations. Many junior engineers joined the team 1 or 2 years ago. They are hard-working, fast to deliver and cause problems with the old systems.

Understanding legacy architecture also means understanding the thinking along the way, why they started the product, and what happened along the way to the coding, people, and business. The River team started the product to compete for the timeline to get the business, so they did it super quick, like 7 days. They created a business on top of that code base. All the things later keep reapeating the same logic.