On the quest for agile software development and delivery, the team should always come first. Because while the market hosts an abundance of robust tools that can streamline product development, there is nothing that beats human cognition and collaboration. A team of developers that can work well together, can turn the tables around, according to Phil Finucane (pictured), former chief technology officer of Express Scripts Holding Co.

Automation can and will reduce human interaction, but it will not replace the people. The values and cultures to make a project succeed are still originated by the people and not technology. Culture is as important as technology, or even more, Finucane added. 

“I still love the technology,” Finucane said. “I’m still an architect at my core, but I’ve come to this realization that good technology and bad teams will get crushed by bad technologies and good teams. It starts with the team.” 

Finucane spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Mayfield People First Network event in Menlo Park, California. They discussed Phil’s background, culture versus technology, digital transformation, and A-star teams (see the full interview with transcript here).

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: Talk about your career; you’re a former CTO of Express Scripts. What are some of the other journeys that you’ve had?  

Finucane: I’ve had sort of a varied career. In 2003, I joined Yahoo and came in as the lead engineer, sort of the Ops guy and the build-and-release guy for the login and registration team at Yahoo, and sort of progressed from there to being the architect. From there I went to Zynga, where I was the CTO for Farmville. Over the 10 quarters, I worked on the game. We had over a billion dollars in revenue.

After that, I went to American Express, where I worked in a division that sort of sat off on the side of American Express focusing on stored value products. I was the chief architect for that division. And, finally, I went to Express Scripts, where I spent the last three years as the CTO for that organization. 

Furrier: A lot of corporate enterprises right now are having that same kind of feeling with digital transformation.  What’s your view on this?  

Finucane: IT is all of your infrastructure, right? And IT is a service organization; it’s not a competitive advantage in your industry. And so both of the places that I’ve gone have had really forward-thinking leaders that have wanted to change the way that their enterprise operates around technology and move away from IT … to thinking about engineering as a core competency. Our charter was to come in and help build a real engineering organization as opposed to an IT org that’s very vendor-oriented, that’s dependent on third parties.

This notion that software is eating the world is still not something that people have gotten their heads around in many companies.

Furrier: I talk to leaders all the time, [and] the theme keeps coming back, it’s culture, it’s a process, technology, all those things you talk about. But culture is the number one issue people point to.

Finucane: It’s difficult for folks, even if they want to get on board to come along some of the time. One of the really big successes we had early on at Express Scripts was transitioning our teams to agile [methodology] wasn’t difficult. What was difficult was getting business partners to sort of come along and be actively engaged in that product development mindset and lifecycle. That was a real challenge because there’s a culture of expertise-driven, being subject-matter driven … expertise-driven as opposed to being data-driven.

Furrier: Let’s talk about data-driven. Data is the new feedback mechanism. If you treat the “agile” as an R&D exercise from a data standpoint — not from a product, but get it out there, get the data circulating in — that’s critical in the formulation of the next piece.  

Finucane: Zynga had an incredible … product culture that every single thing gets rolled out behind an experiment. And so you know, that’s great from an operational perspective, because it allows you to move quickly and roll things out in small increments. And when it doesn’t work, you can just shut it off, but it’s not some huge catastrophe. But it’s also critical because it allows you to see what’s working and what’s not.

Furrier: How do you advise companies to think about the relationship between a product-centric culture and a sales-centric culture?  

Finucane: I think it just comes down to having a conversation and trying to be as transparent as possible on all sides to … try to get to a place where we could be effective in delivering on the vision. You have to just get this together and work in small increments to figure out how to get there. 

Furrier: What advice would you give to the startup, to the supplier, and to the customer to survive this next transition of Cloud 2.0, the data tsunami, and all the opportunities that are coming?  

Finucane: As a startup, you shouldn’t worry about perfection from an engineering perspective. You should figure out how to try to find your marketplace. Everybody has tech debt, you can fix that as time goes on, the startup needs to figure out how to be viable more than anything else. As far as suppliers, it’s important to go in and understand what your customer is, what your customer is asking for, and respond to them appropriately.  

Furrier: So I want to start getting to a mode where I’m dictating the relationship to suppliers. How do you respond to that? Do you see that as aspirational, real dynamic, or fiction? 

Finucane: So a huge focus for me for the engineering teams that we’ve built … is to always think about an arms race, where you’re getting 1% better every day. The aggregation of marginal gains and investing in internal improvements so that your team is doubling productivity every year, which is something that’s really possible for some of these engineering organizations. If you get to the point where your team is really, really productive, they can go through and eliminate all the old legacy technology. 

And so, I’ve moved from being very technology-centric to somebody who says, “OK, I have to start with getting the team right and getting the culture right if we’re ever going to be able to get the technology to a good place.” It starts with the team. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mayfield People First Network event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE