When Vered and I got married, my father-in-law gave me a very nice watch as a wedding gift. I didn’t wear a watch that often at the time. I wore the watch, but it didn’t transform me. It provided the service of telling the time, but even back in 2004, we had phones that had …
Picture this: you’ve a breakthrough strategic initiative tied to one of your company-level goals that impacts 10 teams across two product groups, as well as your GTM organization. These are all busy, overloaded teams. Those same 10 teams are also juggling five other initiatives. And the business-as-usual whirlwind. You pull this work into the backlogs/roadmaps …
Back in 2006, calling my product delivery organization a factory would have been a compliment. We were struggling to deliver predictably. Quality was such a big issue that I joked about asking one of our QA engineers to take a vacation during our final hardening week so that we would have a chance to get …
End-to-end flow of value Continuous Improvement Autonomy and Empowerment Organizing Around Value Sustainable Pace Alignment around Outcome-oriented Goals Energized People Leaders who Serve Speed and Empiricism All worthy Agility Principles (at least I think so…) But why should anyone care? I mean, it’s much healthier to focus on principles than practices as a goal. But …
It seems like we are working on a lot of initiatives. Could it help to get a picture of all the initiatives and where they are in the pipeline? Would it help to make sure we involve the teams and leaders who will need to execute on initiatives in the decision when to actually start …
Let’s be honest. These are “interesting” times for being an agilist. Whether you’re in the “Agile is Dead” camp or not, it is clear that the movement is not well. Agile took over the software development world in a storm. As that happened, the demand for agile outstripped the supply. Agile became practice-focused. A commodity. …
What a difference through just two words. Two Words Check-in. I used it as a warm-up in a leadership session for a Boston-based BioTech. They liked it so much that they started using it as common practice. They started using it in their weekly Review/Retrospective/Planning sessions (Yes, they were using Scrum to develop the company; …
So you identified a meeting people won’t miss one bit in your organization. Let’s say it’s a daily check-in. Standup. Scrum. The name doesn’t change the fact that this is an often-mentioned issue people have with approaches such as Scrum, EOS, Scaling-up, SAFe. Want to improve this event? You can try increasing focus via visualization. …
Picture BuzzCorp (Many of you won’t have to use too much imagination). They’ve invested significant efforts in developing software and products in an agile manner. They formed agile teams (but a deeper look shows those are the existing component/functional teams using agile methods) They manage Features/Stories in JIRA/ADO (but those are the functional slices that …
“OKRs S&%k, but we don’t know anything better” This was a direct quote from a cybersecurity scaleup’s Chief of Staff, but I hear the sentiment way too often from founders, chiefs of staff, COOs, and others in the scaleup ecosystem. I started encountering OKRs when working with scaleups a couple of years ago, helping leaders …