How Comcast's CIO led a culture shift within his team to build trust and get engineers to stop competing against each other
- When Comcast CIO Rick Rioboli inherited the team that would eventually create the X1 voice remote, it was a combination of five different engineering cohorts.
- It immediately became clear that there was a lack of trust among members who were accustomed to competing against one another instead of working together.
- That's when Rioboli went from viewing culture as a "warm and fuzzy thing" to something that can have a dramatic impact on productivity.
- He presented the issue to his team as an analytical problem and took a number of steps to overhaul how the team worked together.
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Chief information officers are increasingly taking on a new role as change agents within their organizations.
And that often means leading cultural transformations that underpin the adoption of more advanced technology like artificial intelligence. That was the case for Comcast CIO Rick Rioboli when he took over the team that would create the voice-enabled X1 remote.
"Culture isn't this warm and fuzzy thing. It's actually a very concrete thing that has day-to-day impact," he told Business Insider.
Rioboli's group was the result of a combination of five different engineering teams, so many members were accustomed to competing against one another instead of working together. It quickly became apparent that a lack of trust was impacting productivity and preventing the group from meeting important milestones.
That's when Rioboli stepped in and told the team to forget about IT architecture and organizational charts. Instead, they would start the difficult task of solving the cultural problem within the group. But convincing a group of engineers who were unaccustomed to thinking about something so intangible was an uphill battle.
"In many organizations engineers are some of the smartest people in the company," Rioboli said. "If you frame things in terms of problems for them to wrap their arms around, they get very excited about it."
Rioboli shared the steps he took to create the culture that would help the team create a revolutionary remote that, as of 2017, was in use by over 18 million households - one that Comcast continues to innovate on top off.
'It was a pretty big gap'
Instead of throwing a bunch of buzzwords on a board and hoping for the best, Rioboli presented it to the team as an analytical problem.
The group mapped out goals for the next five years and discussed the roadblocks that were preventing them from meeting those deadlines. Once the vision was clear, Rioboli used an online poll to solicit input from the cohort and create word clouds that described both the current culture and the target culture.
"It was kind of scary because it was a pretty big gap," he said.
To close that chasm, Rioboli knew he had to make the workplace more transparent. He instituted a common set of tools that all members would use and started doing architecture reviews so everyone could see what others were working on. When there were outages or other technical issues, teammates had to come forward and describe what went wrong. And, of course, happy hours became more frequent.
Rioboli also changed the goal from "just implementing individual projects to start thinking about [building] platforms with layers of capabilities that are reusable, that allow it to run faster over time," he said.
That's an increasingly common goal for IT organizations and one product teams have long utilized. Amazon, for example, is able to effectively plug in its Alexa application to a string of products because of the way in which the voice-activated application is built.
Ultimately, the creation of the X1 at Comcast shows just how different IT operates today, serving as a source of innovation instead of the typical back-office tasks it was once so closely tied to.
"IT organizations have a tendency to be very project-focused versus platform-focused. Because they are always implementing these projects with incremental funding, they are always behind," Rioboli said. "Because we thought about building platforms instead of just implementing projects, we invented the voice remote."