^ LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW ABOVE ^
Ever wonder what happens when a company actually lives the values it promotes? Or what happens when your personal values align with the company values? Can that shape your career and drive meaningful change? In today’s Sixer Spotlight, we are joined by Sarah Knopp, a Senior Delivery Manager at Agile Six. Sarah shares her journey and the pursuit of a values-driven culture and self-management philosophy that have significantly contributed to her personal and professional growth.
Sarah discusses the impactful work she's doing at Agile Six, including the project she's working on modernizing Grants.gov, which aims to make grant opportunities more accessible, especially for underprivileged communities. She'll offer valuable insights on navigating challenges, building trusted teams, and achieving growth in a fully remote, self-managed workplace. If you're curious about how values and innovation intersect in the tech world, you're in the right place. Join us as we learn how Sarah is making a difference in civic tech by living her values and supporting Agile Six in building better by putting people first.
Meet Sarah Knopp
Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who is Sarah Knopp?
I live in Washington DC, and I love to read. I have a golden retriever as well as an almost one-year-old kitten. So I love to spend time outside with my dog or playing with the cat. I collect hobbies as a hobby. So I love to do everything from silversmithing, ice skating, gardening, all kinds of things. Every week it's something new for me.
Journey to Agile Six: The Pursuit of Values
Tell us about your journey to Agile Six. What led you here?
I worked with Robert Rasmussen, our CEO, about 12 years ago at a different company. I really liked his management philosophy of bringing your whole self to work, and it wasn't something I'd experienced before. I worked at larger companies where you punch in at eight o'clock, you punch out at five o'clock, and that was sort of it. But Robert promoted a culture of honesty and compassion and really made me want to come to work every day. I liked that so much that I worked with him again at another company. After we parted ways there, I had my eye on Agile Six from day one. As soon as it was being built, I was really excited to see Robert try to build this vision from the ground up of doing business the way we want to do it and being true to ourselves, and really building better by putting people first, just like our Just Cause.
My Role in Grants.gov Modernization
Tell us about your role at Agile Six and the project you're working on.
I've been working in government contracting and military family programs for the last 13 or so years. I'm very passionate about software development, agile methodologies, and building happy and healthy teams. So, I'm a senior delivery manager here at Agile Six. I am responsible for both making sure the team runs and functions successfully and is happy and doing the kinds of work they want to do, as well as making sure we are delivering on the contract for our customers.
The project I'm working on right now is Grants.gov modernization, which is a really exciting project. We're actually going to be rebuilding the Grants.gov experience. This year, we are working on an improved find functionality so people can find grants and grant opportunities more easily. It has the potential to be really impactful, especially to underprivileged communities and even just people who work with grants every day. I'm really excited about this opportunity.
Growth at Agile Six
Let's talk about growth at Agile Six. Without middle managers, how does one grow here?
We grow by seeking opportunities to help others, help the company, and make it a better place for everyone. So I've grown at Agile Six by being able to contribute to business development by helping choose which contracts we bid on. I've been able to work with other delivery managers on creating inclusive meeting practices to make sure that everyone in the room at a meeting can understand what you're saying, feels comfortable speaking up, and can follow along. I work on coaching other teams and doing code challenges. There are lots of different opportunities at Agile Six. I've grown as a person and professionally just by doing these things.
What drives your motivation to seek out these opportunities for growth beyond the scope of your project work?
I view myself almost as a community member at Agile Six, and I want to improve my community. There are so many opportunities to get involved, I'm just interested in checking out everything. And if I find something that really speaks to me, I'm able to take a larger role and contribute. For example, with the Digital Services Coalition, I was very interested in that coming into Agile Six. I was offered the opportunity to become the company representative for Agile Six. So now I get to go to the DSC meetings and meet people from other companies who are like-minded. And that's something that is just fun and interesting. It enhances how I enjoy my job here.
Living Our Values
I want to circle back on the inclusive meetings group. How did that all come about?
The inclusive meetings group came about after we did a couple of company retrospectives. Myself and another delivery manager here ran the retrospectives, and we learned that people felt uncomfortable speaking up in meetings sometimes or felt like they were not being heard. It was an area of concern, especially as a delivery manager, because you want to make sure that everyone in the room feels comfortable in your meetings and is able to contribute if they want to. So a group of us got together and we talked about what it meant to have an inclusive meeting.
We did a lot of brainstorming exercises and at the end of the day, we were asking ourselves why we were doing this. We realized that we're doing it because we want to build better by putting people first. We had this moment of all just sort of looking at each other on the Zoom screen, saying, "Are we sure about this? I know that it's our company Just Cause, but do we really feel this?" Everyone agreed that that was what we wanted to do, and that's why we were doing it. So we came up with this list of different practices you can do when you're preparing for a meeting, when you're having a meeting, and after your meeting to ensure that everyone understands what's going on, that everyone feels included, that you're creating a safe environment for your participants, and to make sure that you follow up and provide a summary. That work was really exciting to me and has been very impactful in my job.
What was that moment like when you realized you were living the values of Agile Six?
It was a little bit of an aha moment. Oh, this is how I'm growing at Agile Six and this is how I'm making it a better place. I've often said that living the values is one of the most difficult parts about working here because we really try to actually live our values. They're not something that's on a poster in a break room. We really value purpose, wholeness, trust, self-management, and inclusion, and we want to live those every day. So by creating this inclusive meetings group, we were able to promote those practices and tie it to the Just Cause, which was so beautiful.
You just brought up the core values: purpose, wholeness, trust, self-management, and inclusion. Which one resonates with you the most and why?
They're all very meaningful to me. I think that self-management might resonate the most with me because it is such an integral part of what we do here. That's something that we talk about with folks who are interviewing for the company for new roles - asking if they're comfortable with self-management and providing some examples of how it works. We don't have middle managers here, so there isn't going to be someone telling you what your priorities are. There isn't going to be someone doing performance reviews with you. You're going to have to actively go out and seek advice. You're going to have to seek input and feedback from your team. You're going to have to build your own priorities list. And that doesn't mean that there isn't anyone to help you along the way.
The delivery managers have what are called triads, which is where we have an account manager and we have a coach assigned to each delivery manager, and they give us support and provide input in some of our decisions. We can ask them if we need advice on our contract or if we have a particular situation on our team that we need help with. In addition to that, we've got a pretty active Slack community here where I can ask virtually anyone for advice about anything. We also have a self-management coach, which is a great resource. So you have to actually do the self-management work, and it can be hard sometimes, but it's really rewarding.
Did you have trouble adjusting to self-management when you came here?
I didn't have trouble adjusting to it because when I worked with Robert previously at other companies, he cultivated this self-management culture there as well. At the last company I worked with Robert, from day one, I felt like I was a whole person bringing my whole self to work and managing my own things. We basically opened up a software development shop together, and I was doing everything from answering phones and ordering a refrigerator to managing a lot of projects. So I was used to the self-management lifestyle from that role. It's something I have chased since then. And I felt a sense of relief to return to it at Agile Six.
What does wholeness and bringing your whole self to work mean?
It means that if I'm having a bad day or I've got something going on at home, I can let my teammates know and I can make adjustments to my schedule as needed so that I can live my life and also do my work. On development teams, we often ask folks during our standups what their balance score is. The balance score is how you're feeling on a given day about your work and your life and how those things relate. Oftentimes, people will say, "Hey, I've got a sick kid. I have a low balance score today, and I'm just not going to be able to do my meetings in the afternoon. We're going to have to find something else that works." Or maybe you're having a really great day, and you can share that with your co-workers. So we get to know each other as a whole person, and we understand that we have lives outside of work and those may influence our work.
Rewards and Challenges
What’s the most rewarding part of your job?
The most rewarding part of my job is seeing the difference that we can make in people's lives by the software we build. I was last working on the VA patient check-in project, and we built a mobile app for Veterans to check in from their phones or their mobile devices. It was so exciting to do user research during that whole process. After it launched, seeing how big of an impact we made in cutting down the wait time for Veterans and improving their lives was incredibly fulfilling. We even got rave reviews from the low vision community because they were able to better access some of their information on our app and update information that they didn't know was out there that wasn't asked of them when they were checking in with a person. That was something that was really exciting and meaningful. Those are the moments that really make me love my work here.
What’s the most challenging part of your job?
The most challenging part of my job is living the values and leading by example because we work with a lot of different contractors and different government entities who have different values and different hierarchies. I have to constantly remind myself of what our values are, where I work, why we're doing this work, and why we're doing it this way. We’re setting a good example for other contractors so that they may learn from us and so the government may see that self-organizing, self-managing teams are really good at what they do and are really happy teams that produce great results.
You said living our values is one of the most challenging things, but they are also the most important. Can you share an example of how you're living these values?
I think that the Agile Six values are similar to my own values, certainly, in making sure that I have integrity in what I do and that I trust others, that I am true to myself, and things like that. And on my project right now, I think the value of purpose is really important. Recently, we have been looking at how to use the legacy Grants.gov system, pretending that we're a user looking for after-school program grants, for example, and going through the system and looking at how difficult and complicated it can be to find the information you're looking for. And it makes me feel really good that we're building a better way to do this.
It impacts my daily life because I have friends, relatives, and acquaintances who all use Grants.gov and go through this on a daily basis. It's really exciting to know that I'll be able to help them through the work I do, as well as so many others who I don't know or haven't seen, or are in communities that barely have internet access or don't have clean water. We can make a huge difference with the work we do. So it's amazing that I have this opportunity to work on such purposeful projects here at Agile Six.
Surprises and Differentiation
What has surprised you the most about working at Agile Six?
It really doesn't feel like there's any hierarchy here. It's easy to say that there's limited management or we're flat, but you might be inclined to think that there's some boundary between me and the executives. And I don't feel that way. I can talk to Robert anytime I want. I can reach out to Dan or Brian or Josh, any of our wonderful C-titled folks, because they are members of the team, just like I am. They are hardworking and are here to help me and the other Sixers, and I feel like their doors are always open to me.
What differentiates Agile Six from other companies in the government contracting space?
I think we have really smart engineers, and we're able to build these team cultures where people are able to bring out the best that they are capable of doing and be really creative. Because they're able to bring their whole self to work, they feel a lot more comfortable with collaborating, and we just produce superior results.
Reflections
What would you say to someone who's looking to get into civic tech and work for a fully remote company like Agile Six?
I think it's a great opportunity, and there are a lot of really exciting projects and good work to be done here. I think that you can still do just as much remotely as you can in person. There's a lot of great tools out there that help us collaborate better than ever. I've worked with a lot of fantastic government customers in the last few years who are really excited about using the latest and greatest technologies and really want to help their users at the end of the day. It's very exciting to me.
Final Thoughts
Agile Six is a place where I can be myself and work on meaningful projects with others who are like-minded. When I first started at Agile Six, I knew that it was going to be an exciting place to work because I'd worked with Robert previously, but I didn't know just how much it would impact my life and change my values and how much growth I would experience here. I am so much more interested in making sure my coworkers are happy and can be collaborative in meetings, and I'm not as focused on the latest shiniest methodology, PowerPoint template, or whatever is being marketed to project managers. I am a lot more concerned with making sure that I can build a team that trusts each other and trusts me, and that we are able to create great software together and love our time doing it.
Sixer Spotlight is an ongoing series to share the stories of our team. If Sarah’s story piqued your interest in a career with Agile Six, explore our open roles.