Podcasts about feedback ask

This week Trev talks hardware with Shane, Lincoln, Brodie and Rick, From gaming consoles to security cameras, routers and TV's. Good old Hubbl gets another run with caller Brad, none too impressed. Ron has gremlins in his email account and does Justin really need to buy a new TV? Peter asks whose fault is a failed screen protector? As usual, tell your friends and get in touch if you have a question or just want to chat about anything tech. Go to EFTM.com and click on "Ask Trev" or text 0477 657 657

This week Trev talks hardware with Shane, Lincoln, Brodie and Rick, From gaming consoles to security cameras, routers and TV's. Good old Hubbl gets another run with caller Brad, none too impressed. Ron has gremlins in his email account and does Justin really need to buy a new TV? Peter asks whose fault is a failed screen protector? As usual, tell your friends and get in touch if you have a question or just want to chat about anything tech. Go to EFTM.com and click on "Ask Trev" or text 0477 657 657

Feedback is one of the most crucial things you need to be able to give and receive in the workplace, and yet it is one of the biggest things people are afraid to do in the workplace!  Fear not, because in this episode, Kimberly will be talking about the basic steps of effective feedback, the different ways to communicate your feedback, and the things to be mindful of before you decide to offer someone your feedback in the workplace.  Believe it or not, giving and receiving feedback can be an incredibly positive and pleasant experience! Tune in to this episode to find out how to master the art of feedback today.    KEY POINTS: The 4 Basic Steps of Feedback: Ask, Explain, Share, Request Why you need to provide both positive and negative feedback Vertical and Lateral communication: their definitions, differences, benefits, and disadvantages What you can do to improve your feedback & communication  Questions to ask yourself before you provide feedback  The importance of compassion when giving feedback    QUOTABLES: “Radical transparency helps bring everyone along the journey, even if the feedback you're sharing, if the new initiative that's happening, if there's some change in management – doesn't necessarily mean that everyone's reaction is going to be good, and that's okay. What's important is that people are in the know.” “Sometimes, feedback needs to be communicated through several different channels. Not every piece of feedback has to be attributed to the person. It can be generalized feedback.”   RESOURCES: Have career and leadership development questions? Email Kimberly at podcast@manifestyourself.com  Learn more about Kimberly Brown and download a free career strategy template at www.kimberlybonline.com Read the book “Next Move, Best Move: Transitioning Into a Career You'll Love” at www.nextmovebestmovebook.com     Follow Kimberly on social media: IG | @kimberlybonline - www.instagram.com/kimberlybonline  FB | www.facebook.com/kimberlybonline   Twitter | www.twitter.com/kimberlybonline  LinkedIn | www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlybonline    Your Next Move is edited by EPYC Media Network (visit at https://www.epyc.co/)

Clay Clark Testimonials | "Clay Clark Has Helped Us to Grow from 2 Locations to Now 6 Locations. Clay Has Done a Great Job Helping Us to Navigate Anything That Has to Do with Running the Business, Building the System, the Workflows, to Buy Property." - Charles Colaw (Learn More Charles Colaw and Colaw Fitness Today HERE: www.ColawFitness.com) See the Thousands of Success Stories and Millionaires That Clay Clark Has Coached to Success HERE: https://www.thrivetimeshow.com/testimonials/ Learn More About Attending the Highest Rated and Most Reviewed Business Workshops On the Planet Hosted by Clay Clark In Tulsa, Oklahoma HERE: https://www.thrivetimeshow.com/business-conferences/ Download A Millionaire's Guide to Become Sustainably Rich: A Step-by-Step Guide to Become a Successful Money-Generating and Time-Freedom Creating Business HERE: www.ThrivetimeShow.com/Millionaire

Want to receive feedback gracefully and gratefully? These four questions are the basis of turning negative feedback into positive professional change. Asking these questions of yourself, about the feedback you received, and where to go from here is a way that you can be intentional about improvement. What would it look like to take that feedback in stride and take it from frustrating to constructive? Press play to find out. FREE COACHING CALL https://calendly.com/the-pa-is-in/free 1-HOUR COACHING CALL https://calendly.com/the-pa-is-in/coaching SHOW NOTES https://www.tracybingaman.com/blog TRACY ON INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/mrstracybingaman/ ON LINKEDIN https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracybingaman/

Clay Clark is explaining what a world class and gorgeous website looks like and how to give feedback in a way that people will receive it.

We continue our deep dive into 10 Ways to Authentically Connect with Your Podcast Audience. If you would like to listen to the episode that summarizes all 10 ways to connect- listen to https://player.captivate.fm/episode/0fdc704d-25c2-4e71-90c5-17c579c1b779 (Episode 8) here. If you would like to listen to part 1, which dives deeper into the first 2 ways to authentically connect with your audience- listen to https://player.captivate.fm/episode/293a533d-8608-4c56-ba20-0e6f2c2e4863 (episode 10) here. For part 3 we dive deeper into #3 which is all about FEEDBACK: Ask for feedback from your audience, listen to the feedback and reflect on it and share the feedback with your audience. We also discuss #4- Post user-generated content and create partnerships with your listener community. We would love to hear from you! Let us know how you gather feedback and what partnerships you have created with your community. Our mics for this Episode: Tiphany- Blueberry by Blue David- Shure Beta 57A Join our FREE Facebook community: https://www.subscribepage.com/podcastmindset_freegroup (Mastering the Podcaster Mindset Support Group) Get the Guide “https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/m8c3s5 (The Biggest Mistake Podcaster Make and How to Avoid It)”:  DM us on IG: @https://www.instagram.com/podcastermindset/ (podcastermindset) Https://www.instagram.com/podcastermindset/ (Https://www.instagram.com/podcastermindset/)

We continue our deep dive into 10 Ways to Authentically Connect with Your Podcast Audience.If you would like to listen to the episode that summarizes all 10 ways to connect- listen to Episode 8 here.If you would like to listen to part 1, which dives deeper into the first 2 ways to authentically connect with your audience- listen to episode 10 here.For part 3 we dive deeper into #3 which is all about FEEDBACK: Ask for feedback from your audience, listen to the feedback and reflect on it and share the feedback with your audience.We also discuss #4- Post user-generated content and create partnerships with your listener community.We would love to hear from you! Let us know how you gather feedback and what partnerships you have created with your community.Our mics for this Episode:Tiphany- Blueberry by BlueDavid- Shure Beta 57AJoin our FREE Facebook community: Mastering the Podcaster Mindset Support GroupGet the Guide “The Biggest Mistake Podcaster Make and How to Avoid It”: DM us on IG: @podcastermindsetHttps://www.instagram.com/podcastermindset/

What if your son abandoned his trinitarian upbringing? Hildy Chandler recounts that fateful day at the dinner table. Experience it through her eyes, coping with the fear and uncertainty that upended her world. REFERENCES The God of Jesus in Light of Christian Dogma, book by Kegan Chandler. SCRIPTURES John 10:30 - I and the Father are one. John 17:11 - They may be one as we are one. Matt. 28:19 - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Mark 13:32 - Son doesn't know the day of his return. Eph. 2:18, 4:4 - There is one spirit. 1 Tim. 1:7 - They do not understand that which they confidently assert. FEEDBACK Ask questions, leave comments, or vehemently complain. Say your first name and your state or country. I may add your voice to the podcast! "Hi, I'm Juan from Brazil, thanks for mentioning...""Paul from Arizona! What do you think about..." Email podcast@unitarianchristianalliance.org Click here to RECORD A MESSAGE Or call: 615-581-1158 LISTENING TIPS If your podcast app lets you remove silences, maybe don't. You might enjoy this better with the silences left in.

Today more than ever, it's imperative that our team and work culture—even our culture at home reflects the mantra of “We're All in this Together.” This week's guest, author/speaker/consultant, Mike Robbins recently released a book by that title and in our conversation described the tenets, what he calls “the 4 Pillars of creating a team culture of high performance.” Mike describes his life growing up playing baseball and how he observed the power of team chemistry. He noticed sometimes he was on teams with lesser talent that could win against more talented teams simply because they worked better together. Working in the corporate world after baseball, Mike was surprised to learn team chemistry and culture isn't just a sports thing, it's a human thing. He's been on the quest to solve the puzzle of how do we create a winning environment of positive team culture for our teams ever since. Today the game has changed completely as we're working from home. We're more challenged, but team culture is more important than ever. What can help us create team chemistry better? Mike shares the ideas behind the 4 Pillars: 1. Create Psychological Safety: Group Trust comes from how the leader of the team operates. How do you actually behave when things go wrong or someone makes a mistake? It's how we respond sets the tone for the team. As a leader, if you don't operate in a way that allows for error or ask for forgiveness or accept a mistake, then your team definitely won't. The more a leader is willing to share their humanity with their team then the more likely the team will be to trust their leader. 2. Embrace Sweaty Palm Conversations “You know what stands between you and the relationships you really want to have with other people? It's probably a ten minute sweaty palm conversation you're too afraid to have. If you get good at having those conversations, you'll build trust, resolve conflict, and you'll get to know other people who are different than you. If you lean in, you'll build incredibly strong relationships, but it's a practice.” – Mike Robbins Difficult conversations are more like fish than wine—they don't age well. Start with the truth—begin with authentic place. Tell the truth when having a difficult conversation. Be transparent. Own how you're feeling; address it. It makes sense to say something like “I really don't want to have this conversation because it's difficult. However, my relationship with you/the team is more important than how I feel.” Being a leader means choosing courage over comfort when it really matters. I'm feeling really uncomfortable, but I want better for us. Own how you are feeling using “I” statements/“I feel upset because…” I own how I am feeling and I don't blame you for how I feel. If we can lead with vulnerability, we're likely to incite empathy from the other person. 3. Care about and challenge each other—I had a Coach at Stanford who told me that he always believed as a coach. “I have to love you hard so I could coach you hard can we care about each other so that we can push each other to the next level? Care a lot and challenge a lot, but the care has to come first. We all know what challenging others looks like, but what does it look like to care about people? Listen to them. Ask them how they are and actually listen. Appreciate—distinct from recognition—valuing people for who they are, even when they fail. Being curios and interested. You don't have to like someone to care about them. You don't have to know about them intimately, it's about finding that common ground humanity. Life Hack: How to have better conversations or healthier relationships at work or home? Ask for FEEDBACK—Ask our spouse/kids/co-workers what could I start doing that I'm not doing? What could I stop doing that I'm doing? What should I continue doing?   Learn more about Mike or buy one of his five awesome books at mike-robbins.com.

Stephane Kasriel on Unlearn, Melissa Perri on Build by Drift, Will Larson on Software Engineering Daily, April Dunford on Product Love, and Claudio Perrone on Agile Atelier. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting July 22, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. STEPHANE KASRIEL ON UNLEARN The Unlearn podcast featured Stephane Kasriel with host Barry O’Reilly. Barry asked Stephane about what unlearning he has had to do as CEO of Upwork. Stephane said that when Upwork started, they developed software in a waterfall process. Development cycles were long and it was frustrating for people. When the product failed in the field, the level of investment was high and everybody would be pointing fingers at everybody else. When they switched to an Agile model, there was a lot of unlearning to be done. They stopped trying to specify everything up front and instead tried to build minimum viable products, get feedback from customers, and iterate quickly. When they went looking for Agile trainers in 2012, it was hard to find anyone willing and able to train Upwork’s remote teams. Many trainers at the time told them that being Agile meant being colocated. Today, there are many companies doing distributed Agile development and some best practices have been built up and shared. I liked what Stephane had to say about company values. He said that what you don’t want as a value is one in which you are a good person if you have it and you are a bad person if you don’t. You want instead to have values that say, “This company is not for everybody. If you don’t believe in these values, there are plenty of companies that more closely match your values and you should go there. But if you want to be here and you want to be successful, you should be excited about this company’s values.” Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ceo-school-and-the-future-of-work-with-stephane-kasriel/id1460270044?i=1000443495925 MELISSA PERRI ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build by Drift podcast featured Melissa Perri with host Maggie Crowley. Maggie started out by asking Melissa how she defined the build trap she references in her book Escaping The Build Trap (https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Build-Trap-Effective-Management/dp/149197379X/). Melissa says that the build trap is a situation an organization finds itself in when it gets too concerned with how many features it is shipping and not concerned enough with the value for the customer and the business that those features are producing. She says that these businesses fail to retrospect on the impact that the features they shipped had on customers and the business. Maggie asked how companies get into the build trap in the first place. Startups, Melissa says, don’t typically have this problem, but as they scale and get more money, the distance to customers increases, they talk to customers less, and have more runway. They tend to go into an execution mode where they just keep asking themselves, “What’s the next thing we can build?” and forget to go back to their customers and make sure that what they build for them is producing value for them. Maggie described the challenges Drift faces in having teams that locally optimize for particular features and Melissa says this comes back to how the company thinks about strategy. Small companies don’t need a strategic framework but, as you scale, you want all the new teams you are creating to move in the same direction and a strategic framework can help with this. Maggie asked what Melissa prescribes when she consults with a company that is stuck in the build trap. Melissa instead gave an answer on how she assesses a company before making a prescription. She first looks for how the company sets strategy and how it deploys it. Second, she looks to see if the company has the right people in the right roles. She also looks at whether the company has the right processes to learn from customers and incorporate feedback. Next, she looks at product operations, such as a cadence for revisiting decisions and the right data infrastructure to support decisions. Last, she looks at culture and how people are incentivized. Maggie asked what Melissa would change first if the company had problems in all of those areas. Melissa says that she starts by making sure the company has good product leaders and product managers who can learn from those leaders. Many companies had product leaders who didn’t start in product management themselves and can’t train or help the product managers. As Maggie points out in this podcast, this echoes what Marty Cagan said when she had him as a guest in an earlier episode. I referenced that Build by Drift episode in the 14th episode of this podcast, named Safety Is Not A Priority. Melissa says she spends a lot of time translating what the teams are working on into something that executives can get behind because executives don’t care about the list of features that the teams are shipping; they care about what those features are going to do. Melissa says that storytelling in these situations is about relating your story to the goals people care about. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/whats-the-build-trap-what-does-it-mean-for-product-managers/id1445050691?i=1000443704053 Website link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/fbfcff04 WILL LARSON ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured Will Larson with host Jeff Meyerson. Jeff started by asking whether Will thinks Google, where they once had a very flat management hierarchy, could work with no managers today. Will said that today’s hyper-scaling companies are so fast-growing that you need people to help manage that growth while dealing with tools and systems that are constantly becoming out of date. Jeff asked about the psychological ramifications of working in an environment of rapid growth. Will said that the best part of rapid growth is every week you raise your head and look around and see some really smart, talented person who is sitting next to you and wasn’t there the week before and can help. During change, he says, you have to stay open. Don’t try to control the change but you can help to facilitate it. You should be aware of your needs and take action to ensure those needs are being met so you can be the person you want to be for longer, rather than peaking in your first months in a role. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/elegant-puzzle-with-will-larson/id1019576853?i=1000441481446 Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/06/14/elegant-puzzle-with-will-larson/ APRIL DUNFORD ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured April Dunford with host Eric Boduch. April talked about product positioning. She says that many treat the product positioning exercise as a Mad Libs-style template to be filled in. The actual thinking of how to position your product is often ignored. She says that the first thing you have to do is get a handle on what the real competitive alternatives to your product are in the minds of your customers. For many startups, their real competitor is Excel, or hiring an intern, or doing it manually. Next, she says, is to look at what you have feature-wise that the competitive alternatives do not. This is usually a giant list of things. As you go down this list, you ask yourself what value for customers each feature enables. She says that an interesting thing happens at this point: the value tends to theme out. There are usually two or three big buckets that three quarters of your features fall into. Those buckets get you to your differentiated value. That, she says, is your secret sauce. She uses the analogy of building a fishing net specifically for tuna. You have a choice. You can travel to the part of the ocean where you will find tuna and see if your net works or you can go to the part of the ocean where there are all kinds of fish, throw the net in, and see what you pull up. People at startups often think that a certain segment of the market is going to love their product, but they might be surprised to learn that there is a segment that they didn’t even think of that is actually dying for their product. You don’t want to get the positioning so tight that you exclude those people. You want to keep it loose, cast the net wide, and see what happens. April says she doesn’t believe in product-market fit. She says that nobody has given her a good answer to the question, “How do you know you got product-market fit?” You may have a product that people like, but if you don’t know why, you don’t know if it’s at risk of going away or tapping out its market. She asks, “If I can’t measure when I have product-market fit, why am I even trying to get product-market fit?” Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/april-dunford-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product/id1343610309?i=1000441988263 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/productcraft/april-dunford-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product-positioning CLAUDIO PERRONE ON AGILE ATELIER The Agile Atelier podcast featured Claudio Perrone with host Rahul Bhattacharya. Claudio talked about his Popcorn Flow model. He says that Popcorn Flow is based on a pragmatic anti-fragile philosophy and starts from the idea that inertia is our enemy and provides a set of principles and steps to fight inertia in organizations. I saw Claudio give a presentation on Popcorn Flow at the Agile Testing Days 2017 conference, so I was excited to find him being interviewed on a podcast. Popcorn Flow applies ideas from The Lean Startup to organizational change. As an entrepreneur, Claudio realized that in entrepreneurship you are dealing with an environment of extreme uncertainty and, as an Agile coach, he saw the same kind of environment of uncertainty in how people react to change. Lean Startup deals with environments of extreme uncertainty by running frequent experiments. Popcorn Flow applies the same approach of frequent experimentation to organizational change. Popcorn Flow is most known for its decision cycle of seven steps from which the POPCORN acronym is derived: Problems & Observations Options Possible experiments Committed Ongoing Review Next These steps are visualized like a Scrum board or Kanban board. Claudio gave an example of running through the seven steps for the problem of poor quality code: Problem: poor quality code Options: pair programming, test-driven development Possible experiments: pair program for three days and see if the code is better and see if we want to continue with the practice Committed: put a review date on the calendar for evaluating the results of the experiment Ongoing: Track the experiment as it proceeds Review: The experiment is not finished until you review it. Compare the reality against the expectation and discuss what you learned and what are you going to do next. Next: The review may indicate that you do not know enough yet, so you may choose to persist, launch a new experiment based on what you learned, or revisit the problem. I liked what Claudio had to say about Agile: “I felt it was about being humble. If we knew the perfect way of developing software, we would use the perfect way. It is because we don’t know that we start with what we have and we continuously inspect and adapt.” Claudio also talked about some of the principles of Popcorn Flow: If change is hard, make it continuous: borrowing ideas from continuous integration and delivery, replace big change programs with small incremental change and do it all the time. Small bets, big payoff (the venture capitalist principle): when you run a lot of experiments, it doesn’t matter that you failed. What matters is how much does it cost to fail and how much do you gain when you win. It is not ‘fail fast - fail often’, it is ‘learn fast - learn often’: without feedback, your experiments are not small bets and you are not experimenting; you are committing to what should instead be an option. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-9-experimentation-popcorn-flow-claudio-perrone/id1459098259?i=1000443480071 Website link: https://rahul-bhattacharya.com/2019/07/02/episode-9-experimentation-and-popcorn-flow-with-claudio-perrone/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Allen Holub on Deliver It, Jason Tanner on Drunken PM, Mary and Tom Poppendieck on Unlearn, Saron Yitbarek on Greater Than Code, and Dave Karow and Trevor Stuart on Deliver It. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting July 8, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ALLEN HOLUB ON DELIVER IT The Deliver It podcast featured Allen Holub with host Cory Bryan. Cory started out by reviewing an article by Ron Jeffries called “Story Points Revisited.” Allen’s take is that the negatives around story points are more than just the potential for misuse; he believes story points have no value at all. He says the most important thing is to narrow your stories, not estimate them. He says estimates exist because of fear. The software development process is opaque to certain managers and, as a result, they want estimates to alleviate their fear, but when you are delivering every day, you can eliminate the fear without resorting to estimates. Cory asked Allen what product owners need to know about Agile architecture. Allen said that one of the mistakes that he sees product owners make a lot is they try to do a miniature up-front design and expect that to be implemented. When this happens, he says there is too much information captured up-front of what is going to be built during the sprint and not enough information captured during the sprint as a side effect of releasing code to users and getting their feedback. This leads to inappropriate architectures because when you do anything up-front, you start doing everything up-front. Your sprint planning starts involving architecture decisions, UI decisions, and UX decisions that may be wrong and you will not know if you are wrong until you release. In Allen’s view, the most important thing a product owner does is answer questions that come up during the course of development. He uses a “two-minute rule”: if a question comes up during development, the product owner needs to be able to answer within two minutes. Allen talked about how the constraints of a bad architecture can prevent you from ever being Agile. He says, “Agile has nothing to do with standup meetings and backlog grooming and all of those. The important thing is to get stuff into your user’s hands quickly.” Allen says that the architecture has to be focused on the domain. Where systems that are wrong go wrong is that they don’t map to the domain but to the technology. A change at the story level, which is where the majority of changes come from, ends up touching all the modules or layers of your system when your architecture is mapped to your technology instead of your domain. Allen says that when he does a workshop on Agile architecture, people raise their hands about halfway through and say, “All we’re doing is domain analysis!” The fact is, if the domain and code are matched to each other, domain analysis is architecture. One of the questions Allen asks when he gets a bunch of product owners in a class is, “How many of you talk to multiple customers multiple times a day?” Maybe 5% raise their hands. So he says, “Who in the organization does talk to multiple customers multiple times a day?” This is often met with silence. He asks, “What about Sales? What about Tech Support?” He says that if you can’t respond to customer kinds of issues as well as a salesperson or a tech support person could, you don‘t know the domain well enough to be helpful to the engineering team. Cory asked Allen what he thought of the distinction between regular stories and “technical” stories. Allen says that there is no such thing as technical stories. A story describes the users of your system performing some kind of domain level work to achieve a useful outcome. Fixing some technical thing like changing the color of a button in no way makes your end users’ lives easier; it does not help them do their work. Allen says that the role of the architect in an Agile environment is very different from what we traditionally think of, just like the role of a manager in an Agile environment. In Agile environments, the job of people who are in a leadership position is to make sure that you can do your job, not to tell you what to do. They communicate a strategic requirement, provide support, and remove the obstacles. The same, he says, applies to Agile architects. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep90-agile-architecture-with-allen-holub/id966084649?i=1000441313352 Website link: http://deliveritcast.com/ep90-agile-architecture-with-allen-holub JASON TANNER ON DRUNKEN PM The Drunken PM podcast featured Jason Tanner with host Dave Prior. Dave started out by asking Jason why he believes the daily scrum is broken. Jason said that the daily scrum is broken because, first, most developers hate the daily scrum because most daily scrums take the traditional weekly project status review meeting and do it five times a week with the Scrum Master filling the role of the project manager. Second, he says, is that it is being done backwards. The center of attention should not be the Scrum Master, but the team and the sprint backlog. He says that the purpose of the daily scrum is misunderstood. The three questions don’t result in a plan but result in just an exchange of information. For what real daily planning looks like, he uses an analogy of driving down the road and seeing a bunch of plumbers’ trucks from the same company parked outside of a McDonald’s. Inside, they’re planning things like, “We’re going to the Johnson’s house at noon. Can you come over and meet me because it’s going to be a two-man job.” Jason says he hates the three questions. He says the subject of the sentence is not helping us in collective ownership of the sprint backlog. “I have my user story. I have my Jira ticket. I have five team members and we each have a ticket.” Shifting the subject of the sentence to “we”, he says, changes the behavior dramatically. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/jason-tanner-is-on-a-mission-to-fix-your-daily-scrum/id1121124593?i=1000441958371 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/drunkenpmradio/jason-tanner-is-on-a-mission-to-fix-your-daily-scrum MARY AND TOM POPPENDIECK ON UNLEARN The Unlearn podcast featured Mary and Tom Poppendieck with host Barry O’Reilly. Barry asked Mary and Tom what we may need to unlearn since the Agile movement began. Mary says that Agile started as a reaction to what was going on at the time. The vast majority of people doing software engineering today weren’t around back then. One of the things Agile has to do is grow up to be not a reaction to bad things that happened in the past, but to be something that talks about, “What does it take to do good software engineering?” She contrasted the software engineers she speaks to today that expect to be handed a spec with the engineers she worked with early in her career who treated engineering as problem-solving. Tom talked about how many who are working to make organizations more agile attempt to solve problems with process. This assumes that the organization’s problems are process problems but they are actually architectural problems. This includes problems with the architecture of the applications they are evolving, problems with the structure of the organization, and problems with the structure of the relationships between the supporting groups and those who are benefitting from said groups. Mary talked about how Amazon AWS was one of the early organizations to understand that you need to give teams of smart, creative people problems to solve. As a result of having this insight, they organized the company in such a way as to optimize for this, such as by eliminating a central database which was heresy back in 2005. She called out AWS Lambda in particular because this product did not optimize for short-term shareholder value and would never have been approved at most companies because it reduced what Amazon was charging customers by five times. She attributes this ability to self-disrupt as being essential to Amazon AWS’s success. Tom talked about the fact that when you attempt to scale things up, you reach a point where complexity dominates any future gains and wipes them out. He says you instead need to de-scale: figure out how to do things in little chunks that are independent and don’t require coordination. He says that this is how cities have been organized for thousands of years. Mary said that she has been doing software since 1967 and has never seen anything last two decades and still be current. Agile is two decades old and cannot be current unless it is constantly adapting to what is current today. She brought up continuous delivery as a fundamental change in agile thinking. It changed the way we thought about how we structure organizations and teams and what kinds of responsibilities we should give to them. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/solving-problems-safely-with-mary-and-tom-poppendieck/id1460270044?i=1000442018979 SARON YITBAREK ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Saron Yitbarek with hosts Arty Starr, Rein Henrichs, and Chanté Thurmond. They talked about the annual Codeland conference Saron is running and how it offers free on-site childcare this year. Saron says free on-site childcare at conferences today is where codes of conduct were a few years ago. She says that if her conference wasn’t making it easier for parents to attend, it wouldn’t be living up to their promise for inclusion. Chanté asked Saron what she learned in her transition from being a code newbie herself to the present day where she is running two podcasts, a software job, and a conference. Saron said she learned that it is important to be consistent in all your efforts, whether it is community work, your personal projects, or a project at work. Nothing gets built overnight and, for a while, nobody will care what you’re doing. If you want to do something great, it takes persistence and it takes you believing in yourself especially when you’re not getting external validation. Arty asked about what expertise in “newbie-ism” might look like. Saron says that it is about being comfortable in a state of frustration. She pointed to a study on the difference between those who finish a computer science degree and those who quit. The study said that those who finished the degree were comfortable being in a state of confusion: they knew that things were not going to make sense for a while and they were ok with that. A second thing, she says, that helps you become an expert newbie is realizing that almost all problems in coding are solvable. By contrast, in writing, there is no perfect essay. In journalism, there is a search for truth, but is truth attainable? In life sciences, we study nature all around us that we may never fully understand. She also says to keep your frustration external, avoid internalizing your failures, and she says to distance who you are from your work and the things you produce. Saron’s comment on being comfortable in a state of confusion triggered a Virginia Satir quote from Rein: “Do you know what makes it possible for me to trust the unknown? Because I've got eyes, ears, skin. I can talk, I can move, I can feel, and I can think. And that's not going to change when I go into a new context; I've got that. And then I give myself permission to say all my real yeses and noes, because I've got all those other possibilities, and then I can move anywhere. Why not?” Rein asked what Saron learned about teaching. Saron says that teaching is storytelling in disguise. She says that if we frame teaching opportunities as storytelling opportunities we can be better teachers. This reminded me of Josh Anderson’s comment on the Meta-Cast podcast that I referenced way back in episode 3, “Taking The Blue Pill Back To Sesame Street.” Rein brought up a theory of learning called conversation theory. In conversation theory, teaching happens as a conversation between two cognitive entities. You have to come to agreement and build a bridge with that other cognitive entity. It deconstructs the teacher-learner binary. The teacher themselves has to be a learner too. Chanté asked about the ethos at Code Newbie for being a learner and a teacher. Saron says they look to the community to pitch in. When someone asks a question, they encourage the community to answer. She contrasted Code Newbie with Stack Overflow. Code Newbie attempts to teach the learner from where they are and avoid the condescension that is common on Stack Overflow. She said that to create an environment where people are not afraid to ask questions, we have to be unafraid of being vulnerable ourselves. Go first, share your vulnerability, and share what you’re struggling with. The moment you start doing that, other people will be much more likely to raise their hands as well. Chanté asked Saron what resources she recommends for code newbies to learn to code. Saron said that the hard part isn’t finding resources but sticking with them when things get tough or boring. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/135-intentional-learning-with-saron-yitbarek/id1163023878?i=1000442022293 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/intentional-learning DAVE KAROW AND TREVOR STUART ON DELIVER IT The Deliver It podcast featuring Dave Karow and Trevor Stuart with host Cory Bryan. They talked about running experiments to learn about your customer. Cory asked how people can run such experiments at scale. David pointed out that having a way to run the experiment is one thing, but you also need to be able to rapidly make sense of the results in a repeatable, authoritative way. Trevor says it is all about assumptions, hypotheses, and documentation. Before you even start your experiment, you need to understand why you are running it in the first place. In other words, you need to establish what is going to change as a result of the experiment. Trevor says that much of the market is already doing experiments and they don’t know it. They just call it “using feature flags” and rolling things out incrementally. They just need to move one step further to slice and dice their user populations, roll things out for longer time periods to those users, and bring the resulting data into a form that facilitates decision-making. David talked about dog-fooding by starting your rollout of new features with your employee population, giving examples from Microsoft, where it takes a few weeks to go from the employee population to the full customer population, and Facebook, where it takes about four hours for the same kind of rollout. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep91-product-experiments-with-trevor-and-dave-from-split/id966084649?i=1000442844631 Website link: http://deliveritcast.com/ep91-product-experiments-with-trevor-and-dave-from-split FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Rob Fitzpatrick on The Art of Product, Joshua Kerievsky on Being Human, Marty Cagan on Build by Drift, Jutta Eckstein and John Buck on Agile Uprising, and Jocelyn Goldfein on Simple Leadership. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting June 24, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ROB FITZPATRICK ON THE ART OF PRODUCT The Art of Product podcast featured Rob Fitzpatrick with hosts Ben Orenstein and Derrick Reimer. They talked about Rob’s book, The Mom Test. He wrote it for “super-introverted techies” like himself but found it resonated with a wider audience. He explained that one of the reasons he self-published the book is because, when he took it to a publisher, they wanted him to increase the word count simply because they believed, with no evidence, that business books below 50,000 words don’t sell. The hosts asked Rob to describe “The Mom Test” in his own words. He described how, just as you shouldn’t ask your mom whether your business is a good idea because she’s biased, you need to be careful when asking anyone whether they think your business is a good idea. This, he says, puts the burden on them to tell you the truth. Instead, he says you should put the burden on yourself of coming up with questions that are immune to bias, so immune that even your mom would give you an unbiased answer. Rob talked about how the value of customer conversations is proportional to how well the problem you are trying to solve is defined. For products like Segway or Uber or a video game, asking customers questions about the problems they want solved is not as effective as it would be when the product is enterprise software. Derrick talked about how, when The Lean Startup started becoming big, it led him to what he calls “idea nihilism” where he started to believe the idea doesn’t matter at all, it is one hundred percent the journey, and the future is unpredictable, so just build something. The next few things he built while in this mindset either did not get off the ground or led him to ask himself why he built a business he hated. Eventually, he concluded that the idea matters a lot. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/90-the-mom-test-with-rob-fitzpatrick/id1243627144?i=1000440137442 Website link: https://artofproductpodcast.com/episode-90 JOSHUA KERIEVSKY ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Joshua Kerievsky with host Richard Atherton. What I loved about this interview is that Joshua described many of the inspirations behind the Modern Agile principles. The first principle, “make people awesome,” was inspired by Kathy Sierra and her focus on making the user awesome. They originally called it “make users awesome” and realized that there is a whole ecosystem besides the end consumers, including colleagues, management, and even shareholders, to make awesome. He clarified that the word “make” is not coercive, but about asking you what you can do to empower others. Regarding the second principle, “make safety a prerequisite,” he talked about being inspired by a story in Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit about Paul O’Neill and his turnaround of the hundred-year-old Alcoa corporation. Just as Amy Edmondson had connected psychological safety to physical safety in a previous podcast, Joshua connected psychological safety to product safety. He clarified that making safety a prerequisite doesn’t mean avoiding risk. Speaking about the third principle, “experiment and learn rapidly,” he told the story of the Gossamer Condor, the human-powered aircraft that was created to win the Kremer prize. The team that built the Condor engineered their work so that they could fail safely. The airplane flew two or three feet from the ground and the materials they used were expected to break and be repaired quickly. This let them do multiple test flights per day while their competitors would go through a waterfall process that led to large times gaps between test flights. Finally, he described the fourth principle, “deliver value continuously,” as finding a way of working where you can get feedback early and learn from it, delivering value each time. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/62-modern-agile-with-joshua-kerievsky/id1369745673?i=1000440221993 Website link: http://media.cdn.shoutengine.com/podcasts/4081235a-554f-4a8f-90c2-77dc3b58051f/audio/303a9472-75ef-4e7f-94e5-414a3018750a.mp3 MARTY CAGAN ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build by Drift podcast featured Marty Cagan with host Maggie Crowley. Marty says that when he shows teams the product discovery techniques he described in his book, Inspired,he finds that they understand the value of the techniques but too often they are not allowed to use them. Instead, their leaders hand them a roadmap and tell them to just build features. When he talks to these leaders, he asks, “Why are you doing this? You know this isn’t how good companies work.” The answer, though not always admitted, is that they don’t trust the teams and, as a result, they don’t empower them. They talked about the defining characteristics of an empowered product team. First among them is for the leadership team to give the product team problems to solve rather than features to build. They also need to staff them appropriately because, if they have been running things the old way long enough, they don’t have the appropriate staff to run things the new way. For example, they may have somebody called a product manager, but they are really a project manager with a fancy title or a backlog administrator. Or they may have designers who are just adding the company color scheme and logo or engineers who are just writing code. Maggie asked what a product leader can tell a stakeholder who is used to thinking in tangible features rather than the problem to be solved. Marty says there is nothing wrong with talking about features, but it is when they get etched into a roadmap that we get into trouble because it becomes a commitment and the time spent on the feature could be better spent on figuring out how to solve the problem. They talked about Objectives and Key Results or OKRs and how they are a complete mess at most companies. The concept is simple and easy if you are already in the empowered team model, but otherwise it is theater because you’re still doing roadmaps while simultaneously trying to tell people the problems to solve. Maggie started describing how they do product discovery and development at Drift and Marty immediately pointed out how the language she used makes the work sound like it occurs in phases as it would in a waterfall project. She explained that they use this notion of phases to communicate out and he pointed out that, even if it is not currently waterfall, there is a slippery slope between speaking about phases and landing in a waterfall mindset. He talked about three things he cares about that distinguish his process from waterfall: 1) tackling the risks upfront, 2) product managers, designers, and engineers literally coming up with prototypes side-by-side instead of having hand-offs, and 3) iterating towards achieving your KPIs rather than having a phase where you’ve declared the design done and have started implementing.  Maggie asked him to enumerate what he thinks product leaders should be doing. First, he said that they need to coach their product managers to get them to competence, which he says should take no more than three months. In the case of hiring product managers straight out of school, the product leader needs to commit to multiple-times-a-week or even daily coaching. Second, he said that product leaders need to take an active role in creating product strategy. This comes back to OKRs where product leaders provide business objectives that product teams translate into problems to solve. The more product teams you have, the less you can expect those teams to be able to see the whole picture on their own, which makes it more important for product leaders to connect the dots for them. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/we-talked-to-product-management-legend-marty-cagan/id1445050691?i=1000440847157 Website link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/da82dbda JUTTA ECKSTEIN AND JOHN BUCK ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Jutta Eckstein and John Buck with host Jay Hrcsko. Jay asked Jutta how she and John came together to produce the ideas described in their book Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy. Jutta and John met at an Agile conference in Atlanta and got the idea to investigate what Sociocracy could bring to Agile. They soon found themselves thinking, “That’s not really all of it,” and immediately agreed to write a book together about it. Jay started going through the book, beginning with four problem statements: Existing concepts cannot be directly applied to company strategy, structure, or process in the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) world. Companies make decisions from the top down but often people at lower levels who are closer to the realities of the product or market have valuable insights that are currently ignored. There is a collision of values underlying shareholder interests in short-term profits and a focus on the needs of the customers. For a company to be agile, all departments must be agile. However, existing agile systems struggle when applied to non-engineering departments. Jutta described Beyond Budgeting. She said that it sounds like it only has relevance to the finance department, but there is a close relationship between how companies deal with finance and how they are managed. In contrast to Agile, which originated from the experiences of consultants, she says, Beyond Budgeting originated in the experiences of CFOs. She gave examples of the problems with traditional budgeting: In the first scenario, a company’s budget is set annually and, at some point during the year, a project team that had been allocated a certain budget determines that the market has changed and they no longer need a budget as large as they originally thought. She’s never seen this situation lead anyone to give the money back. In the second scenario, the market changes such that the budget needed for the company to succeed in the market exceeds the original budget and it’s too late for anything to be done. Jay brought up the distinction made in the book about the three distinct uses of budgets: 1. a target, 2. a forecast, and 3. capacity planning, and the fact that these should not be combined. Next, they discussed Open Space. John talked about the Open Spaces you often see at conferences and how they increase creative thinking and allow people’s passions to emerge. In the same way, Organization Open Space, where you can come up with a project, line up some people, and go to work, gives you passion bounded by responsibility that leads to creative companies.  John pointed out that the combination of the three concepts, as he and Jutta developed the book, started to interact and come together in ways that made it greater than the sum of its parts. That’s why they gave it a name: BOSSA nova.  Jay brought up how he has already benefitted from what he learned about Sociocracy in the book. He was able to help his colleagues learn about the difference between consent and consensus. The participants in a meeting had been locked in an argument over a maturity model when Jay restated the subject of the disagreement in terms of consent, asking if there was anyone who needed to put a stake in the ground for their position or would they all be willing to let an experiment proceed. This quickly unblocked the stalemate. John related a similar story about helping a group of professors make some decisions about forming a professional association. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/bossa-nova-with-jutta-eckstein-and-john-buck/id1163230424?i=1000440982639 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/bossa-nova-with-jutta-eckstein-and-john-buck JOCELYN GOLDFEIN ON SIMPLE LEADERSHIP The Simple Leadership podcast featured Jocelyn Goldfein with host Christian McCarrick. Jocelyn talked about her career, including some time starting her own company, rising in the ranks at VMWare, arriving at Facebook at a critical time in its history, and becoming an angel investor and a venture capitalist. Christian asked about one of Jocelyn’s tweets about motivation as a management superpower. She says that engineers have a lot to offer the discipline of people management because they know how to think about systems problems and most organization problems are systems problems. On the other hand, engineers sometimes lose sight of the fact that human systems are different from programmatic systems in that they have feelings and don’t always behave rationally, but people respond to incentives. Explanations of the importance or urgency of a particular effort and attaching a bonus to it are blunt instruments, but praise and encouragement satisfies people’s needs and engenders long-term loyalty in a way that other incentives don’t. They talked about one of my favorite blog posts of Jocelyn’s on culture. She says that culture is what people do when nobody is looking. It is not people following an order. It is people knowing what to do when they don’t have orders. She says that people often think that culture is a set of traits or qualities and that you can interview for those traits to find someone who is a “culture fit.” She disagrees with this because companies are different from one another and people are obviously portable between companies.  Christian brought up the example of companies that have posters on their walls describing their culture. To Jocelyn, people are less than 10% influenced by the poster on the wall and more than 90% influenced by what successful, powerful people in the company do. When these are in conflict, you get cynicism. She talked about how compensation can be a motivator, but she noted that other people cannot judge your success by your compensation because they don’t know it, so they look for other indicators like title, scope of responsibility, influence, and confidence. So she says you need to be careful when handing out overt status symbols like titles and promotions because people will emulate the recipients of such symbols. The classic example, she says, is the brilliant jerk. When you elevate the brilliant jerk, you’re sending a message that people who succeed in this company and get ahead are jerks. The poster on the wall may not say that, but people will attach more weight to your behavior than what you or the poster say. Jocelyn talked about the undervaluing of soft skills. Engineers are taught early on that their work is fundamentally solo work and she says that is a lie because, if you want to do anything significant, if you’re going to go from rote work to meaningful creative work, the crucial skills are the soft skills we’re taught to disdain or neglect. Regarding recruiting and hiring, she talked about the tendency, at least at Facebook, to treat the phone screen like an on-site interview and create false negative rates that are too high. She did her own test where she brought in for on-site interviews a set of candidates who had previously been rejected at the phone screen stage and found that the same number got hired from her screened-out pool as were hired from the pool of candidates that passed their phone screen. She talked about the benefits and disadvantages of the centralized hiring model. On the plus side, it reduced silos, made teams friendlier to one another, and made employees become citizens of the company first and citizens of the team second. The downside of the centralized model is that there is no hiring manager taking responsibility, so the responsibility passes to the recruiter. Her preference is a blended model that is mostly centralized but with hiring managers taking responsibility and receiving rewards and praise for taking that responsibility. I loved what Jocelyn had to say about diversity and inclusion. She said that when we’re working at these high-growth companies, we’re desperately seeking to hire, we’re interviewing everybody, and we’re hiring everybody who is above our bar. When we look at the result and it is only 5% or 10% female and single digit percentages black or hispanic, some part of us is thinking that must reflect the inputs and to get a different population I would have to lower my bar and accept people who are failing. But this assumes a few things: that your interview bar is fair and that the population who applies to work at your company is the population who could apply to work at your company. If you really value having a more diverse environment, you will go looking for them. If you just sat there and only looked at applicants, you would never have hired that one signal processing engineer you needed or that one esoteric role that is not there in your applicant pool. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-improve-your-management-skills-jocelyn-goldfein/id1260241682?i=1000440957474 Website link: http://simpleleadership.libsyn.com/how-to-improve-your-management-skills-with-jocelyn-goldfein FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Jocelyn Goldfein on Software Engineering Daily, Michael Bolton on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, Dave Snowden on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, Ben Orenstein on Software Developer’s Journey, and Claire Lew on Greater Than Code. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting June 10, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. JOCELYN GOLDFEIN ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured Jocelyn Goldfein with host Jeff Meyerson. Jocelyn talked about joining Facebook after having spent years at VMWare delivering shrink-wrap software that had a release cycle on the order of years. Witnessing the cadence at which Facebook delivered new releases firsthand, it appeared to her like Facebook was defying the laws of physics. The cost of a release had shrunk to nearly zero. She says that companies that start life developing for native, that is, developing shrink-wrap software like that of VMWare, never really shake off the culture of developing for native. These cultures define a good engineer as someone who can estimate precisely and deliver predictably and it is all because the cost of a release in that native software world is so high. She talked about the often unacknowledged tradeoff between productivity and predictability. She also talked about the flexibility the engineers obtained by shipping more frequently. Not having to hit infrequent, high-risk release windows meant that engineers could stay “on the balls of their feet” and, say, have the news feed team help the photos team because they were not going to miss some “huge release date in the sky” by shuffling tasks and reprioritizing. By the way, I love Jocelyn’s colorful metaphors. She said that being able to move people around fungibly to unblock each other ends up being a “turbo button for the entire organization.” She says that the combination of removing deadline pressure and continuously integrating new features behind feature flags into the single branch that all of Facebook ran on allowed the engineers to be agile and to “reserve the right to wake up smarter and make a better decision tomorrow” based on actual usage. This is in contrast to many software teams that spend so much time making a perfect product before they finally get feedback that they become both psychologically committed to their design and physically committed to it (through a hard-to-change code base). At Facebook, the “concrete was still wet” until incredibly “late in the game.” The architecture and the release process at Facebook let them “jettison some sacred cows,” specifically, the notion of deadlines and the idea that you only get feedback at the end. She says that Mark Zuckerberg has many gifts but one of his superpowers is to be able to admit when he was wrong. She says she doesn’t think people can reliably distinguish good innovative ideas from bad ideas without trying them out first and she believes Facebook has been innovative because their architecture, release process, and values system allowed them to take risks. She says, “Facebook’s genius is not that it is right any more than anybody else. It is that it tries experiments at a higher velocity than anybody else and it purges the ones that don’t work faster than anybody else. It is no surprise that, in the end, the deep-seated challenges for the company have been problems that don’t show up immediately — problems where the downsides were incredibly lagging indicators.” Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/facebook-management-with-jocelyn-goldfein/id1019576853?i=1000438147913 Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/05/15/facebook-management-with-jocelyn-goldfein/ MICHAEL BOLTON ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Michael Bolton with host Shane Hastie. Shane started by asking Michael whether testing is blasé today. Michael said that you can choose to look at it that way but nothing is more fascinating to him than testing, which he defines as evaluating products by learning about them through exploration and experimentation. He also says that testing is focused on a question that nobody else is interested in asking or answering, which is: Are there problems that threaten the on-time successful completion of the project or that threaten the value of the product? Michael sees his job as helping people get comfortable with the process of looking for problems that threaten value so that managers can find out whether the product they have is the product they wanted. In response to a question from Shane, Michael brought up a conversation in which someone said that you often look at a piece of software and think to yourself that it couldn’t have an effect on human life or health or safety. But you don’t know how people are going to use your product. A developer of Microsoft Excel might think, “Nobody’s going to die if there is a bug in Excel.” Somebody could easily lose a mortgage due to a bug in Excel and when a product is used as ubiquitously as Excel, you are not going to see the knock-on effects of the risk. He talked about the problem of needing to maintain a critical distance to spot the problems that arise from complexity. He said that unit tests may demonstrate that the individual units of a program can all be individually reliable, but they would not demonstrate that the overall product is safe. He gave an example from Nancy Leveson’s Engineering a Safer World of a chemical reactor in which the software that controlled the flow of water and catalysts into the reactor was designed to leave all control variables as-is and sound an alarm in response to a fault. This sounds reasonable, but a situation occurred in which a fault was triggered just after the catalyst was added to the reactor. The cooling water flow had not yet ramped up and fault policy meant that it stayed at this low level as the system got hotter and hotter. The reactor overheated, the release valve lifted, and the contents of the reactor were discharged into the atmosphere. This illustrated how putting simple things together into a complex thing creates complex problems we are not great at anticipating. The solution he says is to experiment with the system in the same way Hook, Boyle and their contemporaries in the 1600s were doing: putting the system into conditions that are not normal so as to reveal surprises. It is the tester’s job, Michael says, to be professional skeptics. The problem, he says, is that the critical distance of a good tester is bound together with social distance. Nobody wants to receive bad news and testers are often the people delivering the bad news, creating social distance from the rest of the team. The social challenge for testers is to help people appreciate getting the bad news. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/michael-bolton-on-the-testing-mindset/id1161431874?i=1000438906048 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/interview-michael-bolton DAVE SNOWDEN ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Dave Snowden with host Shane Hastie. After asking Dave to introduce himself, Shane asked about the liminal aspects of the Cynefin “model” and Dave made the correction that Cynefin is actually a framework rather than a model because it doesn’t seek to represent the world but to give a perspective on the world. Dave explained that regarding liminality, Cynefin started with five domains and a set of dynamics for moving between domains but this confused people, so they introduced liminal zones to represent this state of transition. He pointed out that the Scrum framework holds things in the liminal state between complicated and complex long enough to get them right and this is a strength of Scrum. They talked about the need to run parallel safe-to-fail experiments when in the complex domain and Dave gave three examples. The first was to break people up into trios and spin off 30 or 40 trios to look at a problem in their spare time over a week. The second example was to create a prototyping team and put them with users for a day to build a prototype and then pass the prototype on to another team charged with improving it without the original user input. The third example was to do continuous mapping of unarticulated needs and, when they get statistically significant clusters, put small prototyping teams on each cluster. Dave told a story about creating a fake infographic about a cybersecurity breach in one industry, giving it to employees in a different industry, and asking them to tell a story about why it couldn’t happen to their company and a story about what they would do if it did. He then analyzed these stories to look for complacency. More generally, he would use this technique and look for outliers because, when you want to create significant change, you need to look to the outlier groups rather than the dominant groups. Shane pointed out the contrast between this technique and common requirements-gathering techniques and Dave responded that requirements-gathering allows bias to creep in after the first few interviews. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/dave-snowden-on-liminality-in-cynefin-moving-beyond/id1161431874?i=1000438021618 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/dave-snowden-on-liminality-in-cynefin-and-moving-beyond-agile-to-agility BEN ORENSTEIN ON SOFTWARE DEVELOPER’S JOURNEY The Software Developer’s Journey podcast featured Ben Orenstein with host Timothée Bourguignon. They talked about Ben’s academic challenges, his initial lack of maturity, his discovery of Ruby and then Rails, and his growth as a software developer under the tutelage of his former boss and mentor. Tim asked Ben what he would be looking for in a junior developer to have as a mentee and Ben answered that he would look for something like grit (the ability to push forward and not get too discouraged) because the kinds of problems we face as software developers require grit to get through and this never really goes away as you become more senior and experienced. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/51-ben-orenstein-advises-us-not-to-worry-too-much/id1079113167?i=1000439883363 Website link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/190346/1195571 CLAIRE LEW ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Claire Lew with hosts Janelle Klein and Sam Livingston-Gray. The panelists asked Claire the standard “What is your superpower?” question and, after answering, she turned the question around to them. They then entered the topic of bad bosses in which Claire told her own story and then got Janelle and Sam to tell their own bad boss stories. Sam told the story of his experience with a command-and-control CEO and this led to a discussion about when motivating through fear is and isn’t effective. Sam related this to a book by Courtenay Hameister called Okay Fine Whatever that describes the negative effects of stress on one’s ability to be creative. This reminded me of the section of the book Switch by the Heath brothers about the burning platform concept and how negative emotions stifle creativity. Claire pointed out another problem with command-and-control leadership is that it disregards the belief that people are ever intrinsically motivated. She says that while there has been a shift to leaders being told they need to inspire people rather than command and control them, there is still an implicit reference to control. People say things like you need to “empower” people. She hates that word. She says people are already empowered. Leaders need to create an environment that lets their people do their best work and then just get out of their way. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/132-distilling-the-hailstorm-with-claire-lew/id1163023878?i=1000440034174 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/distilling-the-hailstorm FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/thekguy Website:

Ash Maurya on Rocketship.FM, Richard Cheng on the Drunken PM, Jeff Gothelf on Boss Level, the mutual learning model on Troubleshooting Agile, and Amy Edmondson on Lead From The Heart. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting May 27, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ASH MAURYA ON ROCKETSHIP.FM The Rocketship.FM podcast featured Ash Maurya with hosts Michael Sacca and Mike Belsito. They started by talking about the lean canvas. Ash described the lean canvas as a one-page business planning tool that acts as an alternative to spending time writing a large document and exists because, when we start a new business, we know very little about it. The lean canvas was derived from Alex Osterwalder’s business model canvas and optimized for early-stage entrepreneurs. Ash says the lean canvas addresses the innovator’s bias of spending too much time thinking and talking about the solution. It asks questions like: Who are your customers? Who might be the early adopters? Why would they use your solution? How will you get your solution in front of those customers? How will you defend against competition? Where does the money come from? What is the revenue stream? Ash then described writing a follow-up book to Running Lean called Scaling Lean because readers of the first book wanted a better way to satisfy stakeholders looking for financial forecasts. He sees Running Lean as a book for the entrepreneur-to-customer conversation and Scaling Lean as a book for the conversation between the entrepreneur and other stakeholders. The usual way of sizing a market is by estimating revenue from what percentage of a market one thinks one can take, which Ash calls working top-down. Instead, Scaling Lean works bottom-up by modeling the inputs to customer value (such as a pricing model and a lifetime value model) and using this customer value model to produce a revenue estimate. Scaling Lean encourages a staged launch for your business. He compares this with Tesla’s rollout of the Model 3 by testing the riskiest assumptions of the business model by producing the Roadster, Model S, and Model X first. They talked about Fermi estimation and how you can use it to invalidate a model in as little as five minutes. Regarding inputs to such estimates, he says pricing is the most critical, followed by potential lifetime of a customer. He then says you test your estimate against the minimum success criteria, that is, the minimum number (revenue, impact, etc.) for the years invested in the startup to not have been a waste of time. You use this to build your traction model and, with each milestone, you think in terms of achieving ten times what you achieved in the previous milestone. Returning to the Tesla example, the Model S was intended be sold at ten times the quantity of the Roadster and the Model 3 is intended to sell at ten times the quantity of the Model S. Regarding the order in which to address risk, he says to think of the game Jenga (where you try to find where the stack is strongest and move pieces from there) and do the opposite. You want to build the riskiest parts first. He also shared a metaphor for preferring a focus on the customer’s problem over a solution-focus. He describes a solution-focus as building a key and then looking for a door it will open. Problem-focus, by contrast, is like finding a door that needs to be opened and trying to build a key for it. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/interview-ash-maurya-of-lean-canvas-on-scaling-lean/id808014240?i=1000437174185 Website link: https://omny.fm/shows/rocketship-fm/interview-ash-maurya-of-lean-canvas-on-scaling-l-1 RICHARD CHENG ON THE DRUNKEN PM The Drunken PM podcast featured Richard Cheng with host Dave Prior. They talked about product ownership anti-patterns such as a product owner treating the dev team like they’re her vendor or like they report to her. This puts you in a situation where the team is incentivized to keep the PO happy rather than tell her the unvarnished truth all the time. In these situations, the dev teams don’t tell the PO about problems right away and the later the PO finds out, the fewer options she has for addressing them. Instead, Richard says we need a safe environment where the dev team and PO can be open and candid with each other. They talked about whether or not building prototypes is agile and Dave admitted that he is not a big subscriber to Henrik Kniberg’s “skateboard - bicycle - motorcycle - car” model of incremental development and, if he knows he’s going to have a car in the end, he would prefer you build a steering wheel so he can give feedback on it. Richard pointed out that the danger of this line of thinking is that you get a tendency to build vertical layers instead of horizontal slices. Richard doesn’t want a technical person as his product owner since he believes that technical people favor these vertical layers. I take issue with the idea that a “technical person” is automatically assumed to have no “product thinking” skills. I think a better way to put it is to say he doesn’t want someone who lacks the training in lean startup and product management skills in the PO role, regardless of their technical skills. Other than that, I’m in total agreement with Richard here, especially regarding how the same line of thinking that leads to software being delivered in vertical layers also leads to vertically-layered organizational design. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-perfect-product-owner-w-richard-cheng-cst/id1121124593?i=1000436943035 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/drunkenpmradio/richard-cheng-the-perfect-product-owner-april-2019 JEFF GOTHELF ON THE BOSS LEVEL PODCAST The Boss Level podcast featured Jeff Gothelf with host Sami Honkonen. They started with a discussion of humility and the idea of having strong opinions, weakly held. Jeff says we need to admit that the ideas we put forward, even our strategic vision, are just our best guesses. When a leader puts out such a vision, she needs to open up room for her team to discuss and push back on those ideas. Sami added that this change in thinking coincides with a change in terminology to be a better fit for a world of uncertainty where words like roadmap get replaced with words like assumption, belief, bet, and experiment. They then addressed the topic of collaboration. For Jeff, organizing for collaboration means organizing in cross-functional teams and he says that even digital native organizations often get this wrong. He also says that these teams need to be empowered to make their own sprint-level decisions as they are closest to the information and, if they get it wrong, they can correct it in the next sprint. Jeff thinks the motto of every organization today should be to say that they are, in Astro Teller’s words, “enthusiastic skeptics,” excited to figure out the next improvement to their product or service. Sami asked about how organizations can change so that they begin to value continuous learning. Jeff says that we’re fighting a hundred years of manufacturing mindset that says, “The more stuff we make, the more value we deliver to our customers.” In this mindset, people see customer site visits and having engineers talk to customers as somehow less productive. He says that companies resist changing this mindset for two reasons: 1) it feels like it takes authority away from leaders; and 2) incentive structures: we don’t pay people for discovery work or collaboration or agility; we pay them for heroism and for delivery. Jeff says that this is the reason organizations fail to become agile or digitally transform: they buy all the books and training, change language and team structures, build tribes, chapters, guilds, and squads, but they don’t change the performance management system. They still measure people on the old way of working. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/jeff-gothelf-on-sense-and-respond/id1041885043?i=1000437033229 Website link: https://www.bosslevelpodcast.com/jeff-gothelf-on-sense-and-respond/ THE MUTUAL LEARNING MODEL ON TROUBLESHOOTING AGILE The Troubleshooting Agile podcast, with hosts Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel, featured a three-part series on the mutual learning model. The first two episodes covered the first three values of the mutual learning model: informed choice, transparency, and curiosity. The third episode covered accountability and compassion. It started with a definition of accountability from the article “Eight Behaviours for Smarter Teams” and Squirrel told a story about the origin of the word “accountability” from the time of Henry II. Jeffrey described how his relationship of accountability was transformed when he watched a talk by Kent Beck called, “Ease At Work.” Kent talked about accountability as a personal obligation to render an account of his own thoughts and feelings and how this changed Kent’s experience at work. Jeffrey sees this kind of accountability as being important for having a learning culture at work and supporting the previous two values of transparency and curiosity. Jeffrey talked about the connection between accountability and compassion, saying that when people are accountable to one another, it is a lot easier to be compassionate because you start to understand more of what went into their actions and the positions they’re arguing for. Jeffrey then pointed out a place where he finds a lack of compassion for the people in power. They also included a discussion of having compassion for yourself. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/mutual-learning-model-accountability-and-compassion/id1327456890?i=1000437494515 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/mutual-learning-model-accountability-and-compassion AMY EDMONDSON ON LEAD FROM THE HEART The Lead From The Heart podcast featured Amy Edmondson with host Mark Crowley. Amy defined a “psychologically safe workplace” as one in which people believe they can bring their full self to work, speak up, and have their ideas, questions, and concerns welcomed. She says workplaces with high psychological safety are uncommon and organizations often have pockets of both low and high psychological safety. They talked about Google’s use of Amy’s psychological safety research to figure out what makes for high team performance. Mark made a distinction between psychological safety and physical safety and Amy responded that the two kinds of safety actually have a strong relationship. She cited the airline industry discovering through the investigation of black boxes that the majority of crashes involved somebody recognizing a concern and not being heard. She then clarified a common misconception about psychological safety. She said that when she refers to a workplace as being psychologically safe, she doesn’t mean that those in such a workplace are free from criticism or pushback or always feel good about themselves. She actually means the opposite. Psychologically safe workplaces have a high degree of candor. She contrasted this with college campuses that hold “safe spaces” where you cannot say anything that may remotely hurt someone’s feelings. Mark asked why we hold back on candor. Amy says it is a combination of how we’re socialized and how our brains work. We are highly tuned in to other’s impressions of us, particularly in hierarchical contexts. She says that many managers don’t create the conditions for psychological safety because they tend to mimic the behavior of the managers they’ve had in the past and haven’t stopped to connect their own experience of when they’ve done their best work to their management or leadership style so that their employees can do their best work. She says this tendency is a reflex and the problem is that, every now and then, this reflex is given a faulty signal that it works. For example, managing through fear can work in the short term when the task is simple and prescribed, clearly measured, and done individually. But very little of our work today has those attributes: it is complex, collaborative, and requires ingenuity to do it well. Under those conditions, fear doesn’t work. They talked about what you would look for in a candidate for a management position to ensure you get someone who can create a psychologically safe environment. She says that you want to look for people with high emotional intelligence. They should care about other’s opinions and needs but have enough self-awareness to know that their own life doesn’t depend on approval from others. You’re looking instead for passion, curiosity, and drive. Mark brought up a Deloitte study that said that 70% of people choose not to speak up about a problem at work even when they believe that not addressing it will harm the company. Amy says this is not because people rationally weigh the odds but is an unconscious act of spontaneous sense-making and temporal discounting in which we overweight an immediate event and underweight future events. Managers can address this, she says, by being willing to name the challenges faced and by asking questions. Mark asked about what we can learn from the case studies she has written about: the Wells Fargo fraudulent accounts scandal and Volkswagen emissions scandal. Amy asks us to imagine that the goals that the Wells Fargo and Volkswagen executives set for their organizations were not understood to be ridiculous at the outset and may have been intended as stretch goals. She says that when you are eager to set stretch goals, you need to have open ears. Being able to sell eight financial services products per customer is a hypothesis. Being able to create a green diesel that passes emissions tests in the US is a hypothesis. There is nothing wrong with setting these as stretch goals as long as you also encourage the people selling and developing these products to report all of the data that is coming back from the field and you adjust the goals based on this data. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/amy-edmondson-why-psychological-safety-breeds-exceptionally/id1365633369?i=1000431400656 Website link: https://www.blubrry.com/leadfromtheheartpodcast/42334779/amy-edmondson-why-psychological-safety-breeds-exceptionally-high-performing-teams/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

April Wensel on Software Developer’s Journey, Arup Chakrabarti on On Call Nightmares, Alistair Cockburn on Being Human, Brian Balfour on Product To Product, and Kent Beck on Unlearn. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting May 13, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. APRIL WENSEL ON SOFTWARE DEVELOPER’S JOURNEY The Software Developer’s Journey podcast featured April Wensel with host Tim Bourguignon. April talked about hiring for attitude and mindset over the technical skills of the moment. She distinguished between the fixed and growth mindset and talked about how hearing a statement from an interviewee like, “I’m just not good with people,” is a sign that the person is currently thinking with a fixed mindset. Tim asked her to describe her company, Compassionate Coding. At Compassionate Coding, April teaches workshops on emotional intelligence to technical people. These skills are often called “soft skills,” but she prefers to call them “catalytic skills,” because they help technical people catalyze the application and acquisition of their other skills. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/45-april-wensel-encourages-us-to-get-in-touch-our-core/id1079113167?i=1000434465519 Website link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/190346/982475 ARUP CHAKRABARTI ON THE ON CALL NIGHTMARES PODCAST The On Call Nightmares podcast featured Arup Chakrabarti of PagerDuty with host Jay Gordon. Arup talked about starting out in medical research and being exposed to the notion of on call because much of the research involved having access to cadavers that were only available in short time windows that required him, from time to time, to drive to the hospital on a Saturday night. At Amazon, Arup learned what it looks like for not just individuals to go on call, but for whole departments and companies to go on call. At Netflix, he worked with the “father” of Chaos Monkey and managed site reliability as Netflix built out the simian army. He told a story about a NTP time drift that alerted almost every team at PagerDuty. The SRE on call quickly diagnosed the problem as NTP, but their run list was broken, so getting things back took a while. During this time, Arup had to keep the engineers from disabling these constantly-firing alerts because that could have caused them to miss something critical. He says this incident taught him that incident response is a team sport. This led to a discussion about the importance of keeping things light during an incident and taking the issue seriously without taking yourself seriously. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-21-arup-chakrabarti-pagerduty/id1447430839?i=1000436439951 Website link: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/oncallnightmares/episodes/2019-04-25T04_08_18-07_00 ALISTAIR COCKBURN ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Alistair Cockburn with host Richard Atherton. Alistair talked about doing his Ph.D, being able to put the word “people” in the title of his dissertation (apparently a rare thing in academia), and how his heart sank when he realized that his own mentor’s dissertation on methodologies had already covered everything. Then he realized that if it really had covered everything, you could take it to any business in the world and it would solve their problems, but it doesn’t because businesses are made of people and no single methodology can solve all of the problems. Alistair says instead that methodologies and processes should be like tissues: you use them and throw them away. After two or three months, you have to change. He says there are some good things about process, one being that it provides a checklist, like that which a pilot and copilot run through before an airplane takes off. Often though, he says, processes are like drop boxes. You create them so that people don’t have to talk to each other. Companies that have communication problems often want Alistair to create a process for them to resolve those communication problems, unaware of the contradiction. Alistair often has the same advice regardless of the methodology a client has chosen. If a client says, “We do SAFe,” he says, “That’s fine, increase collaboration!” If a client says, “We refuse to do SAFe,” he says, “That’s fine, increase collaboration!” He also says he doesn’t have to teach collaboration because everyone already knows how. We just don’t want to.  Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/56-the-heart-of-agile-with-alistair-cockburn/id1369745673?i=1000435504887 Website link: http://media.cdn.shoutengine.com/podcasts/4081235a-554f-4a8f-90c2-77dc3b58051f/audio/afdb129e-9fcb-40e4-9243-b85f56f3e1b5.mp3 BRIAN BALFOUR ON PRODUCT TO PRODUCT The Product To Product podcast featured Brian Balfour with host Eleni Deacon. They talked about north star metrics, that is, having one metric that attempts to capture all of the most important dimensions of your business. Brian doesn’t believe you can capture this in one metric and instead prefers a constellation of metrics that includes: 1) a retention metric such as monthly/weekly active users, 2) an engagement metric that measures the amount of engagement and the trend over time for those active users, and 3) a monetization metric. He particularly doesn’t like revenue metrics because of their lagging nature and how they ignore actual usage. Being on a data engineering team myself in my current role, I liked what Brian had to say about how to approach data. He says companies need to take on the mentality that data is not a project with a start and end date, but a core part of building product that is meant to constantly evolve. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/north-stars-are-leading-you-astray-brian-balfour-reforge/id1293415837?i=1000436155421 Website link: https://omny.fm/shows/product-to-product-podcast/north-stars-are-leading-you-astray-brian-balfour-r KENT BECK ON UNLEARN The Unlearn podcast featured Kent Beck with host Barry O’Reilly. Barry asked about the system that Kent uses to help him explore uncertainty. Kent says he has habits that help. The first habit is that of reversing any sentence that begins with the word “obviously.” When somebody says, “Obviously, programmers can’t be trusted to test their own code,” he automatically thinks, “What if that’s not true?” A second habit is whenever somebody introduces Kent to a new model of thinking, he asks himself, “What would happen if I just acted like this model was true?” and he says that he applied that habit when reading Barry’s book Unlearn. Barry asked about what made Kent feel that the Test-Commit-Revert (or TCR) technique was worth exploring, since this required an unlearning of Kent’s own Test-Driven Development (or TDD) method. Kent says that he was disenchanted with asynchronous code reviews and used a third habit of looking further forward. During his tenure at Facebook, he experienced growth in the number of engineers from 700 to 5,000. At the time, people were anticipating the problem of having 10,000 engineers working together, but Kent followed the Bill Joy idea of looking six steps further, and looked into how 100,000 engineers would work together. His solution was Limbo, or asking “How low can you go?” to shrink the size of code that can be safely committed and put immediately in production and the TCR technique came out of that line of thinking. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/exploring-uncertainty-with-kent-beck/id1460270044?i=1000436242318 Website link: https://barryoreilly.com/unlearn-podcast/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Melissa Perri on Deliver It, Jenny Tarwater, Laura Powers, Linda Podder, and Cheryl Hammond on Agile Uprising, Michael Sippey on Product Love, Ryan Jacoby on Scrum Master Toolbox, and Phil Abernathy on Engineering Culture by InfoQ. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting April 29, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. MELISSA PERRI ON DELIVER IT CAST The Deliver It Cast podcast featured Melissa Perri with host Cory Bryan. They discussed Melissa’s book Escaping The Build Trap and what motivated her to spend three years writing it. Melissa says she wrote it because she found herself answering the same questions about product management over and over again. They talked about what the build trap is (project-oriented, no product managers, spinning up teams for CEOs that prioritize work, never talking to customers, and getting rewarded for shipping features) and how demoralizing it can be. They talked about Stephen Bungay’s The Art Of Action and his notion of the knowledge gap, the alignment gap, and the effects gap, and Melissa told a story of how she applied these concepts for a client by introducing ways to address these gaps by learning how to communicate strategic intent. Melissa says she always hears from her clients that their CEOs and leaders care about points and velocity but she says that this is only because they have don’t know how else to measure success. When you give them goals that they can relate to, they no longer need to latch onto points and velocity. I particularly liked what Melissa said about getting leaders to work together as a team by getting rid of individual goals. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep85-escaping-the-build-trap-with-melissa-perri/id966084649?i=1000434062102 Website link: http://deliveritcast.com/ep85-escaping-the-build-trap-with-melissa-perri JENNY TARWATER, LAURA POWERS, LINDA PODDER, AND CHERYL HAMMOND ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Jenny Tarwater, Laura Powers, Linda Podder, and Cheryl Hammond with host Chris Murman. They talked about the Women In Agile community and events and what they have learned so far. Cheryl said that they have learned that there is interest among all genders to learn about Women In Agile and get involved in the pre-conferences. Laura learned that it was giving her an opportunity to pay it forward to the next generation. Linda described being a recipient of what Laura has been paying forward and Jenny talked about meeting people through these events who helped her both professionally and personally. She also described how the huge number of attendees of the main conference that Women In Agile is attached to makes her feel lost and how the pre-conference helps her ease into the conference community. They talked about the Launching New Voices program and how it provides a stage and mentoring on how to give a talk to create a more diverse body of speakers. Linda was a protégé in the 2017 program and she described how it taught her not only how to present her topic but also taught her the psychology behind it so that she could help her audience internalize her message. Laura described being a mentor in the program and I loved what she said about authenticity. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/women-in-agile-2019/id1163230424?i=1000434352507 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/women-in-agile-2019 MICHAEL SIPPEY ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Michael Sippey with host Eric Boduch. Michael Sippey became VP of product at Medium after spending some time running product for LiveJournal at SixApart and at Twitter. He was also one of the first bloggers. They talked about how many of these early blogging technologies developed into today’s modern social media platforms and how Michael wishes he could have thought more about the downsides of the technologies and planned for them. This led to a discussion of scenario planning and the the natural tendency towards optimism that product people have. They talked about the history of Twitter and some of the reasoning behind the restrictions Twitter introduced in their API in 2012 and some of the improvements Medium is making now to prevent amplification of low quality content. Then they got into a discussion of hypotheses and hypothesis testing as being fundamental to product management. Michael encourages his product managers to have hypotheses that are bold enough that the users are going to notice and that will drive enough change that it is worth the development time to pursue it. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/michael-sippey-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-hypotheses/id1343610309?i=1000434598454 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/productcraft/michael-sippey-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-hypotheses RYAN JACOBY ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Ryan Jacoby with host Vasco Duarte. Vasco started by by asking Ryan about his book, Making Progress - The 7 Responsibilities of an Innovation Leader. Ryan described the seven responsibilities as: 1) define progress, 2) set an innovation agenda, 3) create and support teams that build, 4) cultivate the ingredients of successful innovation (customer insights, well-defined problem statements, strategic questions, and ways of communicating evidence of what works and what doesn’t), 5) give great feedback, 6) inspire progress, and 7) reward progress. Vasco asked about how Scrum Masters can contribute to innovation. Ryan suggests picking some of the techniques they discussed, applying them to your team, and then sharing them widely. He then referenced Teresa Amabile’s work on finding out what makes people happy and work. He says that by helping your team make progress, you will be improving morale and people’s job satisfaction. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/bonus-ryan-jacoby-on-7-responsibilities-innovation/id963592988?i=1000434879127 Website link: http://scrummastertoolbox.libsyn.com/bonus-ryan-jacoby-on-the-7-responsibilities-of-an-innovation-leader PHIL ABERNATHY ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Phil Abernathy with host Shane Hastie. Phil talked about how happier employees make for happier customers. For producing happier employees, he starts with purpose, autonomy, and mastery as popularized by Dan Pink and he adds fairness. He distinguishes between fairness and equality. He says employees don’t expect equality — there are different levels of capability, maturity, experience, and salary but this is not seen as unfair. They then talked about org structures, going back to Conway’s law and how it relates to complexity. Phil talked about the KPI-driven organizations today that take anything that is not working and put a vice president in charge of it. This leads to things like having a head of “digital.” He asks, “What’s the difference between the IT department and this new digital department?” Nobody can explain it. He says that this obfuscation of accountability and responsibility is at the heart of complex structures and that instead we should copy the great companies. They all have small, simple, loosely-coupled teams delivering a service to a direct customer group, internal or external. Phil says people confuse empowerment and self-direction with no management and no direction. He says there needs to be a hierarchy, but it should be flat, with spans of control over ten. He has a metric he calls the bureaucracy mass index, which is the ratio of enablers such as managers to total employees. A healthy BMI is typically around 10% and in some companies he sees BMIs as high as 45%. He says healthier BMIs lead to happier customers and happier companies. Regarding the structure of the work itself, Phil says too many companies he works with are overloaded. The reason for the lack of prioritization is a lack of strategic clarity: there’s a digital strategy, an innovation strategy, IT transformation strategy and no one can figure out the real strategy. A simple strategy that can be explained in three to five bullet points does not exist. He then got into a description of OKRs and how they are developed collaboratively. The companies who get these right, he says, don’t have a prioritization problem. Last, he adds leadership style because structuring the organization and structuring the work is not enough. A good leadership style, he says, is based on an agreed set of values like trust, respect, transparency, courage, and experimentation. Every organization says they have these values but they don’t all practice them. He says it comes down to holding people accountable. He references Patrick Lencioni’s work on having trust at the foundation and he connected this to accountability and results. He says that the courage of senior leadership to call people out for breaking the values is the deciding factor. He then related this all to Carol Dweck’s book Mindset. This interview is only twenty minutes long, but Phil doesn’t waste a single word. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/phil-abernathy-on-employee-happiness-bureaucracy-mass/id1161431874?i=1000435046419 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/phil-abernathy-on-employee-happiness-and-the-bureaucracy-mass-index FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Cal Newport on Coaching For Leaders, Becoming Mr. Why on Troubleshooting Agile, Gary Pedretti and Jeff Gothelf on Agile For Humans, Thai Wood on Greater Than Code, and Jeff Campbell on Scrum Master Toolbox. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting April 15, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. CAL NEWPORT ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Cal Newport with host Dave Stachowiak. Cal talked about the inspiration for his new book Digital Minimalism having come from readers of his previous book Deep Work who liked what that book had done for their work lives and asked, “What about my personal life?” Dave and Cal talked about competitive Rock, Paper, Scissors, and how the top competitors in that sport are so good at understanding and taking advantage of the way our brains work. This took them to the main point of the book, which is that technologies like social media are not understood by our brains in the same way as true social interaction, so we can be interacting on social media all day long and still feel lonely. Dave asked about the impact the modern tendency to replace face-to-face conversation with virtual connection such as email, text, and social media likes, can have for leaders. Cal described the scenario in which a person in a leadership position with a remote component to it reads, say, an email and can’t put a finger on the emotional affect — she can’t tell whether the author of the email is really angry with her or really happy. He says we need the complex, social-processing part of the brain that relies on analog cues such as the back-and-forth of hearing a voice or seeing body language. It is how we understand people, connect with people, and coordinate with people towards common goals. Taking this kind of conversation out of the picture makes it difficult to be a leader. Dave asked what Cal learned from his readers and blog followers. Cal said he was surprised to learn from his readers and followers the degree to which digital distraction was filling a void for them. He had assumed that simply reducing or taming the digital distractions would allow us to immediately get back to the things we know are more important. He learned instead that, for a lot of people, it is unclear what they are going to do next once they have taken the lightweight distraction out of their lives. He says he is much more sympathetic now about the difficulty of figuring out what you want to do instead of just mindless swiping in every down moment. In the book, he asks people to take a 30-day period to limit social media use and he said, “People are often surprised by how little they miss things like Facebook during this process and also surprised by how much they’re at a loss to figure out what they should be doing instead.” iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/400-how-to-reclaim-conversation-with-cal-newport/id458827716?i=1000432139932&mt=2 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/400/ BECOMING MR. WHY ON TROUBLESHOOTING AGILE The Troubleshooting Agile podcast with hosts Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick spent an episode talking about someone they call “Mr. Why.” Squirrel told a story about a client who would get orders from on high that said, “Thou shalt do it this way.” He would also get orders with explanations that do not make any sense such as investors making technical decisions. Squirrel calls this client “Mr. Why” because most people in these types of environments eventually stop asking the why. The challenge for this client is not that he doesn’t ask why but that he only asks himself. Squirrel said that he tells Mr. Why that we want to be opposite of lawyers, who are carefully trained never to ask the question, “Why?” Jeffrey said that he thinks the legalistic type of question is the model that people often think is the proper way to analyze a situation: legalistically building a case rather than collaboratively trying to get to answers and this could be why people fall into communication patterns in which their goal is to win rather than to jointly discover. To me, this sounds exactly like the difference between constructive and deconstructive criticism described in the book, How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. The constructive criticizer is making an airtight case about the behavior he or she is criticizing even when doing so constructively, while the deconstructive criticizer is seeking to jointly discover the truth with the help of the recipient of the criticism. iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/becoming-mr-why/id1327456890?i=1000432455338&mt=2 SoundCloud link: https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/becoming-mr-why GARY PEDRETTI AND JEFF GOTHELF ON AGILE FOR HUMANS The Agile For Humans podcast featured Gary Pedretti and Jeff Gothelf with host Ryan Ripley. Ryan asked a question that he hears a lot: how do we do UX activities and product discovery within a sprint? Gary says that from the developer community, he hears that design work takes too long. From the designer community, he hears that they think their work is strategic and sprints feel tactical or that they think developers don’t really care about design. Jeff pointed out that the fundamental values and principles of Scrum and UX are the same, but melding the processes in a way that respects both Scrum and UX has proved elusive for a lot of organizations. They talked about a 2007 paper by Desirée Sy and Lynn Miller on staggered sprints that was misunderstood as a series of mini-waterfalls. I believe Jeff was referring to the article named Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-centered Design. Jeff explained that they were actually describing two kinds of work being done by the same team, not by separate groups of designers and developers communicating by handoff.  Jeff described experimenting with his team’s processes back in 2008-09 and settling on a process in which designers were part of the Scrum team with engineers and product managers and work was prioritized not just on what needed to be delivered but also on what the team was trying to learn. Gary talked about how the separation of designers from the rest of the team is similar to the separation of database people and application architects from the rest of the team because of a belief that the work of the database designer or application architect needed to be completed before the work of the rest of the team could begin. In each case, people discovered patterns that overcame this limitation, like the patterns of Ambler and Sadalage’s Refactoring Databases book and the patterns of evolutionary or emergent architecture. iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/afh-106-exploring-user-experience-and-scrum/id991671232?i=1000433513601&mt=2 Website link: https://ryanripley.com/afh-106-exploring-user-experience-and-scrum/ THAI WOOD ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Thai Wood with hosts Jessica Kerr, Sam Livingston-Gray, John K Sawers, and Avdi Grimm. They started with a discussion of resilience engineering and how it spun off of human factors and brought in cognitive systems. Jessica said that old-style human factors got mired in Taylorism whereas cognitive systems is about making systems that work with people in the way that people naturally work. Thai had gotten into tech coming from emergency medicine as an EMT. Jessica asked what he brought to software development from his EMT days. Thai responded that, in medicine, you are trained about burnout, how to identify it, and what resources are available to help with it. In software, despite similar stressors and similar problems, burnout is not talked about that much. Jessica asked Thai how to distinguish between reliability and resilience. Thai said that resilience encompasses the ability to continually adapt to change, whereas reliability might be consistently performing within the same state. He also said that he thinks of robustness as being able to survive certain inputs but not necessarily being able to adapt to them. iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/121-emergency-communication-with-thai-wood/id1163023878?i=1000431679618&mt=2 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/emergency-communication JEFF CAMPBELL ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Jeff Campbell with host Vasco Duarte. This episode was the first to be done in a Q & A format. The question for this episode was: Have you been able to break through the proverbial IT gate and start talking about wider Agile adoption together with management? Jeff answered that being able to communicate with management is probably one of the most important factors to success. He told the story of working at a company that went out of business. Reflecting on this period of his career, he arrived at the idea that, if he was unable to convince management that a particular behavior or practice was important, then that was his failing and not theirs. His recommendation for a person looking to influence management is that they should start doing public speaking and teaching. Exposure to teaching, he says, teaches you to be able to express yourself multiple different ways which is critical because not everybody comes to understand a topic the same way. iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/selling-agile-how-to-get-buy-in-from-management-q-jeff/id963592988?i=1000431928436&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2019/03/podcast/selling-agile-how-to-get-buy-in-from-management-qa-with-jeff-campbell/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Andy Hunt on Greater Than Code, David Sohmer on SPAMCast, Josh Seiden on Scrum Master Toolbox, Tim Herbig on The Product Experience, and Wyatt Jenkins on Product Love. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting April 1, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ANDY HUNT ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Andy Hunt with hosts Janelle Klein, Avdi Grimm, and Jessica Kerr. Andy talked about the origin of his book The Pragmatic Programmer and his workshops on iterative and incremental development where he has students play Battleship while making all their shots upfront. He talked about one of my favorite iteration strategies, the walking skeleton, which he introduced back in 2000 in the same book. He talked about the need people have to be given an estimate and how it comes from a cognitive bias to have closure. He also talked about why scaling Agile doesn’t work at a lot of places: people are ignoring the context that made Agile work for the pilot teams. He suggests that instead of trying to “lock it down”, you should “open it up.” iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/120-expect-the-unexpected-with-andy-hunt/id1163023878?i=1000431206698&mt=2 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/expect-the-unexpected DAVID SOHMER ON SPAMCAST The Software Process and Measurement Cast podcast featured David Sohmer with host Tom Cagley. David started by saying that a key ingredient for an agile or lean transformation is to first help the organization understand the “why” of the transformation because things are going to get worse before they get better by design and when that happens, it is good to have already discussed the “why” so that the focus can always be on how to fix the problems that come up rather than falling back to the old way of doing things. This deeply resonated with me because I have seen people fall back to the old ways of working even after half-heartedly trying and even actually succeeding with more agile ways of working because their expectations were so different from reality, especially about the amount of work they would have to put in to see results. David also talked about the shift away from individual contributors and toward self-organizing multi-skilled teams and how this can be controversial in organizations that have weak teams and strong individual contributor heroes. He says part of the trick is getting people who actually want to be T-shaped rather than specialists. He went on to talk about intermediary groups who are not on the business side or the technology side but want to be the handoff between the two and create the documentation and have control and power in the organization and are quite destructive to the relationship between technology and the business. He talked about the things he aimed for during the transformations he has done such as ensuring XP technical practices are part of the transformation and he listed the things he tried to avoid. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/spamcast-536-executives-view-agile-transformations/id213024387?i=1000430995898&mt=2 Website link: http://spamcast.libsyn.com/spamcast-536-an-executives-view-of-agile-transformations-an-interview-with-david-sohmer JOSH SEIDEN ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Josh Seiden with host Vasco Duarte. Josh talked about how, in the early days, there was a focus on producing beautiful deliverables: wireframes, research reports, personas and other work on paper that teams had to interpret and act on. He described Lean UX as way of working in the UX problem space with less focus on deliverables and more focus on results. Josh described the “lean” in Lean UX as coming from knowing that the work we do with technology is filled with uncertainty, so the best way forward in those environments is to test our assumptions continuously. The activities of Lean UX then become: declaring assumptions, writing hypotheses, and thinking about your work as tests and experiments to help you learn. The people doing the work of Lean UX, he says, are small, cross-functional, colocated, collaborative teams that minimize handoffs and get different points of view that build on each other’s ideas. Vasco asked Josh how he defines the minimum viable product. Josh prefers the Eric Ries definition in which it represents the least amount of work that one can do to learn what one needs to learn next. Vasco also asked Josh what he means when he uses the word experiment. Josh clarified the difference between an experiment in the product development sense from simply abdicating decision-making. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/bonus-josh-seiden-on-lean-ux-toolbox-for-product-owners/id963592988?i=1000431422661&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2019/03/podcast/bonus-josh-seiden-on-lean-ux-a-toolbox-for-product-owners-and-agile-teams/ TIM HERBIG ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE The Product Experience podcast featured Tim Herbig with hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver. They discussed Tim’s new book, Lateral Leadership, and what he means by the title. He describes it as how to lead and influence people without formal authority. From conversations Tim had with product people, not many of them are aware that they have a leadership responsibility, but the implicit expectation from the environments and the stakeholders is that they step into leadership responsibility. He talked about how he recommends product people attend developer community-of-practice meetings to listen, learn how to ask better questions, show that they care, and gain credibility. Randy asked about warning signs of ineffectiveness as a lateral leader. Tim said a big warning sign is when people become resigned to just ask for more granular specs to simply get their job done. He says that this would show an unhealthy hierarchy in the team. Another potential warning sign is whether your peers feel safe about opening up about what really makes them struggle at work in the environment you have created. Lily asked about what tools Tim uses to set the mission or goal for the team. He referenced Stephen Bungay’s mission briefing idea from The Art Of Action. Tim likes the mission briefing because it helps you develop a shared language together and it lets product teams and the people within them have the autonomy to succeed in their specific job by improving the clarity you create up front. Randy compared the Bungay Mission Briefing framework to Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Tree concept. Lily asked whether the mission briefing is defined by just the product manager and team or other stakeholders as well. Tim says that, in the early stages of an idea, he uses it to capture his own thoughts. He may then do another iteration with the team in which he holds back his input. Then he runs it by his boss and boss’s boss to ensure there is alignment and buy-in. Lily asked about what happens when you don’t get alignment. Tim started his answer by distinguishing between alignment and agreement. He then quoted Jeff Bezo’s statements on being able to disagree and commit. He sees reaching alignment as something that would allow you to get started with an idea that you can adjust along the way. He says alignment is much easier to obtain when you don’t feel the need to also get agreement before you start anything. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-influence-without-power-tim-herbig-on-product/id1447100407?i=1000431209799&mt=2 Website link: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2019/03/how-to-influence-without-power-tim-herbig-on-the-product-experience/ WYATT JENKINS ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Wyatt Jenkins with host Eric Boduch. After a discussion of Wyatt’s career journey from disc jockey to product manager at Shutterstock, Optimizely, and now Patreon, they got into a discussion about the why and how of market-testing your features and ideas. For Wyatt, such tests are about understanding customers better and de-risking product ideas before rolling them out. Some of Wyatt’s favorite kinds of tests are the price tests that were popular at Shutterstock. Eric related how pricing seems to be particularly challenging for product managers. They got into a discussion of pricing tests like the painted door test and what to do for the customers who signed up for a service at prices lower and higher than the final chosen price at the end of the test. Eric asked what Wyatt would recommend to a product manager wanting to learn about pricing. Wyatt recommended the book Monetizing Innovation and he recommended reading up on the stories of the companies that have had some of the most successful pricing changes and some of most disastrous ones. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/wyatt-jenkins-joins-product-love-to-discuss-pricing/id1343610309?i=1000431181574&mt=2 Website link: https://productcraft.com/podcast/product-love-podcast-wyatt-jenkins-svp-of-product-of-patreon/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Mary and Tom Poppendieck on The Modern Agile Show, Daniel Mezick on Agile Uprising, Jennifer Tu, Zee Spencer, Thayer Prime, and Matt Patterson on Tech Done Right, James Colgan on This Is Product Management, and Matt Kaplan on Build by Drift. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting March 18, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. MARY AND TOP POPPENDIECK ON THE MODERN AGILE SHOW The Modern Agile Show podcast featured Mary and Tom Poppendieck with host Joshua Kerievsky. Recorded at the ScanAgile 2018 conference in Helsinki, Mary and Tom talked about their keynote on proxies and permissions. Inspired by Bret Victor’s statement that creators need an immediate connection to what they create, Tom and Mary presented on how the most effective teams are autonomous, asynchronous teams that are free of the proxies and permissions that separate creators from their creations.  This led to a discussion of lean thinking and Mary pointed out that the interesting thing about lean is that fast and safe go together. She gave the example of a construction site where nothing slows things down more than the occurrence of an accident. Mary talked about how Jeff Bezos is a good early example of someone who understood that if you want to get really, really big, you need to have autonomous agents acting independently and thinking for themselves. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/interview-with-mary-and-tom-poppendieck/id1326918248?i=1000407584120&mt=2 Website link: https://github.com/modernagile/podcast/blob/master/ModernAgileShow_26_Interview_with_Mary_and_Tom_Poppendieck.mp3 DANIEL MEZICK ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Daniel Mezick with hosts Jay Hrcsko and Brad Stokes. Daniel told the story of how the OpenSpace Agility movement was born from ideas he brought to a Scrum Gathering in Paris in 2013 under the name Open Agile Adoption.  He described Open Space as an invitational, all-hands meeting format in which there is an important issue, no one person has the answer, and there is an urgency to reach a decision. The Open Space format then creates the conditions for high performance through self-organization. Brad brought up that he imagines that OpenSpace Agility can be terrifying to some leaders. Daniel noted that the fear is due to the fact that we have failed the executive leadership of the largest organizations. In the name of “meeting them where they’re at,” we’ve traded away our principles and values and haven’t taught them anything in exchange. Daniel says, “Self-management scales. Not the framework.” This echoes Mary Poppendieck’s comments from the Modern Agile Show on how self-managing, autonomous, asynchronous agents are the only way to scale. Using Scrum as an example, Daniel said that, for the Product Owner to be successful, everyone in the organization must respect his or her decisions. If you do that, he says, you will immediately get culture change because you’ve refactored the authority distribution schema. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/openspace-agility-with-daniel-mezick/id1163230424?i=1000430511928&mt=2 Website link: https://agileuprising.libsyn.com/podcast/openspace-agility-with-daniel-mezick JENNIFER TU, ZEE SPENCER, THAYER PRIME, AND MATT PATTERSON ON TECH DONE RIGHT FROM TABLE XI The Tech Done Right podcast featured Jennifer Tu, Zee Spencer, Thayer Prime, and Matt Patterson with host Noel Rappin. Noel started by asking the guests what they thought the biggest mistake people make when trying to hire developers is. Thayer said, “One of the biggest mistakes anybody makes in hiring is hiring people they like and that they want to work with because they’re nice as opposed to hiring against a spec of what the worker is supposed to be doing.” This comment matches my own experience because this practice was rampant on previous teams of mine. Jennifer asked Matt how his company attracts candidates and he described using their current employee’s networks. Thayer called this the number one diversity mistake that all companies make.  Noel asked about what to do at the end of the process where you need to go from multiple opinions you need to turn into a single yes/no decision. Jennifer has everyone write down their impressions before they talk to anyone else and write down specifically what they observed to support the conclusion you come to. This is how I always do it, but I’m always surprised at how few teams practice this. Noel asked about good and bad uses of interview time. I loved Jennifer’s example of what a bad use of time it is to say, “Tell me about yourself.” Sometimes I have candidates jump into providing this kind of information even though I hadn’t asked. Such people steer the interview into a well-prepared speech of all their best qualities that doesn’t give you a full picture of the candidate. Thayer then made a comment about the tendency of interviewers to try to make the candidates sweat. I agree with Thayer that this is usually the exact opposite of what you want if you’re trying to make the interview as much like the actual job experience as possible. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-56-developer-hiring/id1195695341?i=1000430735771&mt=2 Website link: https://www.techdoneright.io/56 JAMES COLGAN ON THIS IS PRODUCT MANAGEMENT The This Is Product Management podcast featured James Colgan with host Mike Fishbein. James is a product manager for Outlook Mobile, which has 100 million monthly active users. James talked about his strategy for user growth being to make a product that is trusted by IT and loved by users. This led to their measures of success, such as usage and love for the product, measured by things like app store rating. James gave a great example of doing user research to create a product that is loved globally rather just in certain geographies. They did research in Asia and found drastic differences in the relationship between personal time and work time. They found North Americans and Europeans kept a strong delineation between work and personal time, but they found significant overlap between personal and work time among Asian customers. The data-driven nature of the product decisions payed dividends in both choosing the right features to work on and avoiding the wrong ones. They got the idea that they wanted to improve the ease of composing emails, but after looking at their instrumentation, they found that the average session length was 22 seconds. So instead they focused on consumption of emails over composition. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/188-listening-to-users-at-scale-is-product-management/id975284403?i=1000430581654&mt=2 Website link: https://www.thisisproductmanagement.com/episodes/listening-to-users-at-scale/ MATT KAPLAN ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build by Drift podcast featured Matt Kaplan with host Maggie Crowley. Matt talked about how the book Creativity Inc. by Pixar founder Ed Catmull inspired him to see the similarities between creating products and telling stories. He says that every great story has a protagonist (the target user), starts with tension (the problem the product is trying to solve), has an end state (the vision for solving the user’s problem), has a core belief (the product differentiators), and consists of a sequence of events to get to that end state (the work we need to do to get the users from the tension to the end state). Maggie asked what the benefits are of thinking about products in this way and he explained that product management is about solving problems and telling stories. Stories could be used to convince salespeople that you’re doing the right thing, to tell engineers about what they’re going to build, or to tell customers about what your team has built. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/build-19-how-great-products-are-like-great-stories/id1445050691?i=1000430866513&mt=2 Website link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swz0TnLwbrA&list=PL_sQbSaZtRqCn6JJSkjma79c8c4bLdaJH&index=4&t=0s FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Jorgen Hesselberg and Steven Wolff on Agile Amped, Melissa Perri on Agile Uprising, Eric Elliott on Simple Leadership, Liz Keogh on Being Human, and Alex Schladebeck on Test Talks. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting March 4, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. JORGEN HESSELBERG AND STEVEN WOLFF ON AGILE AMPED The Agile Amped podcast featured Jorgen Hesselberg and Steven Wolff with host Howard Sublett. I liked what Steven had to say about how new norms can come into being simply through inaction and how we want to be more intentional about creating norms. This comment reminded me of the discussion of norms in the book Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change by Grenny et al., a book I highly recommend. In my own work, I use working agreements with my team to intentionally develop team norms and hold each other accountable for them. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/change-the-norms-to-change-the-culture/id992128516?i=1000429382285&mt=2 Website link: https://solutionsiq.podbean.com/e/change-the-norms-to-change-the-culture/ MELISSA PERRI ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Melissa Perri with hosts Colleen Johnson, Troy Lightfoot, and Chris Murman. This episode caught my attention because I enjoyed Melissa’s last appearance on Agile Uprising which motivated me to pre-order her book The Build Trap back in November last year. I learned a lot from the book and it introduced me to the book The Art Of Action by Stephen Bungay, which I talked about in the last podcast episode. I liked Melissa’s description of product managers as bad idea terminators. I see this as more of a behavior during the convergent thinking phase of product design. Lack of focus is definitely a problem I see on product teams, so I can appreciate the idea of having someone to keep people focused on the most valuable problems to solve. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/escaping-the-build-trap-w-melissa-perri/id1163230424?i=1000429120613&mt=2 Website link: https://agileuprising.libsyn.com/podcast/escaping-the-build-trap-w-melissa-perri ERIC ELLIOTT ON SIMPLE LEADERSHIP The Simple Leadership podcast featured Eric Elliott with host Christian McCarrick. I appreciated Eric’s comment about the myth of the individual contributor engineer because I have seen developers being judged on simple, easy-to-measure metrics like closed ticket counts when a more appropriate metric would be one that takes into account their time spent mentoring and the benefits that such mentoring had on the team. Over the long term, I have seen the damage that judging engineers by closed ticket count does to a culture where everybody is incentivized to work in their individual silo and almost no mentoring takes place even from senior engineers for whom mentoring and coaching should be, in my opinion, a large part of their day. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-culture-can-help-your-teams-scale-with-eric-elliott/id1260241682?i=1000429163879&mt=2 Website link: http://simpleleadership.io/how-culture-can-help-you-scale-with-eric-elliott/ LIZ KEOGH ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Liz Keogh with host Richard Atherton. Liz talked about the Cynefin framework, psychological safety, and real options. I particularly liked her story of a team that invested in making changes easily reversible by creating a rollback mechanism for when a production release goes awry. She remarked on how this technical safety net provided psychological safety as well. I also liked her description of real options, which I have recently been reading about in the book Commitment by Olav Maassen, Chris Matts, and Chris Geary. Liz told a story about how conference organizers gave themselves options by over-ordering on the engraved trophies. The very affecting second half of this podcast episode was focused on the #metoo movement. Liz shared her experiences of being harassed and Richard confessed to his own poor behavior. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/47-1-complexity-2-exploring-metoo-with-liz-keogh/id1369745673?i=1000429964823&mt=2 Website link: http://shoutengine.com/BeingHuman/47-1-complexity-2-exploring-metoo-with-liz-keogh-73971 ALEX SCHLADEBECK ON TEST TALKS The Test Talks podcast featuring Alex Schladebeck with host Joe Colantonio. The title of the episode, “How to Listen to Your Tests”, immediately caught my attention since I have been encouraging co-workers to develop this skill ever since I read Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided By Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce, even going so far as to create a 10-minute YouTube video tutorial on how to Listen To The Tests last April. Joe and Alex talked about how she applies her training in linguistics in her career in software testing. It turns out that such training was actually helpful as it taught her how to move back and forth between detailed and abstract ways of thinking. They got into a discussion of test data management, which Alex likened to continuous integration because it is something that starts out being painful when you don’t address it often enough or when you push it onto the testers and it becomes easier the more often you pay attention to it and when you make it everyone’s responsibility. I also liked Alex’s story of a pelican encounter on an early-morning run coming to represent to her the unknown unknowns that exploratory testing helps you discover. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/240-how-to-listen-to-your-tests-with-alex-schladebeck/id826722706?i=1000429560907&mt=2 Website link: https://www.joecolantonio.com/testtalks/240-alex-schladebeck/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Jesse Fewell on Drunken PM, Dave Dame on Agile For Humans, Stephen Bungay on Boss Level, Julia Wester on SPAMCast, and Matty Stratton on Greater Than Code. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting February 18, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. JESSE FEWELL ON DRUNKEN PM The Drunken PM podcast featured Jesse Fewell with host Dave Prior. Dave and Jesse talked about the role of the Project Management Office (PMO) in organizations that are transitioning to Agile methods. Jesse talked about the invitation-orientation of the Agile PMO as defined in the Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK) in which the PMO acts to support teams as they learn to become agile. Dave brought up that most people he has spoken to from PMOs want everyone in the organization to “do Agile” the same way, which Jesse described as management junk food. This led to a further discussion about why people want consistency and why most of their reasons are due to misunderstandings and anti-patterns like optimizing resource efficiency over flow efficiency. They also delved into some of my favorite topics: the leadership circle concept from Anderson and Adams, the competing values framework, and Carol Dweck’s ideas around fixed and growth mindsets. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/evolving-role-pmo-in-agile-organization-catching-up/id1121124593?i=1000428696329&mt=2 Website link: http://drunkenpm.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-evolving-role-of-pmo-in-agile.html DAVE DAME ON AGILE FOR HUMANS The Agile For Humans podcast featured Dave Dame with host Ryan Ripley. Dave talked about growing up with cerebral palsy which led to a discussion about the opportunities brought about by improvements in accessibility in recent years. He talked about how a technology like Apple Pay that might seem like a relatively minor innovation to most people can be a complete game-changer for somebody with cerebral palsy as it lets them pay for something without having to trust a stranger to go into their wallet. He talked about how social media has given him a voice where in previous generations there just wouldn’t be the opportunity. Nowadays, he says, the biggest accessibility obstacles at work for him are not buildings lacking ramps and elevators, but the inaccessible nature of the company’s org charts. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/afh-105-agile-leadership-and-management-with-dave-dame/id991671232?i=1000429122862&mt=2 Website link: https://ryanripley.com/afh-105-agile-leadership-and-management-with-dave-dame/ STEPHEN BUNGAY ON BOSS LEVEL The Boss Level podcast featured Stephen Bungay with host Sami Honkonen. This episode is a few years old, but I recently finished reading Melissa Perri’s new book The Build Trap which referenced Stephen Bungay’s book The Art Of Action and I have been reading his work non-stop ever since, which got me interested in hearing more from him. I liked what he had to say about uncertainty’s central place in strategy and its distinction from risk. He also told a compelling story about a friend of his working in strategy at a UK retailer and how he went against the traditional rollout of store layout changes to all stores at once and instead rolled out changes a few stores at a time so that he could tweak the design as he went. This is something any entrepreneur would recognize as Lean Startup thinking, but it was completely foreign to the management of this retailer. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/stephen-bungay-and-strategy-under-uncertainty/id1041885043?i=1000376171555&mt=2 Website link: http://www.bosslevelpodcast.com/stephen-bungay-and-strategy-under-uncertainty/ MATTY STRATTON ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Matty Stratton with hosts Janelle Klein, Coraline Ehmke, and Jessica Kerr. They began the discussion by having Matty summarize his REdeploy conference talk ‘Fight, Flight, or Freeze – Releasing Organizational Trauma.’ Taking the idea of incidents and outages as a form of organizational trauma, Matty talked about the importance of being able to tell stories about your incident responses and how that helps the organization process the trauma. He cited John Allspaw regarding the idea that incident postmortems should ask questions that trigger conversations rather than give answers. Janelle brought up the point that the stories we tell are sometimes lies that cover up the trauma rather than address it when the environment of the organization lacks psychological safety. This brought them to a discussion of blameless postmortems and how a culture of blamelessness is so hard to build and so easy to lose. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/116-healing-organizational-trauma-with-matt-stratton/id1163023878?i=1000429285663&mt=2 Website link: http://www.greaterthancode.com/2019/02/06/116-healing-organizational-trauma-with-matt-stratton/ JULIA WESTER ON SPAMCAST The Software Process & Measurement podcast featured Julia Wester with host Thomas Cagley. Tom and Julia talked about the need for spectrum thinking, discussed the distinction between spectrum thinking and binary thinking, and then Julia described how she uses the Cynefin framework to identify whether or not a problem requires spectrum thinking. While this is a straightforward concept, I see binary thinking being applied all the time to address problems that require something more akin to spectrum thinking. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/spamcast-532-spectrum-thinking-interview-julia-wester/id213024387?i=1000429098317&mt=2 Website link: http://spamcast.libsyn.com/spamcast-532-spectrum-thinking-an-interview-with-julia-wester FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Mike Cottmeyer on Leading Agile, Daniel Goleman on Coaching For Leaders, Christina Wodtke on Build by Drift, Joe Vallone on Agile Amped, and Cindy Alvarez on Product Love. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting February 4, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. MIKE COTTMEYER ON LEADING AGILE The Leading Agile podcast featured Mike Cottmeyer with host Dave Prior. To kickoff 2019, Dave and Mike got together to talk about the year ahead. What I liked most about this conversation is how it got into a discussion of how to introduce Agile to an organization that is just beginning to move away from traditional waterfall methods. Mike talked about how meal prep services got his wife interested in cooking for the first time and contrasted this with the way Agile is often introduced to enterprises: exclusively showing the end state and leaving out details about what Agile looks like when you’re just starting. Just as the meal prep services show more respect for people beginning to take up cooking, Mike says that the Agile community needs to show more respect for people beginning their Agile journey. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/kicking-off-2019-w-mike-cottmeyer/id995790407?i=1000427423678&mt=2 Website link: https://www.leadingagile.com/podcast/kicking-off-2019-with-mike-cottmeyer/ DANIEL GOLEMAN ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Daniel Goleman with host Dave Stachowiak. As a fan of Daniel’s work on Emotional Intelligence, I was eager to hear this interview. Daniel talked about three different kinds of empathy: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern and compared and contrasted them. I loved what Daniel had to say about distinguishing between a healthy and an unhealthy showing of vulnerability, especially since I read so much advice telling leaders they need to be vulnerable. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/391-getting-better-at-empathy-with-daniel-goleman/id458827716?i=1000428075330&mt=2 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/391/ CHRISTINA WODTKE ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build by Drift podcast featured Christina Wodtke with host Maggie Crowley. Christina’s book, Radical Focus, has been showing up on the recommended lists of most of the people I follow, with some saying that it was the first book they read that really showed how to apply Objectives and Key Results or OKRs, so I was quick to hit play on this new-to-me podcast. What I heard was a great conversation on high-performing teams, avoiding traps in setting OKRs, and most importantly, the fact that OKRs are supposed to be stretch goals. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/build-15-christina-wodtke-on-radical-focus-living-your/id1445050691?i=1000426996091&mt=2 Website link: https://www.drift.com/blog/christina-wodtke-okrs/ JOE VALLONE ON AGILE AMPED The Agile Amped podcast featured Joe Vallone with host Adam Mattis. While there was a lot of talk about the Scaled Agile Framework in this conversation and I’m still working out how I feel about that, there was also a great conversation about lean startup ideas, particularly innovation accounting and Joe provided concrete examples from the SR21 Blackbird to self-driving cars to make his point. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/innovation-accounting/id992128516?i=1000427846817&mt=2 Website link: https://solutionsiq.podbean.com/e/innovation-accounting/ CINDY ALVAREZ ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Cindy Alvarez with host Eric Boduch. Cindy Alvarez is the author of a book in Eric Ries’ Lean series: Lean Customer Development. I loved how Cindy took the old saw about Henry Ford and the faster horse and talked about how maybe Ford should have rephrased the question to get the customers to talk about problems instead of solutions. I also loved her emphasis on good listening techniques and how this can mean having to tolerate an uncomfortable amount of silence. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/cindy-alvarez-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-customer/id1343610309?i=1000428744289&mt=2 Website link: https://productcraft.com/podcast/product-love-podcast-cindy-alvarez-product-manager-at-microsoft-and-author-of-lean-customer-development/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Brian Robertson on Being Human, Thomas Perry on Greater Than Code, Jeff Patton on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, story-telling on The Meta-Cast, and David Bland on Agile Amped. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting January 21, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. BRIAN ROBERTSON ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Brian Robertson with host Richard Atherton. Brian and Richard talked about the notion of Holacracy, what it takes to become a Holacracy, and they examined examples of holacracy in Medium and Zappos. I particularly liked what Brian had to say about empowerment. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/41-holacracy-strikes-back-with-brian-robertson/id1369745673?i=1000426987015&mt=2 Website link: http://www.firsthuman.com/podcast/41-holacracy-strikes-back-with-brian-robertson/ THOMAS PERRY ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Thomas Perry with hosts John K Sawers, Janelle Klein, Rein Henrichs, and Jessica Kerr. I found myself nodding my head to much of what Thomas was saying, and I particularly liked his comparison of a well-functioning standup, emotionally, to a fistfight. I have seen enough disengaged teams and their standup meetings to appreciate those rare times when I witnessed the kind of emotionally engaged standup meetings that Thomas describes. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/111-thermodynamics-of-emotion-with-thomas-perry/id1163023878?i=1000426851393&mt=2 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/2019/01/02/111-thermodynamics-of-emotion-with-thomas-perry/ JEFF PATTON ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Jeff Patton with host Shane Hastie in an episode recorded at the Agile 2018 conference. They talked about the difference between products and projects and the client-vendor anti-pattern in which “IT” focuses on satisfying “the business” rather than satisfying the ultimate customer. Shane asked whether the concept of “product owner” fixes this problem and Jeff responded that he recently figured out why he has always bristled at the term product owner and it is because it steals ownership of the product from the team. Jeff generalized this to the anti-pattern of separating deciders from executers, talked about how the earliest Scrum papers had no concept of product owner, and suggested that we should instead think about the cross-functional teaming that the Balanced Team movement promotes. Jeff talked about the VC-funded tech startup failure rate after two years being eighty percent and how successful companies measure outcomes and test their ideas. I liked Jeff’s The Matrix metaphor of how most of us, once exposed to measuring whether our product is actually working in the market, want to take the blue pill and go back to the simplicity of optimizing only for time, cost, and scope. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/jeff-patton-on-noprojects-and-product-management/id1161431874?i=1000427159460&mt=2 Website link: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/noprojects-product-management STORYTELLING ON THE META-CAST In a recent episode of the Meta-Cast podcast,  hosts Bob Galen and Josh Anderson talked about storytelling in response to a question from a member of the kazi.io Twitch/Discord audience. Bob talked about the power of making your stories personal, citing Steve Jobs’ commencement speech and contrasting this with the speeches of pompous speakers. Josh spoke about his own experience as a father of small children in seeing how almost everything communicated to children takes the form of stories. Bob pointed out that storytelling is a skill that improves with practice and becoming a more effective communicator involves practicing the art of storytelling. Josh cited two examples of where he learned to improve his storytelling: reading Stephen King’s book On Writing (which itself is written as a story), and giving a conference talk in which an experienced ToastMaster had Josh rewrite it to tell a story. Bob talked about mining for stories by paying attention to all the interesting events going on around you in the workplace as a source of stories. Bob tied this all back to what user stories are supposed to be and how, when he teaches that in workshops, he sees the group’s energy level go up. In the end, they decided that they need to do a future episode on stories presented in the form of a story. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-140-storytelling-in-agile/id356489089?i=1000427251983&mt=2 Website link: https://www.meta-cast.com/2019/01/episode-140-storytelling-in-agile.html DAVID BLAND ON AGILE AMPED The Agile Amped podcast featured David Bland with host Howard Sublett. David talked about how he is interested in how teams fold discovery work into delivery work and how to develop in them a healthy skepticism of their backlogs. He described his love for the framing of desirability, viability, and feasibility and how most teams he encounters think exclusively about feasibility. He also examined the exhausting nature of regularly validating ideas with customers only to have them reject most of them, which recalls Jeff Patton’s comment above about wanting to take the blue pill. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/lean-experiments-and-design-thinking-for-your-backlog/id992128516?i=1000426931640&mt=2 Website link: https://solutionsiq.podbean.com/e/lean-experiments-and-design-thinking-for-your-backlog/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Courtney Eckhardt on Greater Than Code, Teresa Torres on Product Love, Johanna Rothman on Developer On Fire, Jeff Patton on Scrum Master Toolbox, and Jeff Gothelf on Scrum Master Toolbox. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two weeks period starting January 7, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. COURTNEY ECKHARDT ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Courtney Eckhardt with hosts John K Sawers, Sam Livingston-Gray, Jamey Hampton and Coraline Ada Ehmke. It was great to hear another conversation that built upon the human factors conversations with Steven Shorrock and John Allspaw in previous episodes. I like how Courtney highlighted the importance of good communication in incident response by helping us picture what the lack of good communication looks like from the customer’s point of view. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/110-human-incident-response-with-courtney-eckhardt/id1163023878?i=1000426093173&mt=2 Website link: http://www.greaterthancode.com/2018/12/19/110-human-incident-response-with-courtney-eckhardt/ TERESA TORRES ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Teresa Torres with host Eric Boduch. I felt that, while A/B testing is a powerful and useful technique, Teresa makes a great point that it is not appropriate in all circumstances and she lists several other techniques that teams should consider when doing product discovery. I also liked the bloodletting metaphor. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/teresa-torres-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product/id1343610309?i=1000425622664&mt=2 Website link: https://productcraft.com/podcast/product-love-podcast-teresa-torres-product-discovery-coach-and-writer-of-product-talk/ JOHANNA ROTHMAN ON DEVELOPER ON FIRE The Developer On Fire podcast featured Johanna Rothman with host Dave Rael. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone make a distinction between management and leadership. I always felt that it let managers off the hook. I feel that a manager needs to be a good leader to do his or her job well and vice versa. Johanna captured that sentiment. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-402-johanna-rothman-learning-and-delivering/id1006105326?i=1000426413335&mt=2 Website link: https://developeronfire.com/podcast/episode-402-johanna-rothman-learning-and-delivering JEFF PATTON ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Jeff Patton with host Vasco Duarte. Jeff talked about how, when he got into software development, he quickly learned that building software was about making as many people as happy as you could while still making money. When he found himself on XP and Agile teams in the first decade of the 2000s, he felt something was missing. When he later fell in with product people, he realized that the missing piece was product thinking. They discussed how Jeff came up with user story mapping and Jeff cited three books that emphasize product thinking: Inspired, Escaping The Build Trap, and Inspired. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/product-owner-role-what-scrum-masters-can-do-to-help/id963592988?i=1000426507266&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2018/12/podcast/jeff-patton-shares-his-view-on-the-product-owner-role-and-what-scrum-masters-can-do-to-help/ JEFF GOTHELF ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Jeff Gothelf with host Vasco Duarte. Vasco asked Jeff about the key ingredients in Agile transformations that get organizations to continuously think about how the product they’re creating relates to the business and the market. Jeff gave a great answer that finished with an example of how even a change in the name of the team changes the way that the team thinks of themselves and their mission. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-redefine-measure-success-for-software-development/id963592988?i=1000426560415&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2018/12/podcast/jeff-gothelf-on-how-to-redefine-the-measure-of-success-for-software-development/ Feedback Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website: https://www.thekguy.com/ Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus

Clare Sudbery on Agile Amped, Dennis Stevens on Leading Agile, Howard H White on Coaching For Leaders, Mike Burrows on Being Human, and Dominic Price on Engineering Culture by InfoQ. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting December 24, 2018. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. CLARE SUDBERY ON AGILE AMPED The Agile Amped podcast featured Clare Sudbery with host Chris Murman. Clare talked about leaving the IT industry due to boredom and taking up a career teaching mathematics and described how she regained an interest in IT and became a lead consultant developer at ThoughtWorks. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/lets-stop-making-people-feel-stupid/id992128516?i=1000423906096&mt=2 Website link: https://www.solutionsiq.com/resource/agile-amped-podcast/lets-stop-making-people-feel-stupid/ DENNIS STEVENS ON LEADING AGILE The Leading Agile podcast featured Dennis Stevens with host Dave Prior. Dennis talked about how to connect strategy to execution in an organization. Dennis then spoke about optionality and had a great quote about how organizations get into situations where responding to change becomes difficult: "An interesting phenomenon that you see in organizations is everybody wants to start their projects on day one because they want to get their money starting to be spent before their stuff gets de-prioritized. Once you've started spending it, it's really hard for organizations to stop projects. The net result of this is everything is being worked on all at the same time and there's no stopping point in the middle for somebody to come in and go, "Hey, wait! We've learned something; we want to change," because we're not sequencing the work. We're not flowing the work through the system in a way that we can adapt. So there's no optionality. How do we break work down so we can finish stuff? Even if it's not the most important thing, you're still actually better off, from an optionality and adaptability standpoint and from a risk and a quality standpoint, finishing one thing before you start the second." iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/designing-feedback-driven-strategic-execution-model/id995790407?i=1000425277842&mt=2 Website link: https://www.leadingagile.com/podcast/designing-a-feedback-driven-strategic-execution-model-w-dennis-stevens/ HOWARD H WHITE ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featuring Howard H White with host Dave Stachowiak. This is probably my favorite interview in quite some time. Howard tells the story of transferring schools in junior high so that he could go to school with a girl he fancied, only to end up at the new school all alone, knowing nobody and being the only black kid in ninth grade. After being inspired by a conversation with the new school's basketball coach, he takes up basketball, begins to excel at it, becomes class president, gets injured, but then pivots into a job at Nike. He then tells the story of how he convinced the co-founder of Nike to let him establish the Jordan brand even though Michael Jordan had retired. This is a must-listen. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/384-your-attitude-defines-your-altitude/id458827716?i=1000425474718&mt=2 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/384/ MIKE BURROWS ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Mike Burrows with host Richard Atherton. Mike talked about his career path, what led him to Agile, Lean, and Kanban, and he told a story of an organization that had more projects in progress than people in the company. He talked about how the use of pair-programming brought the work-in-progress down below the number of programmers on his team. Richard asked him why he thought pair-programming helped so much with this and Mike talked about how pairs are more likely than individuals to ask for help when they get stuck rather than picking up a new task and increasing the work-in-progress. Mike talked about working with David Anderson on a project in South Africa where they encountered engineers who had gotten into their mid-twenties without ever having seen a project get completed. He talked about how a generation of managers were taught that Waterfall was the proper way to develop software and he believes that there is still an industry that supports that worldview. He says he refuses to describe Agile now from left-to-right by starting with backlogs and only describes it from right-to-left by starting with outcomes. Everything else, as in the quote above, he sees as pandering to those who still have the Waterfall mindset. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/38-start-with-the-end-in-mind-with-mike-burrows/id1369745673?i=1000425784892&mt=2 Website link: http://shoutengine.com/BeingHuman/38-start-with-the-end-in-mind-with-mike-burrows-70596 DOMINIC PRICE ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Dominic Price with host Shane Hastie. Dominic talked about what led him to be a keynote speaker at Agile 2018 in which he spoke about how many agile "transformations" focus on becoming Agile through the following of rituals rather than focusing on moving to new ways of working. He criticized the focus on Agile as an end state instead of continuous evolution. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/dominic-price-on-why-agile-is-not-always-the-answer/id1161431874?i=1000424791583&mt=2 Website link: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/agile-is-not-always-the-answer FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Clay Clark is explaining what a world class and gorgeous website looks like and how to give feedback in a way that people will receive it.

Today we will be talking with Steve Smith about proven leadership skills to grow by. He's the president of the Growth Source Coaching, in Orange County, California. He provides performance coaching services to business owners, and a variety of professional industrial and trade industry. He’s focused on helping people replace limited thinking, unproductive habits, and poor decisions.  Making with confidence, building strategies for reaching truly extraordinary outcomes is what he is widely known for. Steve speaks to businesses, professional organizations, co-host business podcast and writes to numerous publications. Today we are going to be talking about Steve’s new book, Leadership Axioms. Leadership is something we all look at and we look at it differently. If we want to become a leader, we need to become a leader that we are willing to follow. Leadership is all about dealing with people. It involves management systems and how the business operates on a whole. It is directed towards how do you worked with and get the most out of the people that you hire, the people that are working for you and your company. So, many times initially the reaction of some people are how they want their employees to work as to how they want it to be, which is the typical approach of not looking who they want to be in order for their employees to follow them. The working environment in the present times has radically changed that it doesn’t almost work anymore. The norm used to be “Do as I say and not as I do”. But now if we are to look at things in a different perspective, the people you oversee are what matters. If they operate on a top-notch level it reflects on you. The leadership and growth principles are there but this time, being a leader is about what we are doing together. When people trust you, care about you, when they are willing to extend great amount of time and effort in helping you achieve your goal it’s when you are assured that you hit the mark because people feel that they the leader they are following are also interested about them, this person thinks about the well-being of their employees and hone them in the best way possible. But, when you are working with someone who is all about them, all about what they want then the natural reaction would be is that the people will be looking for a different company to work for. When you are hiring someone, in the first 30 days, as a boss you have to set proper expectation and then ask them what exactly is important for them and you will be surprised as to what they will tell you and this, in result, will help you give the right assistance for them in the long run. The title of this book is interesting. Axiom means are well aged, universally accepted truths needing no proof. The book contains 14 principles but we’ll be talking some of it. Axiom 2: Accountability – We are generally not taught to be accountable to ourselves so if somewhere along the line, we have that initiative to commit to a great work and desire to help people to do their best on a top-notch level, then you are able to show good leadership by making them perform to the best of their ability. Axiom 3: Building Trust – When you provide genuine feedback to your employees in private and on the other hand you acknowledge their good work publicly this makes them feel that the trust is there because they will see the importance of being an employee to your company. They will know that their boss does care about them. Axiom 6: Delegation – Balancing the work loads towards your staff involves making sure you are delegating it to the right people. Find a person who is suited to do the work. Axiom 8: Feedback – Ask permission first or it will be viewed as unwanted or unappreciated. Develop it in a way that as a boss you are there to hear what they are truly saying and don’t force your beliefs on them. Ask them if they are willing to hear what you want to say.   You may visit this website to know more details about Steve Smith: www.growthsourcecoaching.com ***There’s a link in the website for free consultation and the book if in case you want to download it.     There are so many ways to do almost free marketing you just have to think about it or you could just go to the web site and pick up the free download.     4 Hot Marketing Strategies That Can Flood Your Business with Customers   If you have a story to tell and would like to be a guest on this podcast email my assistant Shell at Shell@contractorssecretweapon.com   and she will send you our guest sheet.       Our sponsors     Would you like your phone to ring more with qualified buyers people looking to buy now? Then let’s make that happen. Best Home Services Leads is dedicated to making your phone ring with qualified buyers wanting to buy now. Go to and fill out the form to get more information.       http://contractorssecretweapon.com/money      How about 100 free postcards sent out to your best prospective customers. Radius Bomb sends out hyper targeted, laser focused postcards using a map while sitting in your under ware at your kitchen table then go to http://contractorssecretweapon.com/radiusbomb      Painting Contractors, get up to a 24% better response rate just for having the right memorable telephone number 1-800-PRO-PAINTER.Check out your area before someone beats you to it and it’s not available. https://www.1800propainter.com/  

Wondering what people think about your products or services?    Why not ask your customers?   A few recent examples reminded me how valuable this is. From a restaurant offering a discount for providing feedback to an app that asked for testimonials in exchange for free prizes, these kinds of questions can provide you with invaluable information about your company.    It's not your customers' responsibility provide you with their reviews. It's your responsibility to ask.   SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/jaybaer00   SPROUT SOCIAL SHOUT OUT   Today's Sprout Social shout out goes to Heidi Cohen (http://twitter.com/heidicohen), a prolific writer and digital marketing professional who blogs at HeidiCohen.com.    OUR SPONSORS   Candidio (http://candidio.com), a simple and affordable video production company. Follow @candidio on Twitter.    Sprout Social (http://sproutsocial.com), a social media management and analytics company that Jay uses for much of his social media every day. Follow @sproutsocial on Twitter.   ABOUT JAY TODAY   Jay Today is a video podcast with 3-minute lessons and commentary on business, social media and digital marketing from New York Times best-selling author and venture capitalist Jay Baer. Join Jay daily for insights on trends, quick tips, observations and inspiration at http://bit.ly/JayToday.