Podcasts about innovation games

Joel Bancroft-Connors: The 90-Day Rule—Building Trust Before Disrupting the Status Quo Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Joel shares his first experience as a CSM at a traditional hard drive manufacturing company, where he learned the art of patient change management. Tasked with bridging the gap between a rigid mothership company and their agile startup division, Joel discovered the power of focusing on principles rather than processes. For six months, he concentrated on creating transparency and shifting focus from status reporting to "getting to done" without ever mentioning Scrum or Agile.  His approach followed what he calls the 90-day rule: "In the first 90 days - do no harm, but then have a plan to do something." By listening first and building trust, Joel helped the team deliver a product in just three months. He emphasizes the importance of making people feel valued and using "future perfect thinking" to envision desired outcomes before introducing change. In this episode we refer to Luke Hohmann's Innovation Games, the website and resource Manager-Tools.com, and Daniel Pink's book Drive. Self-reflection Question: Are you rushing to implement changes, or are you taking time to build trust and understand the current state before introducing new practices? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Welcome to another episode of "Behind the Numbers" with your host Dave Bookbinder. This week, we have the pleasure of chatting with Andi Simon, a pioneering corporate anthropologist, renowned podcaster, and author of "Women Mean Business". Dive into the world of corporate anthropology and discover how Andi aids organizations in navigating transformative changes by understanding the data behind their operations in a new light. During our conversation, Andi shares her fascinating journey from academia to finance and healthcare, ultimately leading to the creation of her own business. With over 23 years of experience, she reveals how companies hire her not just for what she does, but for what they need: to unlock the potential behind data and push beyond the obvious, identifying gaps and opportunities for innovation. Andi explains how anthropologists uniquely explore company dynamics, emphasizing observation and ethnographic methods to gain profound insights. From embedding herself in senior living communities to analyzing healthcare strategies, she discusses her innovative methods of understanding client requirements and enhancing business performance. Additionally, familiarize yourself with Andi's authored works, "On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights" and "Women Mean Business", and gain valuable strategies on how to look at business data from a strategic perspective. Tune in to understand how corporate anthropology can be a game-changer in deciphering complex data landscapes and shaping future business success. About Our Guest: Andi Simon PhD is the founder of Simon Associates Management Consultants LLC (SAMC). She launched SAMC in 2002 to apply anthropology's methods, tools, and theory to businesses in need of change. As a Corporate Anthropologist she helps executives see their companies with more observant eyes, achieve “aha!” moments, allowing them to discover new and profitable opportunities. By applying the concepts, methods, and tools of anthropology to business environments, she turns observation into innovation and revitalizes businesses seeking growth. She is author of two-award winning books: “On the Brink: A fresh lens To Take Your Business to New Heights” and “Rethink: Smashing the Myths of Women in Business.” Andi has co-authored a new book published in September 2023 entitled “Women Mean Business: Over 500 Insights from Extraordinary Leaders to Spark Your Success”. Her work as a corporate anthropologist has led to clients across the globe delivering both keynotes and conducting workshops. As a trained practitioner of Blue Ocean Strategy and Innovation Games, she has conducted almost five hundred workshops on Blue Ocean Strategy and Culture Change. Dr Simon has also developed and run Leadership Academies for her clients. About the Host: Dave Bookbinder is known as an expert in business valuation and he is the person that business owners and entrepreneurs reach out to when they need to know what their most important assets are worth. Known as a collaborative adviser, Dave has served thousands of client companies of all sizes and industries.  Dave is the author of two #1 best-selling books about the impact of human capital (PEOPLE!) on the valuation of a business enterprise called The NEW ROI: Return On Individuals & The NEW ROI: Going Behind The Numbers.  He's on a mission to change the conversation about how the accounting world recognizes the value of people's contributions to a business enterprise, and to quantify what every CEO on the planet claims: “Our people are this company's most valuable asset.” He's also the host of the highly rated Behind The Numbers business podcast which is enjoyed in more than 100 countries.

Bio Luke Hohmann is Chief Innovation Officer of Applied Frameworks. Applied Frameworks helps companies create more profitable software-enabled solutions. A serial entrepreneur, Luke founded, bootstrapped, and sold the SaaS B2B collaboration software company Conteneo to Scaled Agile, Inc. Conteneo's Weave platform is now part of SAFe Studio. A SAFe® Fellow, prolific author, and trailblazing innovator, Luke's contributions to the global agile community include contributing to SAFe, five books, Profit Streams™, Innovation Games®, Participatory Budgeting at enterprise scale, and a pattern language for market-driven roadmapping. Luke is also co-founder of Every Voice Engaged Foundation, where he partnered with The Kettering Foundation to create Common Ground for Action, the world's first scalable platform for deliberative decision-making. Luke is a former National Junior Pairs Figure Skating Champion and has an M.S.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. Luke loves his wife and four kids, his wife's cooking, and long runs in the California sunshine and Santa Cruz mountains.    Interview Highlights 01:30 Organisational Behaviour & Cognitive Psychology 06:10 Serendipity 09:30 Entrepreneurship 16:15 Applied Frameworks 20:00 Sustainability 20:45 Software Profit Streams 23:00 Business Model Canvas 24:00 Value Proposition Canvas 24:45 Setting the Price 28:45 Customer Benefit Analysis 34:00 Participatory Budgeting 36:00 Value Stream Funding 37:30 The Color of Money 42:00 Private v Public Sector 49:00 ROI Analysis 51:00 Innovation Accounting    Connecting   LinkedIn: Luke Hohmann on LinkedIn Company Website: Applied Frameworks    Books & Resources   ·         Software Profit Streams(TM): A Guide to Designing a Sustainably Profitable Business: Jason Tanner, Luke Hohmann, Federico González ·         Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur ·         Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, Trish Papadakos ·         Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play: Luke Hohmann ·         The ‘Color of Money' Problem: Additional Guidance on Participatory Budgeting - Scaled Agile Framework ·         The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Eric Ries ·         Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change 2, Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres ·         The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering: Brooks, Frederick Phillips ·         Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud ·         Ponyboy: A Novel, Eliot Duncan ·         Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel, Bonnie Garmus, Miranda Raison, Bonnie Garmus, Pandora Sykes ·         What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, Oprah Winfrey, Bruce D. Perry ·         Training | Applied Frameworks   Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.  Ula Ojiaku   So I have with me Luke Hohmann, who is a four time author, three time founder, serial entrepreneur if I say, a SAFe fellow, so that's a Skilled Agile Framework fellow, keynote speaker and an internationally recognised expert in Agile software development. He is also a proud husband and a father of four. So, Luke, I am very honoured to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. Thank you for making the time. Luke Hohmann Thank you so much for having me, I'm very happy to be here, and hi everyone who's listening. Ula Ojiaku Yes, I'm sure they're waving back at you as well. I always start my conversations with my guests to find out about them as individuals, you know, so who is Luke? You have a BSc in Computer Science and an MSc in Computer Science and Engineering, but you also studied Cognitive Psychology and Organisational Behaviour in addition to Data Structures and Artificial Intelligence. AI is now making waves and is kind of at the forefront, which is interesting, you had the foresight to also look into these. So my question is, what took you down this path? Luke Hohmann Sure. I had a humble beginning in the world of technology. I worked for a large company, Electronic Data Systems, and it was founded in the mid 60s by a gentleman named Ross Perot, and it became a very, very large company. So my first job at Electronic Data Systems was working in a data centre, and we know what data centres are, but back then, data centres were different because they were predominantly mainframe-based data centres, and I would crawl underneath the floor, cabling the computers and cabling networking equipment. Now, when we think networking, we're really thinking one of two kinds of networking. We think of wireless networking or we think of some form of internet networking, but back in those days, there were varieties of network protocols, literally the standards that we use now weren't invented yet. So it was mainframe networking protocols and dial ups and other forms of networking protocols. From there, I worked my way from beneath the ground up. I had some great managers who saw someone who was worthy of opportunity and they gave me opportunity and it was great. And then eventually I started working in electronic data systems and there was, the first wave of AI came in the mid 80s and that's when we were doing things like building expert systems, and I managed to create with a colleague of mine, who's emerged as my best friend, a very successful implementation of an expert system, an AI-based expert system at EDS, and that motivated me to finish off my college degree, I didn't have my college degree at the time. So EDS supported me in going to the University of Michigan, where as you said, I picked up my Bachelor's and Master's degree, and my advisor at the time was Elliot Soloway, and he was doing research in how programmers program, what are the knowledge structures, what are the ways in which we think when we're programming, and I picked up that research and built programming environments, along with educational material, trying to understand how programmers program and trying to build educational material to teach programming more effectively. That's important because it ignited a lifelong passion for developing education materials, etc. Now the cognitive psychology part was handled through that vein of work, the organisational behaviour work came as I was a student at Michigan. As many of us are when we're in college, we don't make a lot of money, or at university we're not wealthy and I needed a job and so the School of Organisational Behaviour had published some job postings and they needed programmers to program software for their organisational behaviour research, and I answered those ads and I became friends and did the research for many ground-breaking aspects of organisational behaviour and I programmed, and in the process of programming for the professors who were in the School of Organisational Behaviour they would teach me about organisational behaviour and I learned many things that at the time were not entirely clear to me, but then when I graduated from university and I became a manager and I also became more involved in the Agile movement, I had a very deep foundation that has served me very well in terms of what do we mean when we say culture, or what do we mean when we talk about organisational structures, both in the small and in the large, how do we organise effectively, when should we scale, when should we not scale, etc. So that's a bit about my history that I think in terms of the early days helped inform who I am today. Ula Ojiaku Wow, who would have thought, it just reminds me of the word serendipity, you know, I guess a happy coincidence, quote unquote, and would there be examples of where the cognitive psychology part of it also helped you work-wise? Luke Hohmann Yeah, a way to think about cognitive psychology and the branch that, I mean there's, psychology is a huge branch of study, right? So cognitive psychology tends to relate to how do we solve problems, and it tends to focus on problem solving where n = 1 and what I mean by n is the number of participants, and where n is just me as an individual, how do I solve the problems that I'm facing? How do I engage in de-compositional activities or refinement or sense making? Organisational behaviour deals with n > 1. So it can deal with a team of, a para-bond, two people solving problems. It can deal with a small team, and we know through many, many, many decades of research that optimal team structures are eight people or less. I mean, we've known this for, when I say decades I mean millennia. When you look at military structure and military strategy, we know that people need to be organised into much smaller groups to be effective in problem solving and to move quickly. And then in any organisational structure, there's some notion of a team of teams or team engagement. So cognitive psychology, I think, helps leaders understand individuals and their place within the team. And now we talk about, you know, in the Agile community, we talk about things like, I want T-shaped people, I want people with common skills and their area of expertise and by organising enough of the T's, I can create a whole and complete team. I often say I don't want my database designer designing my user interface and I don't want my user interface designer optimising my back end database queries, they're different skills. They're very educated people, they're very sophisticated, but there's also the natural feeling that you and I have about how do I gain a sense of self, how do I gain a sense of accomplishment, a sense of mastery? Part of gaining a sense of mastery is understanding who you are as a person, what you're good at. In Japanese, they would call that Ikigai, right, what are the intersections of, you know, what do I love, what am I good at, what can I make a living at and what do people need, right? All of these intersections occur on an individual level, and then by understanding that we can create more effective teams. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. I've really learned something key here, the relationship between cognitive psychology and organisational behaviour, so thanks for breaking it down. Now, can we go quickly to your entrepreneurship? So there must be three times you started three times a company and you've been successful in that area. What exactly drives you when it comes to establishing businesses and then knowing when to move on? Luke Hohmann Sure. I think it's a combination of reflecting on my childhood and then looking at how that informs someone when they're older, and then opportunities, like you said, serendipity, I think that's a really powerful word that you introduced and it's a really powerful concept because sometimes the serendipity is associated with just allowing yourself to pursue something that presents itself. But when I was young, my father died and my mum had to raise six kids on her own, so my dad died when I was four, my mum raised six kids on her own. We were not a wealthy family, and she was a school teacher and one of the things that happened was, even though she was a very skilled school teacher, there were budget cuts and it was a unionised structure, and even though she was ranked very highly, she lost her job because she was low on the hiring totem pole in terms of how the union worked. It was very hard and of course, it's always hard to make budget cuts and firing but I remember when I was very young making one of those choices saying, I want to work in a field where we are more oriented towards someone's performance and not oriented on when they were hired, or the colour of their skin, or their gender or other things that to me didn't make sense that people were making decisions against. And while it's not a perfect field for sure, and we've got lots of improvement, engineering in general, and of course software engineering and software development spoke to me because I could meet people who were diverse or more diverse than in other fields and I thought that was really good. In terms of being an entrepreneur, that happened serendipitously. I was at the time, before I became an entrepreneur in my last job, was working for an Israeli security firm, and years and years ago, I used to do software anti-piracy and software security through physical dongles. This was made by a company called Aladdin Knowledge Systems in Israel, and I was the head of Engineering and Product Management for the dongle group and then I moved into a role of Business Development for the company. I had a couple of great bosses, but I also learned how to do international management because I had development teams in Israel, I had development teams in Munich, I had development teams in Portland, Oregon, and in the Bay Area, and this was in the 2000s. This is kind of pre-Agile, pre-Salt Lake City, pre-Agile Manifesto, but we were figuring things out and blending and working together. I thought things were going pretty well and I enjoyed working for the Israelis and what we were doing, but then we had the first Gulf War and my wife and I felt that maybe traveling as I was, we weren't sure what was going to happen in the war, I should choose something different. Unfortunately, by that time, we had been through the dot-bomb crisis in Silicon Valley. So it's about 2002 at the time that this was going on, and there really weren't jobs, it was a very weird time in Silicon Valley. So in late 2002, I sent an email to a bunch of friends and I said, hey, I'm going to be a consultant, who wants to hire me, that was my marketing plan, not very clever, and someone called me and said, hey, I've got a problem and this is the kind of thing that you can fix, come consult with us. And I said, great. So I did that, and that started the cleverly named Luke Hohmann Consulting, but then one thing led to another and consulting led to opportunities and growth and I've never looked back. So I think that there is a myth about people who start companies where sometimes you have a plan and you go execute your plan. Sometimes you find the problem and you're solving a problem. Sometimes the problem is your own problem, as in my case I had two small kids and a mortgage and I needed to provide for my family, and so the best way to do that at the time was to become a consultant. Since then I have engaged in building companies, sometimes some with more planning, some with more business tools and of course as you grow as an entrepreneur you learn skills that they didn't teach you in school, like marketing and pricing and business planning etc. And so that's kind of how I got started, and now I have kind of come full circle. The last company, the second last company I started was Conteneo and we ended up selling that to Scaled Agile, and that's how I joined the Scaled Agile team and that was lovely, moving from a position of being a CEO and being responsible for certain things, to being able to be part of a team again, joining the framework team, working with Dean Leffingwell and other members of the framework team to evolve the SAFe framework, that was really lovely. And then of course you get this entrepreneurial itch and you want to do something else, and so I think it comes and goes and you kind of allow yourself those opportunities. Ula Ojiaku Wow, yours is an inspiring story. And so what are you now, so you've talked about your first two Startups which you sold, what are you doing now? Luke Hohmann Yeah, so where I'm at right now is I am the Chief Innovation Officer for a company, Applied Frameworks. Applied Frameworks is a boutique consulting firm that's in a transition to a product company. So if this arm represents our product revenue and this arm represents our services revenue, we're expanding our product and eventually we'll become a product company. And so then the question is, well, what is the product that we're working on? Well, if you look at the Agile community, we've spent a lot of time creating and delivering value, and that's really great. We have had, if you look at the Agile community, we've had amazing support from our business counterparts. They've shovelled literally millions and millions of dollars into Agile training and Agile tooling and Agile transformations, and we've seen a lot of benefit from the Agile community. And when I say Agile, I don't mean SAFe or Scrum or some particular flavour of Agile, I just mean Agile in general. There's been hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars shoved into Agile and we've created a lot of value for that investment. We've got fewer bugs in our software because we've got so many teams doing XP driven practices like Test Driven Development, we've got faster response times because we've learned that we can create smaller releases and we've created infrastructure that lets us do deployments automatically, even if you're doing embedded systems, we figured out how to do over the air updates, we've figured out how to create infrastructure where the cars we're driving are now getting software updates. So we've created for our business leaders lots of value, but there's a problem in that value. Our business leaders now need us to create a profit, and creating value and creating a profit are two different things. And so in the pursuit of value, we have allowed our Agile community to avoid and or atrophy on skills that are vital to product management, and I'm a classically trained Product Manager, so I've done market segmentation and market valuation and market sizing, I've done pricing, I've done licensing, I've done acquisitions, I've done compliance. But when you look at the traditional definition of a Product Owner, it's a very small subset of that, especially in certain Agile methods where Product Owners are team centric, they're internal centric. That's okay, I'm not criticising that structure, but what's happened is we've got people who no longer know how to price, how to package, how to license products, and we're seeing companies fail, investor money wasted, too much time trying to figure things out when if we had simply approached the problem with an analysis of not just what am I providing to you in terms of value, but what is that value worth, and how do I structure an exchange where I give you value and you give me money? And that's how businesses survive, and I think what's really interesting about this in terms of Agile is Agile is very intimately tied to sustainability. One of the drivers of the Agile Movement was way back in the 2000s, we were having very unsustainable practices. People would be working 60, 80, death march weeks of grinding out programmers and grinding out people, and part of the Agile Movement was saying, wait a minute, this isn't sustainable, and even the notion of what is a sustainable pace is really vital, but a company cannot sustain itself without a profit, and if we don't actually evolve the Agile community from value streams into profit streams, we can't help our businesses survive. I sometimes ask developers, I say, raise your hand if you're really embracing the idea that your job is to make more money for your company than they pay you, that's called a profit, and if that's not happening, your company's going to fail. Ula Ojiaku They'll be out of a job. Luke Hohmann You'll be out of a job. So if you want to be self-interested about your future, help your company be successful, help them make a profit, and so where I'm at right now is Applied Frameworks has, with my co-author, Jason Tanner, we have published a bold and breakthrough new book called Software Profit Streams, and it's a book that describes how to do pricing and packaging for software enabled solutions. When we say software enabled solution, we mean a solution that has software in it somehow, could be embedded software in your microwave oven, it could be a hosted solution, it could be an API for a payment processor, it could be the software in your car that I talked about earlier. So software enabled solutions are the foundation, the fabric of our modern lives. As Mark Andreessen says software is eating the world, software is going to be in everything, and we need to know how to take the value that we are creating as engineers, as developers, and convert that into pricing and licensing choices that create sustainable profits. Ula Ojiaku Wow. It's as if you read my mind because I was going to ask you about your book, Software Profit Streams, A Guide to Designing a Sustainably Profitable Business. I also noticed that, you know, there is the Profit Stream Canvas that you and your co-author created. So let's assume I am a Product Manager and I've used this, let's assume I went down the path of using the Business Model Canvas and there is the Customer Value Proposition. So how do they complement? Luke Hohmann How do they all work together? I'm glad you asked that, I think that's a very insightful question and the reason it's so helpful is because, well partly because I'm also friends with Alex Osterwalder, I think he's a dear, he's a wonderful human, he's a dear friend. So let's look at the different elements of the different canvases, if you will, and why we think that this is needed. The Business Model Canvas is kind of how am I structuring my business itself, like what are my partners, my suppliers, my relationships, my channel strategy, my brand strategy with respect to my customer segments, and it includes elements of cost, which we're pretty good at. We're pretty good at knowing our costs and elements of revenue, but the key assumption of revenue, of course, is the selling price and the number of units sold. So, but if you look at the book, Business Model Generation, where the Business Model Canvas comes from, it doesn't actually talk about how to set the price. Is the video game going to be $49? Is it going to be $59, or £49 or £59? Well, there's a lot of thought that goes into that. Then we have the Value Proposition Canvas, which highlights what are the pains the customer is facing? What are the gains that the customer is facing? What are the jobs to be done of the customer? How does my solution relate to the jobs? How does it help solve the pain the customer is feeling? How does it create gain for the customer? But if you read those books, and both of those books are on my shelf because they're fantastic books, it doesn't talk about pricing. So let's say I create a gain for you. Well, how much can I charge you for the gain that I've created? How do I structure that relationship? And how do I know, going back to my Business Model Canvas, that I've got the right market segment, I've got the right investment strategy, I might need to make an investment in the first one or two releases of my software or my product before I start to make a per unit profit because I'm evolving, it's called the J curve and the J curve is how much money am I investing before I well, I have to be able to forecast that, I have to be able to model that, but the key input to that is what is the price, what is the mechanism of packaging that you're using, is it, for example, is it per user in a SAS environment or is it per company in a SAS environment? Is it a meter? Is it like an API transaction using Stripe or a payment processor, Adyen or Stripe or Paypal or any of the others that are out there? Or is it an API call where I'm charging a fraction of a penny for any API call? All of those elements have to be put into an economic model and a forecast has to be created. Now, what's missing about this is that the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas don't give you the insight on how to set the price, they just say there is a price and we're going to use it in our equations. So what we've done is we've said, look, setting the price is itself a complex system, and what I mean by a complex system is that, let's say that I wanted to do an annual license for a new SAS offering, but I offer that in Europe and now my solution is influenced or governed by GDPR compliance, where I have data retention and data privacy laws. So my technical architecture that has to enforce the license, also has to comply with something in terms of the market in which I'm selling. This complex system needs to be organised, and so what canvases do is in all of these cases, they let us take a complex system and put some structure behind the choices that we're making in that complex system so that we can make better choices in terms of system design. I know how I want this to work, I know how I want this to be structured, and therefore I can make system choices so the system is working in a way that benefits the stakeholders. Not just me, right, I'm not the only stakeholder, my customers are in this system, my suppliers are in this system, society itself might be in the system, depending on the system I'm building or the solution I'm building. So the canvases enable us to make system level choices that are hopefully more effective in achieving our goals. And like I said, the Business Model Canvas, the Value Proposition Canvas are fantastic, highly recommended, but they don't cover pricing. So we needed something to cover the actual pricing and packaging and licensing. Ula Ojiaku Well, that's awesome. So it's really more about going, taking a deeper dive into thoughtfully and structurally, if I may use that word, assessing the pricing. Luke Hohmann Yeah, absolutely. Ula Ojiaku Would you say that in doing this there would be some elements of, you know, testing and getting feedback from actual customers to know what price point makes sense? Luke Hohmann Absolutely. There's a number of ways in which customer engagement or customer testing is involved. The very first step that we advocate is a Customer Benefit Analysis, which is what are the actual benefits you're creating and how are your customers experiencing those benefits. Those experiences are both tangible and intangible and that's another one of the challenges that we face in the Agile community. In general, the Agile community spends a little bit more time on tangible or functional value than intangible value. So we, in terms of if I were to look at it in terms of a computer, we used to say speeds and feeds. How fast is the processor? How fast is the network? How much storage is on my disk space? Those are all functional elements. Over time as our computers have become plenty fast or plenty storage wise for most of our personal computing needs, we see elements of design come into play, elements of usability, elements of brand, and we see this in other areas. Cars have improved in quality so much that many of us, the durability of the car is no longer a significant attribute because all cars are pretty durable, they're pretty good, they're pretty well made. So now we look at brand, we look at style, we look at aesthetics, we look at even paying more for a car that aligns with our values in terms of the environment. I want to get an EV, why, because I want to be more environmentally conscious. That's a value driven, that's an intangible factor. And so our first step starts with Customer Benefit Analysis looking at both functional or tangible value and intangible value, and you can't do that, as you can imagine, you can't do that without having customer interaction and awareness with your stakeholders and your customers, and that also feeds throughout the whole pricing process. Eventually, you're going to put your product in a market, and that's a form itself of market research. Did customers buy, and if they didn't buy, why did they not buy? Is it poorly packaged or is it poorly priced? These are all elements that involve customers throughout the process. Ula Ojiaku If I may, I know we've been on the topic of your latest book Software Profit Streams. I'm just wondering, because I can't help but try to connect the dots and I'm wondering if there might be a connection to one of your books, Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play, something like buy a feature in your book, that kind of came to mind, could there be a way of using that as part of the engagement with customers in setting a pricing strategy? I may be wrong, I'm just asking a question. Luke Hohmann I think you're making a great connection. There's two forms of relationship that Innovation Games and the Innovation Games book have with Software Profit Streams. One is, as you correctly noted, just the basics of market research, where do key people have pains or gains and what it might be worth. That work is also included in Alex Osterwalder's books, Value Proposition Design for example, when I've been doing Value Proposition Design and I'm trying to figure out the customer pains, you can use the Innovation Games Speed Boat. And when I want to figure out the gains, I can use the Innovation Game Product Box. Similarly, when I'm figuring out pricing and licensing, a way, and it's a very astute idea, a way to understand price points of individual features is to do certain kinds of market research. One form of market research you can do is Buy-a-Feature, which gives a gauge of what people are willing or might be willing to pay for a feature. It can be a little tricky because the normal construction of Buy-a-Feature is based on cost. However, your insight is correct, you can extend Buy-a-Feature such that you're testing value as opposed to cost, and seeing what, if you take a feature that costs X, but inflate that cost by Y and a Buy-a-Feature game, if people still buy it, it's a strong signal strength that first they want it, and second it may be a feature that you can, when delivered, would motivate you to raise the price of your offering and create a better profit for your company. Ula Ojiaku Okay, well, thank you. I wasn't sure if I was on the right lines. Luke Hohmann It's a great connection. Ula Ojiaku Thanks again. I mean, it's not original. I'm just piggybacking on your ideas. So with respect to, if we, if you don't mind, let's shift gears a bit because I know that, or I'm aware that whilst you were with Scaled Agile Incorporated, you know, you played a key part in developing some of their courses, like the Product POPM, and I think the Portfolio Management, and there was the concept about Participatory Budgeting. Can we talk about that, please? Luke Hohmann I'd love to talk about that, I mean it's a huge passion of mine, absolutely. So in February of 2018, I started working with the framework team and in December of 2018, we talked about the possibility of what an acquisition might look like and the benefits it would create, which would be many. That closed in May of 2019, and in that timeframe, we were working on SAFe 5.0 and so there were a couple of areas in which I was able to make some contributions. One was in Agile product delivery competency, the other was in lean portfolio management. I had a significant hand in restructuring or adding the POPM, APM, and LPM courses, adding things like solutions by horizons to SAFe, taking the existing content on guardrails, expanding it a little bit, and of course, adding Participatory Budgeting, which is just a huge passion of mine. I've done Participatory Budgeting now for 20 years, I've helped organisations make more than five billions of dollars of investment spending choices at all levels of companies, myself and my colleagues at Applied Frameworks, and it just is a better way to make a shared decision. If you think about one of the examples they use about Participatory Budgeting, is my preferred form of fitness is I'm a runner and so, and my wife is also a fit person. So if she goes and buys a new pair of shoes or trainers and I go and buy a new pair of trainers, we don't care, because it's a small purchase. It's frequently made and it's within the pattern of our normal behaviour. However, if I were to go out and buy a new car without involving her, that feels different, right, it's a significant purchase, it requires budgeting and care, and is this car going to meet our needs? Our kids are older than your kids, so we have different needs and different requirements, and so I would be losing trust in my pair bond with my wife if I made a substantial purchase without her involvement. Well, corporations work the same way, because we're still people. So if I'm funding a value stream, I'm funding the consistent and reliable flow of valuable items, that's what value stream funding is supposed to do. However, if there is a significant investment to be made, even if the value stream can afford it, it should be introduced to the portfolio for no other reason than the social structure of healthy organisations says that we do better when we're talking about these things, that we don't go off on our own and make significant decisions without the input of others. That lowers transparency, that lowers trust. So I am a huge advocate of Participatory Budgeting, I'm very happy that it's included in SAFe as a recommended practice, both for market research and Buy-a-Feature in APM, but also more significantly, if you will, at the portfolio level for making investment decisions. And I'm really excited to share that we've just published an article a few weeks ago about Participatory Budgeting and what's called The Color of Money, and The Color of Money is sometimes when you have constraints on how you can spend money, and an example of a constraint is let's say that a government raised taxes to improve transportation infrastructure. Well, the money that they took in is constrained in a certain way. You can't spend it, for example, on education, and so we have to show how Participatory Budgeting can be adapted to have relationships between items like this item requires this item as a precedent or The Color of Money, constraints of funding items, but I'm a big believer, we just published that article and you can get that at the Scaled Agile website, I'm a big believer in the social power of making these financial decisions and the benefits that accrue to people and organisations when they collaborate in this manner. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for going into that, Luke. So, would there be, in your experience, any type of organisation that's participatory? It's not a leading question, it's just genuine, there are typically outliers and I'm wondering in your experience, and in your opinion, if there would be organisations that it might not work for? Luke Hohmann Surprisingly, no, but I want to add a few qualifications to the effective design of a Participatory Budgeting session. When people hear Participatory Budgeting, there's different ways that you would apply Participatory Budgeting in the public and private sector. So I've done citywide Participatory Budgeting in cities and if you're a citizen of a city and you meet the qualifications for voting within that jurisdiction, in the United States, it's typically that you're 18 years old, in some places you have to be a little older, in some places you might have other qualifications, but if you're qualified to participate as a citizen in democratic processes, then you should be able to participate in Participatory Budgeting sessions that are associated with things like how do we spend taxes or how do we make certain investments. In corporations it's not quite the same way. Just because you work at a company doesn't mean you should be included in portfolio management decisions that affect the entire company. You may not have the background, you may not have the training, you may be what my friends sometimes call a fresher. So I do a lot of work overseas, so freshers, they just may not have the experience to participate. So one thing that we look at in Participatory Budgeting and SAFe is who should be involved in the sessions, and that doesn't mean that every single employee should always be included, because their background, I mean, they may be a technical topic and maybe they don't have the right technical background. So we work a little bit harder in corporations to make sure the right people are there. Now, of course, if we're going to make a mistake, we tend to make the mistake of including more people than excluding, partly because in SAFe Participatory Budgeting, it's a group of people who are making a decision, not a one person, one vote, and that's really profoundly important because in a corporation, just like in a para-bond, your opinion matters to me, I want to know what you're thinking. If I'm looking in, I'll use SAFe terminology, if I'm looking at three epics that could advance our portfolio, and I'm a little unsure about two of those epics, like one of those epics, I'm like, yeah, this is a really good thing, I know a little bit about it, this matters, I'm going to fund this, but the other two I'm not so sure about, well, there's no way I can learn through reading alone what the opinions of other people are, because, again, there's these intangible factors. There's these elements that may not be included in an ROI analysis, it's kind of hard to talk about brand and an ROI analysis - we can, but it's hard, so I want to listen to how other people are talking about things, and through that, I can go, yeah, I can see the value, I didn't see it before, I'm going to join you in funding this. So that's among the ways in which Participatory Budgeting is a little different within the private sector and the public sector and within a company. The only other element that I would add is that Participatory Budgeting gives people the permission to stop funding items that are no longer likely to meet the investment or objectives of the company, or to change minds, and so one of the, again, this is a bit of an overhang in the Agile community, Agile teams are optimised for doing things that are small, things that can fit within a two or three week Sprint. That's great, no criticism there, but our customers and our stakeholders want big things that move the market needle, and the big things that move the market needle don't get done in two or three weeks, in general, and they rarely, like they require multiple teams working multiple weeks to create a really profoundly new important thing. And so what happens though, is that we need to make in a sense funding commitments for these big things, but we also have to have a way to change our mind, and so traditional funding processes, they let us make this big commitment, but they're not good at letting us change our mind, meaning they're not Agile. Participatory Budgeting gives us the best of both worlds. I can sit at the table with you and with our colleagues, we can commit to funding something that's big, but six months later, which is the recommended cadence from SAFe, I can come back to that table and reassess and we can all look at each other, because you know those moments, right, you've had that experience in visiting, because you're like looking around the table and you're like, yeah, this isn't working. And then in traditional funding, we keep funding what's not working because there's no built-in mechanism to easily change it, but in SAFe Participatory Budgeting, you and I can sit at the table and we can look at each other with our colleagues and say, yeah, you know, that initiative just, it's not working, well, let's change our mind, okay, what is the new thing that we can fund? What is the new epic? And that permission is so powerful within a corporation. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for sharing that, and whilst you were speaking, because again, me trying to connect the dots and thinking, for an organisation that has adopted SAFe or it's trying to scale Agility, because like you mentioned, Agile teams are optimised to iteratively develop or deliver, you know, small chunks over time, usually two to three weeks, but, like you said, there is a longer time horizon spanning months, even years into the future, sometimes for those worthwhile, meaty things to be delivered that moves the strategic needle if I may use that buzzword. So, let's say we at that lean portfolio level, we're looking at epics, right, and Participatory Budgeting, we are looking at initiatives on an epic to epic basis per se, where would the Lean Startup Cycle come in here? So is it that Participatory Budgeting could be a mechanism that is used for assessing, okay, this is the MVP features that have been developed and all that, the leading indicators we've gotten, that's presented to the group, and on that basis, we make that pivot or persevere or stop decision, would that fit in? Luke Hohmann Yeah, so let's, I mean, you're close, but let me make a few turns and then it'll click better. First, let's acknowledge that the SAFe approach to the Lean Startup Cycle is not the Eric Ries approach, there are some differences, but let's separate how I fund something from how I evaluate something. So if I'm going to engage in the SAFe Lean Startup Cycle, part of that engagement is to fund an MVP, which is going to prove or disprove a given hypothesis. So that's an expenditure of money. Now there's, if you think about the expenditure of money, there's minimally two steps in this process - there's spending enough money to conduct the experiments, and if those experiments are true, making another commitment to spend money again, that I want to spend it. The reason this is important is, let's say I had three experiments running in parallel and I'm going to use easy round numbers for a large corporation. Let's say I want to run three experiments in parallel, and each experiment costs me a million pounds. Okay. So now let's say that the commercialisation of each of those is an additional amount of money. So the portfolio team sits around the table and says, we have the money, we're going to fund all three. Okay, great. Well, it's an unlikely circumstance, but let's say all three are successful. Well, this is like a venture capitalist, and I have a talk that I give that relates the funding cycle of a venture capitalist to the funding cycle of an LPM team. While it's unlikely, you could have all three become successful, and this is what I call an oversubscribed portfolio. I've got three great initiatives, but I can still only fund one or two of them, I still have to make the choice. Now, of course, I'm going to look at my economics and let's say out of the three initiatives that were successfully proven through their hypothesis, let's say one of them is just clearly not as economically attractive, for whatever reason. Okay, we get rid of that one, now, I've got two, and if I can only fund one of them, and the ROI, the hard ROI is roughly the same, that's when Participatory Budgeting really shines, because we can have those leaders come back into the room, and they can say, which choice do we want to make now? So the evaluative aspect of the MVP is the leading indicators and the results of the proving or disproving of the hypotheses. We separate that from the funding choices, which is where Participatory Budgeting and LPM kick in. Ula Ojiaku Okay. So you've separated the proving or disproving the hypothesis of the feature, some of the features that will probably make up an epic. And you're saying the funding, the decision to fund the epic in the first place is a different conversation. And you've likened it to Venture Capital funding rounds. Where do they connect? Because if they're separate, what's the connecting thread between the two? Luke Hohmann The connected thread is the portfolio process, right? The actual process is the mechanism where we're connecting these things. Ula Ojiaku OK, no, thanks for the portfolio process. But there is something you mentioned, ROI - Return On Investment. And sometimes when you're developing new products, you don't know, you have assumptions. And any ROI, sorry to put it this way, but you're really plucking figures from the air, you know, you're modelling, but there is no certainty because you could hit the mark or you could go way off the mark. So where does that innovation accounting coming into place, especially if it's a product that's yet to make contact with, you know, real life users, the customers. Luke Hohmann Well, let's go back to something you said earlier, and what you talked earlier about was the relationship that you have in market researching customer interaction. In making a forecast, let's go ahead and look at the notion of building a new product within a company, and this is again where the Agile community sometimes doesn't want to look at numbers or quote, unquote get dirty, but we have to, because if I'm going to look at building a new idea, or taking a new idea into a product, I have to have a forecast of its viability. Is it economically viable? Is it a good choice? So innovation accounting is a way to look at certain data, but before, I'm going to steal a page, a quote, from one of my friends, Jeff Patton. The most expensive way to figure this out is to actually build the product. So what can I do that's less expensive than building the product itself? I can still do market research, but maybe I wouldn't do an innovation game, maybe I'd do a formal survey and I use a price point testing mechanism like Van Westendorp Price Point Analysis, which is a series of questions that you ask to triangulate on acceptable price ranges. I can do competitive benchmarking for similar products and services. What are people offering right now in the market? Now that again, if the product is completely novel, doing competitive benchmarking can be really hard. Right now, there's so many people doing streaming that we look at the competitive market, but when Netflix first offered streaming and it was the first one, their best approach was what we call reference pricing, which is, I have a reference price for how much I pay for my DVDs that I'm getting in the mail, I'm going to base my streaming service kind of on the reference pricing of entertainment, although that's not entirely clear that that was the best way to go, because you could also base the reference price on what you're paying for a movie ticket and how many, but then you look at consumption, right, because movie tickets are expensive, so I only go to a movie maybe once every other month, whereas streaming is cheap and so I can change my demand curve by lowering my price. But this is why it's such a hard science is because we have this notion of these swirling factors. Getting specifically back to your question about the price point, I do have to do some market research before I go into the market to get some forecasting and some confidence, and research gives me more confidence, and of course, once I'm in the market, I'll know how effective my research matched the market reality. Maybe my research was misleading, and of course, there's some skill in designing research, as you know, to get answers that have high quality signal strength. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for clarifying. That makes perfect sense to me. Luke Hohmann It's kind of like a forecast saying, like there's a group of Agile people who will say, like, you shouldn't make forecasts. Well, I don't understand that because that's like saying, and people will say, well, I can't predict the future. Well, okay, I can't predict when I'm going to retire, but I'm planning to retire. I don't know the date of my exact retirement, but my wife and I are planning our retirement, and we're saving, we're making certain investment choices for our future, because we expect to have a future together. Now our kids are older than yours. My kids are now in university, and so we're closer to retirement. So what I dislike about the Agile community is people will sometimes say, well, I don't know the certainty of the event, therefore, I can't plan for it. But that's really daft, because there are many places in like, you may not for the listeners, her daughter is a little younger than my kids, but they will be going to university one day, and depending on where they go, that's a financial choice. So you could say, well, I don't know when she's going to university, and I can't predict what university she's going to go to, therefore I'm not going to save any money. Really? That doesn't make no sense. So I really get very upset when you have people in the agile community will say things like road mapping or forecasting is not Agile. It's entirely Agile. How you treat it is Agile or not Agile. Like when my child comes up to me and says, hey, you know about that going to university thing, I was thinking of taking a gap year. Okay, wait a minute, that's a change. That doesn't mean no, it means you're laughing, right? But that's a change. And so we respond to change, but we still have a plan. Ula Ojiaku It makes sense. So the reason, and I completely resonate with everything you said, the reason I raised that ROI and it not being known is that in some situations, people might be tempted to use it to game the budget allocation decision making process. That's why I said you would pluck the ROI. Luke Hohmann Okay, let's talk about that. We actually address this in our recent paper, but I'll give you my personal experience. You are vastly more likely to get bad behaviour on ROI analysis when you do not do Participatory Budgeting, because there's no social construct to prevent bad behaviour. If I'm sitting down at a table and that's virtual or physical, it doesn't matter, but let's take a perfect optimum size for a Participatory Budgeting group. Six people, let's say I'm a Director or a Senior Director in a company, and I'm sitting at a table and there's another Senior Director who's a peer, maybe there's a VP, maybe there's a person from engineering, maybe there's a person from sales and we've got this mix of people and I'm sitting at that table. I am not incented to come in with an inflated ROI because those people are really intelligent and given enough time, they're not going to support my initiative because I'm fibbing, I'm lying. And I have a phrase for this, it's when ROI becomes RO-lie that it's dangerous. And so when I'm sitting at that table, what we find consistently, and one of the clients that we did a fair amount of Participatory Budgeting for years ago with Cisco, what we found was the leaders at Cisco were creating tighter, more believable, and more defensible economic projections, precisely because they knew that they were going to be sitting with their peers, and it didn't matter. It can go both ways. Sometimes people will overestimate the ROI or they underestimate the cost. Same outcome, right? I'm going to overestimate the benefit, and people would be like, yeah, I don't think you can build that product with three teams. You're going to need five or six teams and people go, oh, I can get it done with, you know, 20 people. Yeah, I don't think so, because two years ago, we built this product. It's very similar, and, you know, we thought we could get it done with 20 people and we couldn't. We really needed, you know, a bigger group. So you see the social construct creating a more believable set of results because people come to the Participatory Budgeting session knowing that their peers are in the room. And of course, we think we're smart, so our peers are as smart as we are, we're all smart people, and therefore, the social construct of Participatory Budgeting quite literally creates a better input, which creates a better output. Ula Ojiaku That makes sense, definitely. Thanks for sharing that. I've found that very, very insightful and something I can easily apply. The reasoning behind it, the social pressure, quote unquote, knowing that you're not just going to put the paper forward but you'd have to defend it in a credible, believable way make sense. So just to wrap up now, what books have you found yourself recommending to people the most, and why? Luke Hohmann It's so funny, I get yelled at by my wife for how many books I buy. She'll go like “It's Amazon again. Another book. You know, there's this thing called the library.” Ula Ojiaku You should do Participatory Budgeting for your books then sounds like, sorry. Luke Hohmann No, no, I don't, I'd lose. Gosh, I love so many books. So there's a few books that I consider to be my go-to references and my go-to classics, but I also recommend that people re-read books and sometimes I recommend re-reading books is because you're a different person, and as you age and as you grow and you see things differently and in fact, I'm right now re-reading and of course it goes faster, but I'm re-reading the original Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck, a fantastic book. I just finished reading a few new books, but let me let me give you a couple of classics that I think everyone in our field should read and why they should read them. I think everyone should read The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks because he really covers some very profound truths that haven't changed, things like Brooks Law, which is adding programmers to a late project, makes it later. He talks about the structure of teams and how to scale before scaling was big and important and cool. He talks about communication and conceptual integrity and the role of the architect. The other book that I'm going to give, which I hope is different than any book that anyone has ever given you, because it's one of my absolute favourite books and I give them away, is a book called Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Comics or graphic novels are an important medium for communication, and when we talk about storytelling and we talk about how to frame information and how to present information, understanding comics is profoundly insightful in terms of how to present, share, show information. A lot of times I think we make things harder than they should be. So when I'm working with executives and some of the clients that I work with personally, when we talk about our epics, we actually will tell stories about the hero's journey and we actually hire comic book artists to help the executives tell their story in a comic form or in a graphic novel form. So I absolutely love understanding comics. I think that that's really a profound book. Of course you mentioned Alex Osterwalder's books, Business Model Generation, Business Model Canvas. Those are fantastic books for Product Managers. I also, just looking at my own bookshelves, of course, Innovation Games for PMs, of course Software Profit Streams because we have to figure out how to create sustainability, but in reality there's so many books that we love and that we share and that we grow together when we're sharing books and I'll add one thing. Please don't only limit your books to technical books. We're humans too. I recently, this week and what I mean recent I mean literally this weekend I was visiting one of my kids in Vermont all the way across the country, and so on the plane ride I finished two books, one was a very profound and deeply written book called Ponyboy. And then another one was a very famous book on a woman protagonist who's successful in the 60s, Lessons in Chemistry, which is a new book that's out, and it was a super fun light read, some interesting lessons of course, because there's always lessons in books, and now if it's okay if I'm not overstepping my boundaries, what would be a book that you'd like me to read? I love to add books to my list. Ula Ojiaku Oh my gosh, I didn't know. You are the first guest ever who's twisted this on me, but I tend to read multiple books at a time. Luke Hohmann Only two. Ula Ojiaku Yeah, so, and I kind of switch, maybe put some on my bedside and you know there's some on my Kindle and in the car, just depending. So I'm reading multiple books at a time, but based on what you've said the one that comes to mind is the new book by Oprah Winfrey and it's titled What Happened to You? Understanding Trauma, because like you said, it's not just about reading technical books and we're human beings and we find out that people behave probably sometimes in ways that are different to us, and it's not about saying what's wrong with you, because there is a story that we might not have been privy to, you know, in terms of their childhood, how they grew up, which affected their worldview and how they are acting, so things don't just suddenly happen. And the question that we have been asked and we sometimes ask of people, and for me, I'm reading it from a parent's perspective because I understand that even more so that my actions, my choices, they play a huge, you know, part in shaping my children. So it's not saying what's wrong with you? You say, you know, what happened to you? And it traces back to, based on research, because she wrote it with a renowned psychologist, I don't know his field but a renowned psychologist, so neuroscience-based psychological research on human beings, attachment theory and all that, just showing how early childhood experiences, even as early as maybe a few months old, tend to affect people well into adulthood. So that would be my recommendation. Luke Hohmann Thank you so much. That's a gift. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. You're the first person to ask me. So, my pleasure. So, before we go to the final words, where can the audience find you, because you have a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of experience, and I am sure that people would want to get in touch with you, so how can they do this please? Luke Hohmann Yeah, well, they can get me on LinkedIn and they can find me at Applied Frameworks. I tell you, I teach classes that are known to be very profound because we always reserve, myself and the instructors at Applied Frameworks, we have very strong commitments to reserving class time for what we call the parking lot or the ask me anything question, which are many times after I've covered the core material in the class, having the opportunity to really frame how to apply something is really important. So I would definitely encourage people to take one of my classes because you'll not get the material, you'll get the reasons behind the material, which means you can apply it, but you'll also be able to ask us questions and our commitment as a company is you can ask us anything and if we don't know the answer, we'll help you find it. We'll help you find the expert or the person that you need talk to, to help you out and be successful. And then, and I think in terms of final words, I will simply ask people to remember that we get to work in the most amazing field building things for other people and it's joyful work, and we, one of my phrases is you're not doing Agile, if you're not having fun at work, there's something really wrong, there's something missing, yeah we need to retrospect and we need to improve and we need to reflect and all those important things, absolutely, but we should allow ourselves to experience the joy of serving others and being of service and building things that matter. Ula Ojiaku I love the concept of joyful Agile and getting joy in building things that matter, serving people and may I add also working together with amazing people, and for me it's been a joyful conversation with you, Luke, I really appreciate you making the time, I am definitely richer and more enlightened as a result of this conversation, so thank you so much once more. Luke Hohmann Thank you so much for having me here, thank you everyone for listening with us. Ula Ojiaku  My pleasure. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!   

Buy Profit Streams on Amazon Joel can be reach on LinkedIn. Learn more about the book at http://Profit-Streams.com You'll also be interested in the series below: Dynamic Value Streams: https://agilenoir.biz/en/agilethoughts/dynamic-value-stream-mapping/

Join us on our SaaS Fuel™ Founder Episode featuring Luke Hohmann, CEO of Enthiosys and esteemed startup advisor. We dive into the crucial topic of cash management for startups as Luke shares top-notch insights on mastering cash flow, balancing expenses, and making savvy financial choices to fuel your startup's growth.Luke further delves into the world of investment banking and its impact on startup success. He discusses when to hire an investment banker, selecting the right one, and what to expect during the fundraising adventure.Don't miss this insightful episode with Luke Hohmann as we explore the SaaS entrepreneurship landscape and unlock the keys to startup victory. This conversation is a must-listen for all entrepreneurs, from seasoned to aspiring!Key Takeaways00:00:00 Adventurous Experience Reveals Lack Of Agility00:01:16 Samurai and Ninja Training, Time Traveling 00:07:38 Luke's Background in SaaS 00:09:13 Expertise as a bootstrap founder00:09:15 Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play: The Story Of Conteneo00:09:26 "Innovation Games" and how Luke founded FirstRoot00:10:24 VC Funding and Customer-led Growth 00:12:24 Choosing a Meta Segment 00:13:29 Characteristics of B2B Software00:14:20 Characteristics Of Mission Critical Systems00:15:41 Managing Critical And Expensive Systems: The Importance Of Focus00:16:20 Differences between B2B and B2P00:19:04 Importance of target market insight00:22:18 Managing Cash For Startups: Tips For Investment Planning00:24:36 The Challenges Of Competing With Big Tech Companies In Terms Of Salary And Equity00:25:17 Lessons Learned from the Acquisition Process00:27:30 Valuing a Company00:28:51 Importance Of Top-Line Revenue And Emergency Board Meeting00:35:29 Software Profit Streams' novel methodology00:38:07 Creating A Visually Engaging Open Source Book00:39:34 The value of a business model canvas and process00:42:00 Adoption Curve And Pricing Strategy00:43:46 Highlights profit's role in corporate growth & customer service00:45:27 The Value Of Startups In Competition With Established Companies00:45:42 SaaS founders' inclination to neglect intangible benefits00:48:12 Customer Requirements in B2B00:50:17 The Complex System Of Pricing Software SolutionsTweetable Quotes“A company is a product just like anything else. IIf a product itself isn't ready to be bought, the sales team and the marketing team can't sell it.” - 00:26:36 Luke Hohmann“So I think having the understanding of what is it you're doing and who are you 're selling to, super important.” - 00:19:07 Jeff Mains“So if I ever wanted to sell my home, I know it will sell. It's a hot market forever, but I'm still gonna hire a realtor because it's a complex transaction.” - 00:34:26 Luke Hohmann“You don't wanna change your doctor every time you visit someone. You want someone who knows you a little bit and has a little history with you that you feel trust with.” - 00:35:02 Luke HohmannSaaS Leadership LessonsRecognize the distinctions between B2B, B2P, and B2C software and choose your lane.Avoid pitching VCs who don't understand your market. Fashion-driven venture capitalists (VCs) prefer consumer tech to enterprise software.Maintain cash flow and use a mix of in-house and outsourced workers. Have a spreadsheet to track client data, gaps, and cash flow, and treat your personnel appropriately.Listen to your customers and allow them to drive growth by customizing products and features.Create a data room for...

Hear how games can make your employees' effectiveness soar! Several years ago, Andy (my husband and business partner) and I went to Brussels to train in Innovation Games. IG is a wonderful set of creative tools to help people see things in new ways by playing games. In fact, IG downloads are the most frequent downloads from our website, www.simonassociates.net. Here at SAMC, we integrate IG into many of our workshops and leadership programs. Take a look at some of our IG white papers and PowerPoints which might open up your mind to what gamification can offer you, your team members and your customers as you rethink your organization to face the challenges of these fast-changing times. Today's podcast is with gamification strategist Naomi Redel I was thrilled to recently meet Naomi Redel to discuss how she has become a gamification strategist with her own methods for increasing the effectiveness of organizations through what she calls “Collaborative Emotional Intelligence.”  Our podcast was global. Naomi was in Israel, and I was in New York. We had a wonderful discussion about people, the power of games, and the type of work she does with organizations that need to boost their people power.  Watch and listen to our conversation here Some background on Naomi and what she has created After years of working as an innovation and marketing consultant with leading Israeli companies, Naomi felt firsthand the frustration of watching brilliant strategies flounder in C-suite silos, unable to trickle down and make an impact, because of lack of time, motivation, and the right tools to institutionalize them. So what did she do? Create a multilayered system that uses collaborative emotional experiences with cutting-edge technologies and gamification to push the boundaries of implementation and embed those strategies into people's hearts and minds. She then followed this with the creation of the first-ever board game in positive psychology, Positive Turn, which is recommended by the VIA Institute of Character Strengths and used as an innovation for companies in France.   She also co-founded HappierMe and led the design and development of the HappierMe platform, a system of minigames and exercises designed to make the practice of happiness easy and accessible anywhere and anytime.  Naomi earned her Master's in Business Administration and Economics (with distinction) and graduated Cum Laude BA in Economics (with distinction) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. You can contact Naomi on LinkedIn or by email at naomi.redel@gmail.com. Special offer from Naomi for you, our audience Available only to On the Brink listeners: a free presentation about collaborative emotional intelligence at work. To receive this game-changing power point, simply DM Naomi (or email her at naomi.redel@gmail.com) and say “I am an On the Brink Listener.” Enjoy. Want to know more about what Innovation Games can do for your company? Blog: Innovation Games: The Bridge To New, Previously Undiscovered Ideas And Innovations Blog: Why Are Innovation Games In Such Demand? Podcast: Andy and Andi Simon—Innovation Games® Are What You Need To Imagine Your Future Additional resources for you My two award-winning books: Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Businessand On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights Our website: Simon Associates Management Consultants  

Luke Hohmann is the Founder and CEO of Conteneo, Inc. (formerly, The Innovation Games® Company). He is also the co-founder of Every Voice Engaged Foundation, a 501 3(c) nonprofit that that helps citizens, governments and nonprofit organizations collaboratively solve problems that are unsolvable without civic engagement. Key Insights 00:00 Introduction 01:25 Good to Great 04:97 Making choices 15:20 Financial intelligence for kids 21:30 Walk the talk 31:10 Money tips for kids Check out Luke's books: https://amz.run/5g9S Check out Julia Barbaro's books: https://amz.run/5g9S In real estate, your network is your net worth, attend our Live Events and network with the fellow investors and professionals: https://jakeandgino.com/live-events/ About Jake & Gino Jake & Gino are multifamily investors, operators, and mentors who have created a vertically integrated real estate company that controls over $175,000,000 in assets under management. They have created the Jake & Gino community to teach others their three-step framework: Buy Right, Finance Right and Manage Right®, and to become multifamily entrepreneurs. Subscribe to this channel: https://ytube.io/3McA Sign up for free training: https://jakeandgino.mykajabi.com/freetraining The resources you need to succeed at every level of apartment investing: https://jakeandgino.com/resources/ Apply for Mentorship: https://jakeandgino.com/apply/ #realestate #multifamilyrealestate #multifamilyinvesting #investing #apartmentinvesting Jake & Gino Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jakeandgino/ Jake & Gino Twitter: https://twitter.com/JakeandGino Jake & Gino Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/jake-and-gino-llc/ Jake & Gino Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jakeandgino/ More ways to engage with the Jake & Gino Investor Community: MM5: https://jakeandgino.com/mm5/ Rand Cares: https://jakeandgino.com/randcares/ Henson Flooring: https://www.greatertennessee.com/ The 100 Year Real Estate Investor: https://www.dualassetstrategy.com

In this episode, Richard interviews Luke Hohmann. Luke is the founder and CEO of FirstRoot, the company on the mission to create the next generation of impact investors. He is also an inspiring public speaker and the creator of Innovation Games. Luke tells us how to recognize whether a team is a team we want to stick with and how self-appreciation can help us on this quest. When you finish listening to the episode, connect with Luke on LinkedIn and visit www.firstroot.co. You can read the transcript of the entire episode at https://kasperowski.com/podcast-83-luke-hohmann/.

Participatory Budgeting allows students to use a real money budget and work together to create better education. Luke Hohmann joins the Agile World Better English crew to discuss the new venture, First Root, and how students across America and soon the world, can learn about money, budgeting, and create a better learning experience. Luke Hohmann, discusses his agile journey from his days as a competitive ice skater to Innovation Games and how a new venture, First Root uses Participatory Budgeting to change the lives of 1,000s of students. By apply game theory and creating interactive participation, budgeting can now be done by students in real-world situations. These same principles have been applied by some of the largest organizations in history for Lean Portfolio Management. FirstRoot has built the world's first platform for Participatory Budgeting in Schools. This brings a democratic process to budgeting and encourages real conversations between diverse groups of people. Everyone who wants to participate in budgeting can bow have a voice. Endorsed by the United Nations, Participatory Budgeting is used by thousands of schools around the world to teach financial literacy, civics, and design thinking. Online Agile World News https://agile-world.news/ Agile World Institute https://agile-world.institute/ Agile World Institute Resources https://agile-world.org/ LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/agile-world-news/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/agileworldnews Instagram https://www.instagram.com/agileworldnews/ Twitter https://twitter.com/AgileWorldNews Tumblr https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/agile-world YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/AgileWorld Medium Agile World News https://medium.com/agile-world-news Big Thank You to: Sabrina "Brains and Braun" C E Bruce Karl "Eye Candy" Smith Agile World © 2021 Broadcast Media, Hollywood, California | Better English Content by Cynthia Kahn and Steve Moubray --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/agile-world/message

"Calm down, take a deep breath and just talk to me“   Luke Hohmann's new mission: Participatory Budgeting in Schools Luke Hohmann founded FirstRoot to advance participatory budgeting in schools. Let me get straight to the point: You can invest in this company in this early stage. You can also support the cause by talking about or by simply using the free software and talking about it in your kids' school.  Luke Hohmann and me go back a long time. I met him ca. 12 years ago in one of his trainings and was fortunate enough to co-train and facilitate with him. He wrote an early book „Beyond Software Architecture“ which to me is one of the best books on software Architecture (sic!) and was ahead of its time. He then got deep into Serious Games with his Innovation Games trainings and a great book on it. Also ahead of its time. From there he was on a constant path towards which had to end in what he does now. Through his Innovation Games, he made it to participatory budgeting in communities, in the Enterprise and other important places. Also, he built an enterprise SaaS company to further bring his ideas deeper into Companies and also enable distributed Serious Games. Now, he founded FirstRoot, bringing participatory budgeting to schools. (You will realize over the course of the pod, that we couldn't constrain ourselves - we wouldn't be Luke and Markus, then - from drawing all kinds of parallels to Quality of Software, agile, Portfolio Planning, Architecture, Comics for Story Mapping and what have you.) The underlying problem that Luke is tackling with FirstRoot is inequality of chances by social background, financial illiteracy (lack of education on that topic in school in general) and economic disparity. First Root is having its part in solving that problem by offering a five step process in facilitating Participatory Budgeting to pupils around the globe, based on a software solution. Steps are: Planning Gather Ideas Refine Ideas to proposals Voting (there will always be more ideas than we can afford - „a truism in life“ Projects in implematation In the pod Luke thoroughly leads us through an example to show us how it works and which impact it has. I put the core of the idea at the beginning of the cast. Again: If you believe in this story, you can also invest for as little as a couple of hundred dollars alongside of people like Alex Osterwalder, Lysa Adkins and many more. You also help by just using the software and bring it into schools. Just follow the „Invest“ link on firstroot.co

The evolution of the logistics industry thrives on innovation in areas like operations, communication, and technology. What if your company could develop an in-house “innovation incubator” to generate innovative ideas and bring them to market? ID Logistics has done just that with their Innovation Games which challenges the company to bring the next big idea to light. Mario Rivera, Vice President of Development and Innovation, shares what goes on when ID Logistics let the games begin. FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.solutions.id-logistics.com EMAIL: mrivera@id-logistics.com DO YOU WANT TO RESPOND TO THIS EPISODE? Call our Dialog Line: 888-878-3247 DOWNLOAD THE NEW INBOUND LOGISTICS APP featuring the updated and expanded Logistics Planner! Available on iTunes and the Google Play Store: http://bit.ly/ILMagApp   http://bit.ly/ILMagAppGoogle  Are you a #logistics Thought Leader that would like to be featured on the Inbound Logistics Podcast?  Connect with me on Twitter:  @ILMagPodcast Email me: podcast@inboundlogistics.com   Connect with Inbound Logistics Magazine on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inbound-logistics Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ILMagazine Like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/InboundLogistics Catch our latest videos on YouTube: www.youtube.com/inboundlogistics   Visit us at www.inboundlogistics.com  

Hear how to use this time of crisis to re-think, re-create and soar  During the economic disruption tied to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are indeed living in chaotic times. But chaos is also an opportunity to work in new ways, re-creating our companies and ourselves for the future. Tomorrow is going to be very different from yesterday. The challenge for us all, however, is that we are uncomfortable with uncertainty. So stop, pause and give yourself a moment to re-group. Rather than flee the fear, turn this into a time to use new tools to think about how you could do things better, not how you've always done them. Please join us! The "new normal" may become the normal normal Let’s see how we can adapt ourselves, our communities, our companies, our staff and our customers to the new normal, for however long it remains with us. Perhaps even forever. That is what we have been hearing out in the market among clients and prospects, friends and colleagues. They are actually liking many of the new ways of getting their jobs done. And some of our friends love having more time with children and spouses or partners. Something big is happening This is why we wanted to do a podcast about how to adapt to these fast-changing times. It is the first of several we are going to share with you, and they will focus on tools we use with many of our SAMC clients that could help you respond creatively to today's changes. We could almost see changes coming before the pandemic. We kept talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Freelancer Nation, and the growing affection for remote work. And then, voilà, it was here. There is nothing better than a crisis to accelerate the changes taking place already in our society As we look into our future, what are we imagining? Well, there are entirely new channels of distribution emerging. There are already new ways to use blockchain to help in the supply chain. We see people launching blockchain solutions to ease access to new pharmaceutical companies and medical device vendors. More will follow. We see a lot of new families embracing home-based schooling, albeit reluctantly but still effectively. One of our friends moved all of his behavioral health clients onto a remote model so they can access mental health services via their iPhones, and it is working. Then there are new industries emerging around COVID-19 testing and protection. Our healthcare workers are learning how to reallocate their resources to sustain their hospitals and specialty practices which are waiting for elective surgery and in-office care to return. College presidents tell us how they aren’t sure they need their campuses, at least as they have used them in the past. Manufacturing clients are trying to keep their supply chain operating as it responds to the shifting needs of end-users and tries to resolve difficulties with raw material sources abroad. When all is said and done, all that matters is that we stay healthy and use this time to be creators The one thing about looking into the future is that the future is going to create itself. For you and your company, this is a great opportunity to think about how this applies to you as well. It is a wonderful time to think about possibilities. At SAMC , we love to play Innovation Games® when we are looking at the future. It often frees us from what we think today and lets our imaginations flow to what could be in the future. An innovation game that works well is called Reverse Everything What this particular game forces you to do is to take everything you used to do and not do it any longer. And, things you never did, you are going to do lots of in the future. Remember, it's a game so let your imagination flow. What's truly freeing for people is that they get to create new ideas about what they can do tomorrow without the burden of what they did in the past. For a restaurant, Reverse Everything might look like this: As you can see, things you did before, you no longer do. Things you did not do yesterday, you do a lot of tomorrow. And then let the ideas flow. We have a very good friend who owns restaurants and a hotel, and he is trying to reinvent them. Some of the ideas above are very relevant for him and could be for you as well. We will tell you more about this in the podcast, so listen in. And there are dozens of blogs and presentations available on our website.  We are big believers in testing You don’t really know it’s going to work. These are new times. And you are crafting new solutions. So test the ideas and learn from your tests. One thing we do know is that change can be an opportunity or a threat See how you can use it to your advantage so that you can enjoy a safe, healthy journey into the future. As always, we are here to help you along the way. About Andy and Andi Simon Partners in life as well as in business, Andy and Andi Simon are principles/owners of Simon Associates Management Consultants (SAMC). Using the tools and methods of corporate anthropology, Blue Ocean Strategy® and Innovation Games, they specialize in helping companies who want or need to change to “see” unmet needs and opportunities that are all around them. As business change management advisors, they are uniquely equipped to suggest ways you and your business can change, adapt and pivot, particularly during the COVID-19 crisis, to achieve even greater success. More on how Innovation Games can help you rethink the future: Blog: How To Stay Moving Forward As The World Moves At Warp Speed Workshop: Innovation Games For Your Company Workshop: My Favorite Games And Why They Work White paper: Innovation Games: Serious Play to Do Serious Work, Seriously Additional resources My award-winning book: "On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights" Simon Associates Management Consultants website  

Find out more about the Innovation Games, a free science event held in the heart of Sydney Olympic Park as part of National Science Week and the Sydney Science Festival. Hosted by Ben Newsome from Fizzics Education About the Innovation Games Part of Sydney Science Festival in National Science Week, The Innovation Games is a free event held in Sydney Olympic Park that is full of ways to taste, touch and see science and technology in action! A variety of exhibits, shows, hands-on workshops and more are available to the public for people to connect with researchers, science organisations & technology companies to learn more about how science is relevant in our everyday lives. About the FizzicsEd Podcast With interviews with leading science educators and STEM thought leaders, this science education podcast is about highlighting different ways of teaching kids within and beyond the classroom. It's not just about educational practice & pedagogy, it's about inspiring new ideas & challenging conventions of how students can learn about their world! https://www.fizzicseducation.com.au/ Know an educator who'd love this STEM podcast episode?  Share it! The FizzicsEd podcast is a member of the Australian Educators Online Network (AEON ) http://www.aeon.net.au/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ever wonder if you can start a business with your husband and make it work? Megann Willson shares a lot of tips on how to make it work and how and when to start your business. Also, hear about how she uses Innovation Games® and Conteno Weave to help companies become very successful.  0:00 Guest: Megann Willson BIO Today our Guest is MEGANN WILLSON, CEO and Partner, of PANOPTIKA which is a consulting firm. Megann also serves as VP Communications on the Board of the Canadian Council for Small Business & Entrepreneurship. As an Innovation Games® facilitator, she works with a wide range of clients from the C-Suite through Product Management teams.   She brings experience and skills gained in Sales, Marketing, and Strategic Planning, with organizations ranging from family businesses to global corporations. 5:00 - Hear Megann share how she started her business with her partner who is her husband and the risks that she took. How she set limits and goals. 7:40- Penny is curious how Megann can work with her husband. Megann explains the rules they put in place and how they were once competitors.  Megann then tells us some of the tips that help them make it work. Having a code that is nice and reminds your partner to stop talking about work Preserve the personal relationship and it has its own time and space Recognizing each other’s strengths and experience Share with what you want 13:50 – Discussion on how there are ups and downs in business and how to handle that. Megann offers advice how to overcome these moments and some good habits. How to set “The One”. 20:36- Megann shares what measures were put in place so the company could be launched. Listen to hear about how it is now always about money. 25:15 – Interesting how Megann shares her life experiences as a child and how it relates to her path to running a consulting company. 28:34 – A conversation on niche businesses and how Megann’s company determined what theirs would be and why. 31:57 – Innovation Games ® is a business tool Megann uses and she shares how she was introduced to it and explains how this methodology can be so effective. Using frame works and models instead of just asking questions help businesses become more aware of what needs to be done for their business. Plus, how the tool is effective not only face to face but can be done on line. 35:36 – Conteno’s Weave, a software business tool is explained and how it helps you connect with associates around the world. The connection and process help associates build strategy, solve problems and set priorities so everyone knows their role. 37:37 – Conversation about events that happen when you are in your home office and are in a on line meeting and the unexpected happens. How to deal with it. Plus, more on how Innovation Games® can be used remotely. 44:36 – Penny asks Megann what she would tell someone if they were thinking of becoming a consultant. Megann mentions that she is having a 5 by 5 challenge for sharper focus in your business.  Five days during the week and for 5 weeks which is for people that are going to start their business or are in business now.  To listen to the daily challenge, you can email Megann and get on the mailing list so you can receive the videos and be part of her Face Book group. 51:47- Megann suggests don't worry about failing.  She talks about how she was as an early twitter user and how she got great clients from connecting on social with them. 55:11 – Hear Megann’s message and how she encourages you to start now, don’t wait. HOW TO CONNECT WITH MEGANN www.panoptika.ca www.twitter.com/panoptika also findable at www.twitter.com/megannwillsonTO www.facebook.com/panoptika.ca  5x5 Sharper Focus Challenge Information: www.panoptika.ca/5by5focus 

Jennifer Hill talks to corporate anthropologist, Dr. Andi Simon, about change management. Dr. Simon discusses tips for finding a culture that matches with your values. Dr. Simon also discusses how organizations are having to adapt to create cultures that work for Millennials and Baby Boomers alike. simonassociates.net Andi Simon, author of On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights, is a corporate anthropologist and award-winning author (simonassociates.net). She is the founder and CEO of Simon Associates Management Consultants, designed over a decade ago to help companies use the tools of anthropology to better adapt to changing times. Simon also is a public speaker and an Innovation Games facilitator and trainer. She served as a tenured professor of anthropology and American studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and was a visiting professor teaching entrepreneurship at Washington University in St. Louis. Simon has appeared on “Good Morning America” and has been featured in the Washington Post, Business Week and Forbes, and on Bloomberg Radio.

Jennifer Hill talks to corporate anthropologist, Dr. Andi Simon, about change management. Dr. Simon discusses tips for finding a culture that matches with your values. Dr. Simon also discusses how organizations are having to adapt to create cultures that work for Millennials and Baby Boomers alike. simonassociates.net Andi Simon, author of On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights, is a corporate anthropologist and award-winning author (simonassociates.net). She is the founder and CEO of Simon Associates Management Consultants, designed over a decade ago to help companies use the tools of anthropology to better adapt to changing times. Simon also is a public speaker and an Innovation Games facilitator and trainer. She served as a tenured professor of anthropology and American studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and was a visiting professor teaching entrepreneurship at Washington University in St. Louis. Simon has appeared on “Good Morning America” and has been featured in the Washington Post, Business Week and Forbes, and on Bloomberg Radio.

Just across from the mangroves in Sydney Olympic Park is an education center designed to help students to discover more about their environment. We caught up with Danielle Leggo, who as the education coordinator at SOPA has very much had the opportunity to see first-hand the positive impact that biological field studies and nature walks can bring to kids from urban centers. “The sampling techniques we're using with them… gathering data and asking questions about that data… every time they come out or they think about going and investigating their environment they get to use what they've learned out here in the field”. After chatting with Danielle Leggo, we also look at how to use cooking Baked Alaska to teach science (!) plus we revisit a grab from a past episode in which Ally Watson from Code like a Girl talks about the importance of role models for girls that want to take the lead in digital industries. Hosted by Ben Newsome from Fizzics Education Top 3 learnings Get out into the field! It's not just about the textbook, students need to experience real ecological sampling techniques and learn about the environment first-hand. The intersection between the built environment and ecological communities is fascinating, plus it is an area of research that is being actively investigated as a direct result of urbanization and city sprawl. Observe your surroundings. The living environment had a lot to offer for all the senses! Contact details for Danielle Leggo http://www.sydneyolympicpark.com.au/education_and_learning education@sydneyolympic.com.au https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-leggo-7344168a/ Also, learn more about the Innovation Games that was held during National Science Week in August on Episode 16. https://goo.gl/xTjZ4i Education tip: Cooking Baked Alaska to learn about science! https://goo.gl/MxjEPc Contact Fizzics Education Web: http://www.fizzicseducation.com.au/ Phone: +612 9674 2191 STEM Teaching support resources NEW Primary STEM teaching book!  http://www.fizzicseducation.com.au/be+amazing+book.html >100 Free Science Experiments  http://www.fizzicseducation.com.au/Free+experiments.html >100 Free Science Ideas and Tips http://www.fizzicseducation.com.au/Blog.html Know an educator who'd love this episode? Share it! If something grabbed your attention in this STEM podcast please leave your thoughts below. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What have the following things got in common? Weasels, the San Jose public budgeting process, bootstrapping, disposable software, games and mods of games, figure skating, and a Nike sprinter show falling apart after reaching the 100m line? Well, it’s Luke Hohmann they have in common. I learned an awful lot from Luke. Years and years ago I attended one of his Innovation Games trainings and while I really really liked it, it took me years to realise what I really learned. For me, personally, this was the event that finally made me decide to leave the developing world towards the product or business side of the world. This event moved a switch in my head. But what I really realised years later was that I really groked games, game design and above all, I had learned how to facilitate. Luke is so deep into „designing“ his games that never is it by chance if Luke stands, sits, is in the middle of the room, or in a corner or if he even tears apart some game thing that hangs on the wall. Even designing the simple name tags in the beginning of a class is transformed into a designed game, when Luke does it. But Luke got carried away by the games he found. He bootstrapped an enterprise software company that produced a platform for playing a serious games framework at massive scale. Several thousand payers do not bother him. Scaling world wide also does not bother him. No problem seems to be deep for him to tackle. And this then led Luke to extend his activities to facilitating public budgeting rounds, which he started in San Jose. Also, he applies his framework to education. Who knows what’s next? This interview really is a rollercoaster all over the place and also contains really personal stories on why Luke chose the path he chose and what led him. You can see from the show notes how far and deep we went. I’d really urge you to listen to the end. The interview gets even better as longer as we sat together. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did and you learn much as I learned! Chapters 0:03:00 What are Serious Games, Innovation Games? 0:23:30 Applying Innovation Games 0:48:24 Scaling Innovation Games in several dimensions & Luke, The Entrepreneur 0:59:04 Personal Choices & the power of collaboration in wicked problems 1:32:22 Concepts - self application of games, disposable software, extrinsic vs. intrinsic quality, strategy frameworks as the next tipping point Chapter Notes 0:03:00 Chapter one: What are Serious Games, Innovation Games? What are Serious Games? „You play a serious game not for pleasure but to have a business outcome. Innovation games are a collection of different games as we have different business problems to solve. A game has four components: (1) It has a goal, something you want to achieve. (2) It has a set of resources and rules and interactions, (3) it has a space or a field of play (4) a way to keep score Why Luke calls games frameworks nowadays. 10:52 The role of fun (or not) in Serious Games; Facilitating Games; (Designing) Games as a way to give permission 17:15 Details matter: A pencil without an eraser „If you want me to engage in the act of design, then don’t give me a pencil without an eraser. 18:20 Explaining the „Speed Boat“ game as an example, how it can be applied (e.g. as a technique for team retrospectives or identifying improvement potential in products. Games have the potential to de-personalize feedback and critique and thus make feedback more acceptable and actionable 0:23:30 Chapter 2: Applying Innovation Games 23:30 Scrum as a game and changing the rules of a game; Modding games is great and the goal; When you learn innovation games, you learn modding them 28:23 Modding Monopoly as an example why modding makes sense 31:18 Innovation games as a way to discover why and intent and why you don’t send bug reports to Richard Stallmann 34:12 Scaling organisations w/ Innovation games „It’s not the picture on the wall that drives behaviour, but it’s the picture in the head that drives behaviour. That means: You gotta change the picture in the head before you change the picture on the wall.“ 35:42 Using the „Buy a feature“ game to discuss portfolios „Any performing executive team will always have more ideas than it is able to fund. So the question becomes „how to pick?“. So McKinsey has the following rules and you want to listen to McKinsey and not Agilists. McKinsey says: pass one - do ROI. Get rid of the projects that are not attractive for ROI - that’s easy. But you still gonna have too many. The second pass: Look at the passion and interests of the team. Now, how do we get to the passion and the interest of this team? Well, we have this game!“ 39:28 Explaining great experiences is hard: „Reading about riding a bike is not riding a bike“ 41:58 - An example of shrinking a portfolio of 38 projects to 6 „There is no way a human being can keep and compare 45 things in his head. I will do better then I put them on the board“ 0:48:24 Chapter 3: Scaling Innovation Games in several dimensions & Luke, The Entrepreneur  48:24 Scaling games to gigantic size: (1) Scaling for magnitude of the problem. From market research to internal use to use in agile organisations (2) Scaling the number of participants: From few in person to several thousand online (3) Scaling in industry, e.g. the Austrian Chamber of Commerce (Wirtschaftskammer Österreich) „Really, is my Scaling Agile book that I’m supposed to follow really more than 400 pages?“ „You’re reading these books on Agile and they’re anything but. It’s like I’m reading the top ten books on Agile and they outweigh me“ 55:16 Entrepreneurship - building an enterprise software company without venture capital funding, Adventures of bootstrapping. 0:59:04 Chapter 4: Personal Choices & the power of collaboration in wicked problems 59:04 Getting personal - choices in life: Figure skating as first exercise in latching onto something without compromise. The way of the weasel. Latching onto something and sticking to it. Not chasing the easy way, but the only way possible. „So, yeah, I thought: I’m gonna live like a weasel for a rest of my life“ 65:01 The power of collaboration - „I really do believe - and it’s not just Luke, it’s also my team and people like you in our network - we really do believe that collaborating teams are the best hope we have for solving the problems we face“ „Teams are everywhere, Teams are the foundation of our work in the future“ A list of books (links below): Team of Teams Team Genius The Silo Effect Exponential Organisations The Connected Company 1:06:51 Extending games to public matters, like funding and budgeting decisions for the public: Every Voice engaged foundation 1:11:16 Games in education, on the example of middle school 1:15:16 Not the easiest way to live, but the most satisfying. The Weasel way again. More examples by Luke and Henry Rollins 1:20:56 The importance of the support of others and support in success 1:25:33 „And So I’ve stopped talking to VCs“ and what Luke still learned from VCs 1:32:22 Chapter 5: Concepts - self application of games, disposable software, extrinsic vs. intrinsic quality, strategy frameworks as the next tipping point  1:32:00 Self applying the cure to the Luke’s company so that everyone knows the experience to the companies’ benefit. 1:36:45 Disposable Software 1:39:02 Release quality, intrinsic quality, extrinsic quality 1:39:45 „They improved quality so much that they lost all innovation.“ „You know, the guy who built Flappy Bird, I don’t know if he had green bar automated tests. Did he have an automated production pipeline? CI/CD? No, I doubt it. He was just a kid having some fun. And he built an incredibly high extrinsic quality App. Now, I don’t know about the level of intrinsic quality … and the point is: It doesn’t matter. 1:42:28 Why the ideal Sprinter shoe should fall apart after exactly 100m 1:46:28 Strategy frameworks on the tipping point: The Ansoff Matrix - an early approach on strategy „As we move from physical labor to knowledge work - and we continue to move down knowledge work - these (strategy & problem solving) frameworks are the next tipping point and it’s really fundamental“ Links and Notes Books and resources by Luke Hohmann Innovation Games Beyond Software Architecture Journey of the Software Professional: The sociology of Software Development  Blog Post: The role of passion in prioritization Every Voice Engaged foundation Organizations andPeople mentioned and more resources Wirtschaftkammer Österreich WKO Report on the cooperation between who and Conteneo Interview with Henry Rollins as a Joe Rogan Experience Podcast: Books mentioned Annie Dillard - „Living like Weasels"   from the book „Teaching a Stone to Talk"  Team of Teams Team Genius The Silo Effect Exponential Organisations The Connected Company Reality is broken, Jane McGonigal Gamestorming People mentioned  Jane McGonigal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_McGonigal  Game Designer Matt Leacock (e.g. Pandemic Board Game) Figure skater Toller Cranston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toller_Cranston    

Craig joins guest co-host Shane Hastie to talk with Luke Hohmann, author of “Innovation Games”, founder and CEO of Conteneo, Inc. and co-founder of Every Voice Engaged at the Agile 2015 conference after his inspirational opening keynote and they chat about: Luke’s opening keynote “Awesome Superproblems“ Innovation Games – the book, the training, the games also author … Continue reading →

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 037 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: Luke Hohmann was recommended by the VP of Global Innovation of the RELX Group, Jeff Honious, who was my guest in episode 28. Consequently, I knew I had to interview Luke to learn about his tools for innovators. Luke is the founder and CEO of The Innovation Games, which is now known as Conteneo. His past experiences include computer scientist, engineer, and product manager. Luke is serious about the smart application of games to optimize decision making in innovation, product development, and market research, and numerous companies use his tools. He is also the author of “Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play.” My favorite line from his profile is: “Luke’s an old school Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Instead of building a company to flip, he’s building a company to change the world.” Buy A Feature is an example of an innovation game. It helps the group decide which projects are most important and makes the best use of their available resources. To use it, say you have: 20 possible projects and the total budget for all them is $20MBut you only have $8M available for new projectsInstead of creating a competitive environment for selecting the projects, you create a collaborative environment.This could be accomplished by telling eight decision-makers that they each have $1M to allocate to projects.They must work together to determine the projects of highest value.

Luke Hohmann was recommended by the VP of Global Innovation of the RELX Group, Jeff Honious, who was my guest in episode 28. Consequently, I knew I had to interview Luke to learn about his tools for innovators. Luke is the founder and CEO of The Innovation Games, which is now known as Conteneo. His […]

Luke Hohmann was recommended by the VP of Global Innovation of the RELX Group, Jeff Honious, who was my guest in episode 28. Consequently, I knew I had to interview Luke to learn about his tools for innovators. Luke is the founder and CEO of The Innovation Games, which is now known as Conteneo. His […]

Craig and Renee visit Washington, DC for the Agile 2015 conference and debrief in the Agile Alliance Lounge after day 1: Luke Hohmann keynote “Awesome Superproblems” – Innovation Games and book, Every Voice Engaged – challenge to play 2 games in the next year that will change the world Lundy’s Law – “any team of programmers if … Continue reading →

Theme: Agile Community Events Dr. Dave (@DrCorneliusInfo) joins Vic (@AgileCoffee) for a beautiful morning on Huntington Beach discussing all manner of Agile community events: Agile Opens (and other open space uses), coaching retreats and camps, lean coffees, hackathons. Dave talks about the 5Saturdays model, and we tell how to find, get involved and host these activities. This is one of my favorite episodes. In addition to the excellent scenery and the superb company, I very much enjoy talking about community events. Not only do I believe that community is important and fulfilling, but I have a penchant for organizing these activities. For more information Open Space: History of Open Space Harrison Owen's Guide to Open Space Technologies Agile Opens: Agile Open Southern California - Sept 10-11, 2015 Agile Open Northern California - Oct 9-10, 2015 Agile Open Northwest Agile Coach Camps: AgileCoachCamp.org Agile Coach Camp US West 2015 Scrum Coaching Retreat Seattle 2015 LeanCoffee.org - includes listing of cities with lean coffees 5Saturdays.org - Dr.Dave's community learning initiative to bring Scrum and other skills into local high schools ALICE - educational software that teaches computer programming in a 3D environment Scrum Day San Diego and Scrum Day Orange County (Vic presented at both in each of their first years) various others: Play Camp (and Luke Hohmann's other ventures: Innovation Games and Conteneo) Play4Agile AgileGames (New England) DevOps AIN World Conference (Montréal, Sept 24-27, 2015 - organized by the AI Network) Lego Serious Play (might have to search a bit to see if conferences are planned) Finally, Vic ran a couple of Hackathons in the workplace... - - - - Coming up in episode 31 - I hold a lean coffee at a 5Saturdays event with a cast of new voices. Further ahead in episode 32 - interviews from the 2nd annual Scrum Day San Diego.  

In this episode we talk about the relationship between software architecture and the business. Based on his book, Beyond Software Architecture we discuss how things such as branding, licensing, updating or different deployment scenarios influence the technical architecture of a system. We also discuss issues such as portability that add a huge amount of complexity, although from a business perspective it often does not make much sense. In the second part of the interview we discuss how the technical team and the business team can improve the way they work together. We look at some of the games (such as Buy a Feature or Give them a Hot Tub) from his new book Innovation Games, which discusses how to use collaborative play to be more creative and innovative in product creation.

In this episode we talk about the relationship between software architecture and the business. Based on his book, Beyond Software Architecture we discuss how things such as branding, licensing, updating or different deployment scenarios influence the technical architecture of a system. We also discuss issues such as portability that add a huge amount of complexity, although from a business perspective it often does not make much sense. In the second part of the interview we discuss how the technical team and the business team can improve the way they work together. We look at some of the games (such as Buy a Feature or Give them a Hot Tub) from his new book Innovation Games, which discusses how to use collaborative play to be more creative and innovative in product creation.

In this episode we talk about the relationship between software architecture and the business. Based on his book, Beyond Software Architecture we discuss how things such as branding, licensing, updating or different deployment scenarios influence the technical architecture of a system. We also discuss issues such as portability that add a huge amount of complexity, although from a business perspective it often does not make much sense. In the second part of the interview we discuss how the technical team and the business team can improve the way they work together. We look at some of the games (such as Buy a Feature or Give them a Hot Tub) from his new book Innovation Games, which discusses how to use collaborative play to be more creative and innovative in product creation.