I help large organizations adopt new ways of working and make them stick in how people do their jobs.
It started with agile practices at John Deere, moved to organizational agility and the product operating model at Principal, and now it's AI. The subject keeps changing and the craft mostly doesn't.
Today I lead Principal's enterprise coaching function and own its coaching strategy. Right now my attention is mostly on AI enablement, especially getting people outside engineering building with it: lawyers, relationship managers, underwriters, and product managers.
Lately more of it is building. The product and delivery councils own their standards, and I wrote the standard for how those become plugins and skills people use every day, with an evaluation each one has to pass before anyone installs it.
Lead the enterprise coaching function and own coaching strategy company-wide: about a dozen coaches in the US covering product, delivery, team practices, and technical coaching, in partnership with the leader of the India-based coaching team. Own the operating model, hiring, vendor relationships, and a contract portfolio of roughly $1.5M a year.
Coached product and delivery organizations on discovery, collaboration, and delivery performance, and introduced product thinking and delivery measurement to leaders new to both.
Coached product teams and leadership through a large-scale agile transformation, with workshops on product discovery, OKRs, and story mapping.
Led technology delivery for credit management systems while implementing SAFe and training leaders and teams across the Deere enterprise.
Facilitated delivery and requirements for international Oracle E-Business Suite implementations and supported early agile adoption.
Infrastructure and server support for the John Deere dealer network, and global data center and network operations.
Built and maintained communications infrastructure for forward operating bases across three combat deployments supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.
Agile, the product operating model, and now AI all ask people to change how they work and keep it up after the kickoff. AI is different in one way: it arrived bottom-up. By the time a leader asks for help, their teams have been at it for months, unevenly and mostly in private, so I start by finding out what's already happening.
Before I design anything I look at who's showing up. When I read the registrations for an AI hackathon, most of the directors and executives had never built anything, so the support model got a quieter, hands-on track for them instead of one plan for everyone.
I usually start with an idea shaped from a need in the business. I take it to the people who'll have to own it, we form a group around it, and they carry it. The product management job track worked that way, and so did the learning hub I handed to its product manager.
Coaching capacity is always the constraint, so I design around it: leader guides that let leaders run taxonomy work without a coach in the room, and a sprint model that embeds experienced practitioners on teams when there aren't enough coaches to go around.
A skill has to beat no skill at all, and the closest thing you could buy, before anyone installs it, and a coach who didn't write it does the grading. When I write up what we found, each claim says how we know it. I'd rather put a smaller number in front of a leader that I can stand behind than a bigger one I can't.
The PDF has the full detail. If you're working through something similar, I'm happy to compare notes: joshvande@gmail.com.
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