All right, we'll go ahead and get started. So would um like to introduce myself. So, Devia Smith, I am senior director of Product Technology. I work at Optum. My role today is uh Center uh within Center for Digital Health.Uh I'm leading multiple initiatives within the area of Center for Digital Health. Some of you may have heard of Optim virtual care. It is our virtual offering and I am excited to be part of that group today. Uh I will be talking about building strong technical teams. So to share a little bit about myself from uh my prior experience and background, I've been doing development and leading technology teams for over 17 years. I uh I started off my career as a developer and I have moved on throughout uh from that to leadership roles in leading large and uh complex programs and systems. And as we talk about building strong technical teams, there's a few things I would love to share with all of you. Um As you walk through our time today, uh my goal would be to share quick steps to take your current teams or the new teams that you're getting.

Uh getting as part of your new roles and transform them from uh from whatever phase they're in to, to the next step of greatness. I would also like to give you some tools and things uh to ask yourselves and uh of your teams in order to kind of make that journey. And finally, I'd love to give some time to all of you to ask some questions. So jumping right in one of the things I would love to talk to all of you about is what are the different steps we can take in order to transform our teams. So talking about that specifically, um once you start on a technical team and you have taken on a brand new team, understanding what that team's role is and what you're doing is really crucial. So understanding what the expectations um of your team is, your stakeholders are.

But more importantly, why do you need to do that work? And what is the value that your teams are bringing to the business side of uh of the company that you're working with? Secondly, talking about your team as well. So for, for you to truly accelerate and kind of go to the step of uh truly transforming, you have to understand who do you have on your team? Take a minute to identify now that I know what I need to do and why I need to do. Who do I have on the team? What truly is the gap in order for you to really make it to the outcome that you desire with your team. And end of the day, we, we gotta make sure we are building a family. We, we gotta talk about that team as if it is our family and what that uh cadence looks like. So to start off with, when we talk about empowering our, why, what do I mean by that? The goal is for us to understand uh the the value of the product that you're going after. So for example, um myself leading today the Optim virtual care business, why are we doing this? What is the value from a patient perspective or a provider perspective? And can I take that why behind our business and truly understand it and then share it with our engineering teams? So, so that's step one, understand your business. Second, I would say is explain those product goals to them.

So if your product goal uh today is uh to deliver a faster experience, really take a minute to explain that to engineers. Uh not, not the story by story, very specific technical details that they need to do. But truly from a thought process of we are trying to transform our business and trying to get the total number of um patients using our portal. Can we make sure the amount of time that they take to uh book an appointment? Truly is less than 1020 30% than what we originally said, and the value truly provides better customer satisfaction. People are getting to the provider sooner. So there's a lot of benefits that you gain in order to uh from explaining those goals. Now, the great thing about explaining those goals is instead of your business and product teams truly solving for one solution to, to meet the goals. Now, you have the whole engineering team who's rallying behind that one purpose and goal and it really does transform how your engineering teams are involved with the broader group as you talk with them. Um And you are sharing your goals. One of the things you uh you will see is within your tech teams and your engineers will start to say, hey, I could do this, this and this very quickly. And here's how it makes the experience better, faster, delivers quicker.

So when you bring them in, not only have you identified quickly, small little wins, but it also has gotten you to your goal faster. And then finally, in your empowering way, one of the things uh and a gap that I have seen is having the product teams not work directly with the engineers. And that can really have an impact on the long term with motivation and excitement and truly creating that purpose that all of our engineering teams seek. So moving on, understood our why and we have figured out what we truly need to achieve. We need to understand what does our team look like. So we need to take a minute to listen to each of our team members. And this, this can be a difficult conversation from asking them the right questions. Do they truly know what their strengths are? Do you need to help them understand? Um they're really good at this specific technology, but have they taken time to say, understand the bigger picture or um they build products but not with performance in mind? So, so talking to them truly about their strengths and what their interests are. It kind of does two things. Firstly, it gives it first, it gives you an idea about um what you have on your team.

Second, it also gives you a quick insight into what they might be looking to do and what that next step for them is, and it really can help drive that motivation and excitement for, for your engineers thinking through how they can get to that next level, not only just from a growth or our next promotion perspective, but truly from a growth perspective of uh learning new things, driving a new challenge and what that excitement would look like for them, say working in a brand new group.

Um you, you likely have some engineers who like to work one on one, solve the problem, then come back to a bigger group and then kind of share what they have learned and done. You could also have a group of engineers who who prefer to just work one on one with somebody. But that bigger group can be a concern. So identifying their strengths and matching that up, but you know, the right work setting for them can be important. And as you've done these conversation, it really sets you up for the next step, which is mind the gap, identify what is the next thing you need to do in order for you to augment the missing skills from your team and going through that process can help you identify. Are we solving the problems the right way or are we solving the problems with what we have because that's the best we know. So as a leader, uh it is important for us to go through that journey of identifying the current skills, figure out what problems we need to solve. And do we have the right roles? Do we have the right people in the right roles? And I'm gonna just stay here for a minute talking through this specific example. Do you have a very technical person kind of doing uh a project manager, scrub master role and they're doing it because we have asked them to do it.

Uh Not because that is their strength and they're just not enjoying it. I take that example because more often than not, I have heard that. Now, on the contrary, I've also had uh expectations uh where engineers have shared that we are expected to learn this brand new technology, that is just not my passion area. That's just not exciting for me. I would truly like to move into a architectural or a analysis sort of role. So identify the skills and do we have those folks in the right roles? You have done all, all the kind of the leg work behind the scenes to learn about your team. And the next step truly is how do we bring all of this together? If we all are working towards one vision, we have identified the right skills and strengths of our team, we have figured out what the gaps are next is, can you bring everybody together? Can we build a family? So what are some ground rules that we need to bring together for the team to make sure they are building on the right skills? They are respectful of each other. Are they autonomous? Are they able to make the right decisions themselves or are they coming to you as a leader to talk and like make the decisions for them? One of my favorite codes when we talk about building a family is what does, what does your Sunday dinner look like?

So when you're building that team and you see those team meetings happening, are they talking to each other? Are they talking about each other? Are they solving problems together or are they complaining? And that is a very quick insight into what is happening within the team and how you may want to move that culture from maybe not as productive to really constructive and continue to move forward into a growth culture. Are they supporting each other? Can they trust each other to truly say I am gone on vacation for a week or two? I expect that these group of folks will be able to support the work that I have. We all need to take time off. So are we truly supporting and trusting each other to take care of each other in time of um especially in pandemic in times of need and to give each other a break, we all should not be working 24 7. So how do we really make sure that our teams feel supported and that they really can take care of themselves while also taking care of uh the family that they've built at work. And finally, we talk about learning cul culture and training. But have we taken a moment to assess that our current teams? Are they truly working a lot of hours?

And if so, they really wouldn't have time to pick up things, learn, learn new technologies or are we saying, hey, let's save 20% of all of your bandwidth and make sure that you're able to once a week or once every one day a week or one day, every other week, spend time learning a new skill, a new technology.

So to sum it all up, I would love to share kind of four key questions for you to ask as you're assessing your teams. Do they all understand the vision? Are we all on the same page with what needs to be delivered? Do I have the right strengths and skill sets identified within the team? Am I missing the skills that I need within the team? And finally, how is my team interacting with each other with that? I would love to open up our questions and I am going to go out of the slide mode to make sure I can see the chat. Yeah. So great question. So one of the questions I see here is um how do you improve team interaction? So uh this always is a challenge. But one of the ways I have tried to do it is uh one, it's not just one answer which is create more happy hours or create more team meetings uh that will take you forward into uh spending more time together. But if you have done that step two that we talked about learning about your team, what is truly motivating and exciting to them and then really taking a moment to create um create spaces where they can talk each other with each other freely. And I'll give an example, a couple of the engineers that I was working with. As I got to know them a little bit more, they talked about Cryptocurrency and that was very exciting to them.

Some of them had gone out created their own algorithms to kind of predict some of the, the way uh market was going and was it in line with how you know, their models were looking? So we created a, a knowledge sharing session, completely off work topic, but just truly talk about this passion. Um Interestingly enough, quite a few people are interested to even talk about that. So creating those small opportunities of uh of ways that people can interact and really have conversations.

Besides that, just one, you know, piece of information that they're working in. The second example, I would love to share um when we talk about solution and we are talking about designing new systems. Um How inclusive are we for all the engineering team to come to the table and really be able to speak their mind and be involved in the discussion. So giving them a minute to think through uh the design and how it's impacting the technology, but also how it's impacting the business and that space can really give us a way in order give us a way for engineers to truly make an impact, which can really seem um which can really seem difficult at times.

Uh But it gives them a way to think outside the box from the current uh current way of work working. Let's see one more question here. Um I have definitely included the the the training. So, so the question is the development and inclusion and the bias training uh have, have we done that? And yes, I have taken some of those in the past. I think I find more interactive uh sort of sessions helpful and uh kind of bring the team along through some of those examples uh to be more useful with that. I think we're running right on time. Uh I appreciate everybody's time today and uh I hope you all have a great day. Thank you so much.