Contracting Against an Adoption OKR
Lena has been Director of Engineering at a 400-person SaaS company for nine weeks. She has an OKR to adopt Kanban across all 22 engineering teams by the end of Q3 and a budget for one coach at two days a week for 12 weeks. The company has a mix of Scrum teams, one team using a homegrown flow process, and three teams with no visible board. In your first meeting she says: 'I don't need an assessment. I need you to roll it out. If we don't show adoption, the CFO will cut the budget.'
You have two days before the engagement letter is due. A mutual contact tells you that one team's manager is hostile to process people, and that the CTO has publicly described Kanban as Scrum without the discipline.
1. How do you contract with Lena? Name the specific agreements you would seek and what you would refuse.
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Contract on outcomes, roles, and evidence - not on the OKR's wording. I would open by asking Lena what problem the CFO is actually trying to solve: cost, predictability, time-to-market, or confidence in commitments. Kanban on 22 teams is an output, and an output-based key result will be gamed by board creation. I would propose a 12-week engagement with three volunteer teams chosen to represent different work types, a quantified baseline across all 22 teams in the first three weeks so the CFO gets numbers early, and a decision gate at week eight.
Specific agreements I would seek: the sponsor attends a service delivery review at least twice; the coach has direct access to teams without filtering by managers; data and findings are shared openly with Lena and the teams; success is defined as observable changes in policy, flow, and review behavior, not adoption counts; either party can exit at week eight with a written rationale. I would put in writing what I will not do: install boards on teams' behalf, certify maturity, or act as the compliance enforcer for a mandate.
I would also raise the hostile manager and the CTO's remark as engagement risks, not as gossip, and ask Lena how she wants them handled. Contracting is where the coach's independence is either established or lost.
2. Lena pushes back: 'I don't have time for a pilot. The CFO wants numbers.' What is your response, and what do you put in writing?
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I would not pretend a mandate can be coached into existence. A mandate can produce boards; it cannot produce the agreements that make a board useful. At ML1–ML2, teams that are told to adopt will create the minimum artifact that satisfies the reporting, and the CFO will receive adoption numbers that do not predict delivery. That is a worse outcome than a slower start, because it burns credibility for the next attempt.
My response to Lena: we can give the CFO numbers in three weeks without pretending to have transformed 22 teams. Baseline lead time, WIP, throughput, and blocker age across all teams from existing data - even partial data is informative. Then the pilot produces before-and-after flow data at week eight, with attribution caveats. I would write down the assumptions, the risks, the definition of success, and the limits of what we can claim, and ask her to sign it.
If she insists on a full rollout, I would ask to reframe my role as supporting volunteers and running communities of practice, with the mandate owned by her. I would not accept accountability for an adoption target I believe is unsound. The engagement letter is the place to make that boundary visible and professional.
3. The CTO's remark reaches you second-hand. How do you address it without creating a political fight?
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I would not defend Kanban or attack the CTO. I would ask for 30 minutes and open with a question: what has he seen go wrong with process initiatives? His remark probably reflects a real experience of teams using flow language to avoid commitments. That concern is legitimate and worth engaging.
Then I would offer a concrete demonstration rather than a methodology pitch: take one current painful delay in his organization and visualize it with him, using real dates. If Kanban is useful, it will show in that conversation; if it is not, I learn something. I would also be explicit about what I am not proposing: not a replacement for engineering discipline, not a tool rollout, and not a maturity label.
Finally, I would tell Lena that I met with the CTO and what was discussed, so the sponsor relationship stays transparent. Coaching requires working with skeptical stakeholders, not routing around them. If the CTO becomes an active blocker to the pilot, that is useful information for the decision gate, and better surfaced at week eight than discovered at the end. The same principle applies to the hostile manager: invite scrutiny, do not seek a mandate against him.