EYN#052: Quality Assurance and the Russian Invasion?

"I've got the graveyard shift. After lunch on day 2 of a 2 day summit. With a drinks reception the night before."

I was running a coaching session with Kelly (name changed to protect the innocent). Kelly had an amazing opportunity. She'd been asked to present at a global summit to a select group of leaders from around her organisation. She'd been asked to share the best practices of her department which she'd recently transformed.

The problem: her department is often perceived as boring. Quality Assurance and Test. And to make it worse she'd been given the graveyard shift to share her thoughts.

But the thing is, her team is vital and actually really interesting. We just needed to make everyone else feel the same.

Kelly's first draft was the same as so many other presentations I see. Packed full of well thought through substance. But it was dull.

Two things were missing:

• Why this topic benefitted people.
• Something interesting that connected people emotionally to the topic.

So I asked her - "Tell me what it was like when things were bad. Before you transformed the team". Her response was a bit generic.

"Product quality was poor, so we were constantly fixing stuff. Which meant work-life balance was bad. We were having to fix stuff quickly out of hours".

So I pressed her. "Tell me what that actually meant to people in your team".

"Well the people fixing the problems lived in Ukraine and this was during the early days of the Russian invasion. They were trying to protect their families and we were asking them to make out of hours changes".

JAW DROPPED

There was our story. The impact of bad QA and Test was people being asked to fix code whilst their families lives were threatened.

People remember things like that. That was our hook and story to get people interested.

Next thing, the why. We needed to make sure people understood why this topic was important. Right at the beginning, we needed to smack them between the eyes with "What's In It For Me". Something like:

• Builds morale in their team
• Enables you to hit your KPI's
• Builds your teams reputation
• Improves customer experience
• Improves product velocity
• Lowers cost

Who doesn't want that!?!

Kelly put the effort in, crafted the content, flew to the US and delivered the session.

I didn't get to see the final result but I heard all about it.

It went down a storm. Even though she got the graveyard shift.

Her CTO shared with me:

"Her presentation was standout excellent. Her content was well delivered with a good pace, excellent stories and clear value."

Result!

If you and your team can engage people, make them care and add value to your audience, success will follow.

Hope this helps.

Ben