The Company as a Product: Applying APOM to the Organizational Capabilities at Dyno Therapeutics

This episode is a must-listen for COOs, Agile Coaches, and Business Leaders who want to bridge the gap between "technical agility" and "business agility."

When startups grow, they often bring in "responsible adults" who implement traditional playbooks in Finance, HR, and Legal. While well-intentioned, these silos often create a "factory mindset" that undermines the very agility that made the company successful.

In this episode, Dave West is joined by Tyson Bertmaring, VP Partnership Success at Dyno Therapeutics and Yuval Yeret, Professional Scrum Trainer, to discuss how Dyno Therapeutics is taking a different path. By applying the Agile Product Operating Model (APOM) to General & Administrative (G&A) functions, Dyno is treating its organizational capabilities as a product to be engineered, not a hierarchy to be managed.

What you’ll learn:

• The Stewardship Mindset: Moving from local optimization (like chasing $10k in interest income) to systemic value (ensuring vendor reliability).
• The "Two Jobs" Challenge: Balancing "running the business" with "building a better system."
• G&A as a Service: Identifying essential services—like talent acquisition and contracting—and developing them into exceptional "internal products."
• More!

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Transcript

moderator 00:00 Welcome to the Scrum.org community Podcast, the podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast, agile experts, including professional scrum trainers and other industry thought leaders, share their stories and experiences. We also explore hot topics in our space with thought-provoking, challenging, and energetic discussions. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Dave West 00:25 Hello and welcome to the Scrum.org community podcast. I'm your host, Dave West, CEO here @Scrum.org. I'm actually in the office today, which is rare. In today's podcast, we're discussing enterprise agility—not Scrum at Scale, not scaling frameworks. But really: how does an enterprise stay agile as it scales, which is a really interesting topic and something that I think there have been a lot of books written about. In fact, I recently just bought a book called Scaling, about how enterprises scale. So, it is a hot topic and very interesting. Because it's such an interesting topic, I'm very fortunate to have on the show today Tyson Bertmaring, VP of Partnership Success at Dyno Therapeutics. Welcome to the podcast, Tyson.

Tyson Bertmaring 01:38 Happy to be here, Dave.

Dave West 01:40 And we've got Yuval Yeret, PST, SAFE Fellow, Kanban expert, OKR expert, and general thought leader in the Agile community. Welcome to the podcast, Yuval.

Yuval Yeret 01:38 Good to be here again, Dave.

Dave West 01:41 So let me set the scene, and then I'd love Tyson for you to tell a little bit about Dyno. The premise of this podcast, listeners, is that when startups hit a growth spurt, the back office usually starts getting heavy. HR, Finance, Operations, and IT start bringing in systems and processes really to manage risk and to make things more efficient. Also, because of who we are hiring—I can tell you from my experience at Tasktop—when we grew and got funding, we brought in people that were experts at scaling. They came with their own processes, rules, and experiences.

This pursuit of efficiency leads to a set of processes. I'm almost not wanting to say "inefficient processes" because they're motivated from a good place, but they bring a set of processes that undermine the agility of the ultimate business—our ability to build products more effectively and our ability to respond to the market in a more agile manner. Now, that ultimately is a cycle which can undermine an organization or certainly make it more painful. Tyson, at Dyno, your company has grown since the time I've been working with you, and you've been going through a lot of these scaling challenges in a very mindful way. Can you set the scene about those challenges in particular and your context?

Tyson Bertmaring 03:30 Yeah. So before I came to Dyno, like Yuval and our listeners, you've worked at other companies and you've seen exactly what you're talking about, Dave. I was in integrator roles, and whenever I interacted with the GNA part of the organization, it felt like I needed to do certain things to satisfy certain rules or expectations that were sometimes at odds with what we were trying to accomplish from a program or organizational perspective. I carried those experiences into Dyno.

When I came to Dyno, my focus was on our partnerships, so I was very externally focused. Then about two years into it, I saw it as a really good opportunity to advocate to consolidate our GNA function—Operations, Finance, People, IT—underneath a single integrated function. That is where I spent three of my years here at Dyno. Now I'm back into partnerships as our business continues to grow.

One aspect of this is local optimization. When I got into GNA, you started to see some of that happening for good intentions. Because I had this perspective of what we were trying to accomplish externally as a partner-centric organization, I'll give one example. In Finance, we have free cash and cash flow, and we want to monetize the interest on that cash because it's sitting there. If I could pay my vendors later, then I could actually increase my interest income. But from my perspective, if we do that, then our vendors are maybe not going to want to work with us. They will prioritize us after other clients. If what we really want is the best from those we are working with externally, then we should do what's in their best interest as well as ours.

I pushed for this goal: we need to pay and be paid 100% correctly, on time. It was difficult for the Finance team. It came down to a conversation: if we optimized at the local level for interest income, how much are we actually earning? It came down to something like $10,000 extra a year. I'm like, well, the reliability that we would have with those we are working with externally is worth way more than $10,000. It was difficult to argue because there was no way to actually compare. I had to use my leverage as the leader to push this goal forward. This is an example where local optimization doesn't necessarily see the systemic impact of their decision. Hopefully, Dave, that's a good segue into the general problem we have at the local level.

Dave West 07:04 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's exactly what I've seen. You bring in a leader to Finance or IT and they bring in a playbook that has been proven successful. By executing that playbook—whether it is standardization on machines in IT—it can cause trouble. Software Engineers do not like to be told to use a particular machine. At Tasktop, we were incurring lots of costs as we grew to 50 or 60 software engineers because everybody had a completely different machine. Unhappy software engineers are never a good thing to have. This idea of optimization at the micro level having an impact on the broader business story makes total sense. Yuval, tell me from your perspective, in a broader sense, do you see this happening in many organizations?

Yuval Yeret 08:24 Yes, this is such a common pattern; there's even a name for this. In the last year, the "founder mode versus responsible adults operator mode" meme came to life. It started at Airbnb and Y Combinator, but I'm listening to Tyson and your story, Dave, and it is about responsible adults that are hired as a company scales up. It happens way earlier in the lifecycle of companies than you might expect. You said "enterprise," but this isn't just about enterprises—it's almost any type of company. The moment it hits a Round B, the moment it grows beyond 50 people, the founder hears advice from others: "You need to bring in the responsible adults. You need to bring in somebody that knows what they're doing with Finance".

They're also told: "Focus on certain things. Let these people run the show". It's dangerous in your core product delivery organization, and based on what we're hearing from Tyson, it's dangerous in other areas. Now, I don't think we're saying you need to be agile and responsive everywhere in the organization. It's not that we need Finance to set up a new vendor within a day, but if we're not intentional about how we design the services in the rest of the organization, it might become a constraint. It might become something that actually slows the business down and becomes an impediment to continuing to scale.

Dave West 10:41 Can I just lean into that for a second? I think that's a really interesting point. This isn't about scaling agile practices; it's about ensuring that the system those agile practices are working on is not being constrained so greatly by external dependencies that they can no longer be as agile as they need to be. It is not about adopting Scrum in Finance or IT operations—as much as we would love you to do that, listeners. It's about being mindful of the broader ecosystem that these agile teams are working in. Is that really what you're saying?

Yuval Yeret 11:43 I'll say even more than that. I've worked with a healthcare organization—an orthopedics network—that was thinking about scaling and merging more clinics. As things became more complex, there were redundancies and different marketing approaches. What they realized is that in order to work on their enterprise, it is not an IT issue, it's not a Finance issue, it's not a Marketing issue—it's a systemic issue.

That is where they started to think: how do we work on systemic issues involving Finance, HR, and IT operations? Whether this system is serving agile teams is irrelevant. Sometimes it will be the opportunity we see because we're working on a product organization and we start to see the constraints. But this is happening in organizations without a product organization as well.

Dave West 13:55 Okay, so the point is that you need to think about the whole system, all the dependencies, and the whole ecosystem. That sounds awfully complicated, though; it means everybody has to be cognizant of everything. Tyson, how did you deal with that? You moved from an external facing position to a position focused on supporting services inside Dyno. How do you get everybody to worry about this holistic system perspective? Isn't it a little bit of an overhead?

Tyson Bertmaring 14:45 Yeah, it was a lot of work at the very beginning and there was a lot of confusion. It took some time, and not everybody is cut out for this. You probably heard of Donella Meadows and the points of leverage in the system. That really was what was guiding me personally: start with the mindset.

I brought in a thinker, Michelle Holiday, who has written about stewardship. We used stewardship as a concept to reframe our role in the organization. Are we here to serve our departments, or are we here in service of a bigger organization? That's really what stewardship was about. When you're thinking as a steward, you're thinking about the parts, the whole, and the relationships between them.

The mindset was really important. Another aspect of this was around what you all teach within Scrum, which is around ceremonies and artifacts. One of the ceremonies is just getting people together in the same room and breaking that siloed structure. Then we focused on goals. What do we need the system to achieve? We thought about it in terms of breaking work down into a collection of services—talent acquisition as a service, payment as a service, IT help desk, or cyber security.

Then you start to think about structure. What are the dependencies for each of these services? Which ones are impacted by others? You start to see a systemic understanding. Then you get down to rules, which is where I think most people start. Rules should come way after the "why" is created and the mindset is in place. We paid a lot of attention to the mindset of stewardship and starting with the "why" and structure.

Dave West 17:56 From my experience, we didn't think of it quite holistically like this, which is kind of embarrassing. At Tasktop, we tended to just deal with pain points when they emerged, whether it was a cash flow problem or getting stuck in Legal for months. We changed the rules at that moment based on that situation, which then had consequences later. We were always playing a game of Whack-a-Mole. Most companies going through a scaling moment don't have time to step back. Tyson, how did you get that time to step back and think about the stewardship model and mindset?

Tyson Bertmaring 19:24 Yeah, that was definitely hard at the very beginning because I was asking folks to basically do two jobs. One was: keep the system we have today running. The second was: let's build a better system. We had to document things. People got upset with me because I was asking people to document a lot, but I was thinking about the people that are going to come later. They need to understand the goals and the principles we use to make decisions.

If you're driving on a highway and they are replacing a bridge, they still need to make sure traffic is going. It's a mess. Traffic is slower, lanes are narrower, and no one likes it. But you need to keep things going. Eventually, the new bridge gets built and it's amazing. Traffic speeds up. That is the way to think about it: we were operating the system we had and building a new system at the same time.

Dave West 20:58 Let's lean in a little bit on goals, because I know that Yuval, you're going to have a very strong opinion on measurable outcomes and OKRs. Tyson, did you manage to get this holistic set of goals communicated to the whole enterprise? People are often measured on their number one job, while their number two job is seen as a way to be a nice person or get a review. How did you manage to get those two sets of goals balanced and transparent?

Tyson Bertmaring 22:02 There were successes and some things we didn't quite get to. We were able to identify the goals at the service level. We had about 30 services across this part of the business, and there was an individual accountable for that goal and responsible for the work to deliver that service. Every month, we would come together as a stewardship team—we called the accountable agent the "service steward"—and they would talk about how their service was performing.

We ensured the broader organization knew about these goals because you need two to tango. For example, talent acquisition needs hiring managers to participate to achieve their goal around the quality of hire. The one aspect I could never get alignment on across the executive team was to include a goal at the company level around the performance of the overall system itself. I could never get support for that to be a company goal. To this day, there is a disconnect. They look at the company goals around products and business traction, and they have to draw whatever connection they think is right, but there's no direct connection today to a company goal. I wish we could have gotten to that.

Dave West 24:35 Actually, that's true at Scrum.org, too. We don't measure our operational systems other than in a transient connection to our broader mission. The goals for our operational systems like Support and Finance are not connected at all. Yuval, what have you seen in other companies? How do you get the "run the business" and "improve the business" sets of goals to connect?

Yuval Yeret 25:33 I think the key is to not look at all of your "run the business" KPIs all the time at the company level. The goal is to identify a very small set of developmental goals. For a therapeutics company like Dyno, probably 80% of their goals should be about their product. Same for Scrum.org. But there should be a certain percentage about developing the company, especially if it's growing. Nothing stays great and clear forever.

What are you going to focus on developing? If in Tyson's case, it's revamping how we acquire talent because we need to grow by 50 people, that's something I would put as a company goal in parallel to finding new partners. You need that clear connection. At the orthopedics network I mentioned, there was a goal about streamlining operations that dictated work for different teams that year. Even at the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic, there are OKRs about developing new organizational capabilities, not just patient care.

Dave West 28:30 "Streamlining" to me always means just reducing costs, so we have to be careful with those words. But can we talk about skills? I've recently been doing a project with my son's school to help them improve their parent-teacher conference capability. These are amazing teachers, but they hadn't been exposed to systems thinking or product development—ideas we take for granted. Is there a skills issue here? In Lean thinking, middle managers take that culture and apply it to every part of their business. Are people lacking those standard skills?

Yuval Yeret 30:23 I think there are a lot of people that should become Product Owners.

Dave West 30:28 Not just Product Owners, but even just having a bit of systems thinking or Theory of Constraints would open their minds to a different way of looking at the world they work in.

Tyson Bertmaring 30:49 On this, Dave, I think what we have is a crisis of institution. The skills people gather throughout their careers are a product of the organizations they have been a part of. If you think about the way companies are set up, everything is almost like a factory. People specialize deeply in one area and don't build an understanding of the broader system because they are not rewarded to do so. I feel like an oddball because I came through integrator roles. The skills I gathered were more likely to lead me to think systemically. There are only so many people with those skills. If more organizations were set up where people build integrative skills, maybe AI could help with the depth or the integration.

Yuval Yeret 32:41 There are two things. One is the integration and systems thinking aspect. The other main pillar that is missing is growth versus fixed mindsets—the skills you need to grow and experiment. In Toyota, we see the Improvement Kata: things aren't fixed. You have a goal, you try an increment of improvement, and you apply the scientific method. That is inherent to Toyota in way more positions than in a typical biotech or high-tech organization. I'm talking to CEOs who don't understand that their organization is a product they need to develop. Even if they have that integrator mindset, it's ad hoc, not a system of improving the organization and its biggest constraints.

Tyson Bertmaring 34:32 I think those organizations only see the organizational chart—the hierarchy of how they get work done. I imagine a lot of the work at Toyota gets done outside of the hierarchy.

Dave West 35:02 It is a really interesting realization. When we were working with the school, there was a surprise when they asked, "Who's in charge of agreeing that this new system applies to the middle and lower school?" We said the team is, and there's a Product Owner determining value, but we're ultimately doing the work and delivering a system. Not only did we have a team driving change, but suddenly everybody felt they could be part of that change. That ownership element is missing in many organizations. I do my job, and that creates silos and friction. OKRs can unfortunately reinforce that if they are set up to reinforce the hierarchy.

Yuval Yeret 36:37 Right. If you set OKRs from a mindset of stewardship, then people will become stewards.

Dave West 36:53 One other thing: power, position, and status. Tyson, when you said we need to think of it as a service, you were in charge of these operational capabilities. But when you bring in a person with 20 or 30 years of Finance or Legal experience, they come with a certain level of authority and status. They don't want to look like they aren't the boss. How did you deal with that?

Tyson Bertmaring 37:55 I think you need to look for leaders who don't necessarily want to "wear the crown". You still need hierarchy for development and growing specialized depth, but you need leaders who see success as a future where they are no longer needed. I think that is very rare, but essential.

Yuval Yeret 38:56 I want to caveat that. Tyson has a very visionary and idealistic look at what stewardship is. A more realistic view is that much of the work in a GNA organization happens within functions. When Finance pays vendors, they don't necessarily need HR or IT day in and day out. That work can be managed the usual way, with the stewardship mindset of occasionally looking at what needs to improve. We need to cut across the hierarchy for the integrative, complex work on the system. It might be easier because we aren't telling people they are losing control; we're just adding a tiger team. Hopefully, people realize that this makes sense once they see the system. These are evolutionary steps to get where you need to be without rocking the boat too much.

Dave West 41:51 That's very pragmatic. Crisis is a really good way of bringing people together; a good crisis definitely breaks down silos. We're coming to the end of today's podcast. Considering our listeners in large organizations, what advice would you give them about enterprise agility and the GNA connection?

Yuval Yeret 44:07 I think the starting point is to find the biggest problem or bottleneck and work on it just like we work on products. Try something and see if it's working. Don't stay stuck to best practices. Dedicate a percentage of your capacity to working on your system and your function.

Dave West 44:47 Find that pain point, get support, build that cross-functional team, and make incremental progress.

Yuval Yeret 45:01 Work on a cross-functional problem first. Formally creating a cross-functional team might be a bridge too far. Depending on your power, you might not be able to go that far yet.

Dave West 45:28 Tyson, what about you? What are your pearls of wisdom?

Tyson Bertmaring 45:45 I would say think about what is essential for the success of your organization from a GNA perspective. Is it fast contracting, paying on time, or hiring the best people? Figure out those few services that are most important and focus on developing those so they are exceptional. Parkinson's Law says that left to their own devices, GNA will just continue to grow and put in place rules for the sake of doing it. Start thinking about the system from the core and be intentional about it to push back against that creep.

Dave West 47:08 That makes a lot of sense. Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time today to talk about GNA and its impact on the agility of the organization. Thank you to our listeners. I was very fortunate to have Tyson Bertmaring and Yuval Yeret sharing their insights. We talked about stewardship, transparency, and shared goals. There is incredible expertise in those functions, and if we can leverage them effectively, they can really help the mission. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and share with friends. Thanks everybody, and Scrum on!