Podcast appearances and mentions of josh seiden

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Play Episode Listen Later Dec 24, 2024 8:42

In this special holiday episode of the Product Thinking Podcast, Melissa Perri curates the most impactful insights from 2024's top episodes. Featuring conversations with industry leaders including Steve Portigal on user research evolution, Quincy Hunte on decision-making at scale, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden on OKRs, Kate Leto on leadership coaching, and Leah Tharin on product-led growth. This compilation episode showcases key learnings that shaped product thinking throughout the year, offering valuable perspectives on research, leadership, goal-setting, and growth strategies.

250: Putting Customers at the Heart of Your Goals: A Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs with Josh Seiden

Navigating the Customer Experience

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 3, 2024 23:58

Send us a textIn today's episode of Navigating the Customer Experience with Josh Seiden. Josh's insights emphasize that customer-centricity is a journey requiring both leadership and employees to adopt new ways of thinking and working. By focusing on customer needs and empowering teams through OKRs, organizations can create greater value and drive meaningful change.Josh's JourneyJosh began his career in Silicon Valley during the pre-internet days, working in technology. Fascinated by what makes great products and services, he spent many years as a designer and later a product manager. Today, he helps teams collaborate more effectively, fostering customer-centric approaches to deliver exceptional value to the world.About Josh's New Book: Who Does What By How Much? A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRsJosh's book is inspired by his passion for integrating a customer-focused perspective into product and service development. He emphasizes that while creating good products is challenging, it's essential to keep the customer at the core of decision-making. His book introduces OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), a goal-setting framework that helps organizations align their objectives with customer needs.OKRs prompt teams to define clear objectives—what they want to achieve—and measurable key results based on customer outcomes. For example, the Cleveland Clinic uses OKRs with objectives like "Be the best place in the world to receive healthcare" and key results such as reducing serious safety events. This approach ensures customer-centric thinking while empowering teams to solve problems creatively.Overcoming Challenges with OKRsA common pain point in organizations is micromanagement, where leaders dictate tasks rather than allowing teams to leverage their expertise. OKRs address this by shifting leadership's focus from controlling tasks to setting strategic goals and creating an environment where employees can solve problems independently. This requires mutual trust and encourages employees to think critically about delivering customer value.However, resistance to change is a hurdle. Employees may feel overwhelmed by new processes. Josh emphasizes the importance of leadership in clearly articulating why OKRs are being adopted, addressing organizational pain points, and explaining how OKRs will benefit both the company and individual employees. This alignment fosters motivation and helps overcome resistance.Aligning OKRs with Employee NeedsJosh highlights the need to connect OKRs to the employees' sense of purpose. Everyone within an organization has customers—whether they're external consumers or internal stakeholders. For example, an HR professional's customers might be employees seeking benefits or managers hiring talent. By adopting a customer-centric mindset, employees at all levels can see how their roles contribute to organizational success, making them more engaged and motivated.Key Behaviors for Customer-Centric OrganizationsTo become truly customer-centric, organizations must:Understand Customers Deeply: Organizations should invest in customer discovery, understanding who their customers are, their motivations, and what challenges they face.Prioritize Value Creation Over Sales: Beyond generating revenue, focus on how customers use products and whether those products are delivering real value.Foster a Problem-Solving Culture: Empower employees to solve problems rather than prescribing solutions.Enhance Communication and Transparency: Ensure alignment and clarity in how OKRs connect to customer and employee goals.

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Making Sure Everyone Organization-wide Works on the Right Stuff, With Josh Seiden

Business Creators Radio Show With Adam Hommey

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 22, 2024 66:14

People are working hard in your company…but often on the wrong stuff. This happens widely because teams are told what to build from leadership, causing them to lose track of what their customers want. It's important to keep in mind that organizations exist to provide some kind of value to people, yet too often they […] The post Making Sure Everyone Organization-wide Works on the Right Stuff, With Josh Seiden first appeared on Business Creators Radio Show with Adam Hommey.

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Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden | How We Tested Training Programs

How I Tested That

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 16, 2024 34:53

In this conversation, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden discuss their journey in scaling their training business, focusing on the assumptions, risks, and testing methods they are employing. They share insights on the importance of community building, the challenges of filling workshops, and the balance between qualitative and quantitative success metrics. The discussion highlights the significance of cold outreach, learning from past experiments, and navigating uncertainty in entrepreneurship.

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Building Customer-Centric Teams: Josh Seiden on OKRs and Agile

Convergence

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 1, 2024 69:05

In this episode, Ashok sits down with Josh Seiden, author and product management expert, to explore key insights from Josh's latest book, "Who Does What by How Much." The conversation centers around using OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to align teams and improve organizational outcomes. They examine the challenges many teams face when implementing frameworks like OKRs or Agile and emphasize the importance of understanding the "why" behind these systems. Josh also reflects on his early work, such as developing the Kensington Turbo Mouse and collaborating with Alan Cooper, widely known as the "Father of Visual Basic." Unlock the full potential of your product team with Integral's player coaches, experts in lean, human-centered design. Visit integral.io/convergence for a free Product Success Lab workshop to gain clarity and confidence in tackling any product design or engineering challenge. Get key strategies for fostering a customer-centric culture, building effective product teams, and aligning leadership with team goals. Whether you're new to OKRs or looking to refine your process, this episode provides actionable advice for team leaders, product managers, and executives alike. Inside the Episode... The role of OKRs in driving business alignment and outcomes The importance of clarifying the "why" behind processes like OKRs or Agile Josh Seiden's background and his early design work with the Kensington Turbo Mouse Strategies for using frameworks to empower teams and avoid over-focusing on the process How to implement OKRs successfully and avoid common pitfalls The evolution of design thinking in product development Understanding the customer's role at every level of an organization Key lessons from "Who Does What by How Much" and Josh's other books Mentioned in this Episode: "Who Does What by How Much" by Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf "Lean UX" by Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf "Sense and Respond" by Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt "Outcomes Over Outputs" The Kensington Turbo Mouse Alan Cooper - The father of visual basic, author of About Face Book that every software designer should now - About Face by Alan Cooper Vitsoe Shelving Subscribe to the Convergence podcast wherever you get podcasts, including video episodes on YouTube at youtube.com/@convergencefmpodcast. Learn something? Give us a 5-star review and like the podcast on YouTube. It's how we grow. Follow the Pod Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/convergence-podcast/ X: https://twitter.com/podconvergence Instagram: @podconvergence

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E314 | The Power of Customer-Centric OKRs with Josh Seiden & Jeff Gothelf

The Melting Pot with Dominic Monkhouse

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 17, 2024 45:55

SummaryJosh Seiden & Jeff Gothelf join Dominic Monkhouse to talk about one of his favourite growth tools - OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)The discussion dives deep into the world of OKRs, highlighting their critical role in goal-setting and driving organisational alignment. The guests introduce their latest book, Who Does What By How Much?, which offers a fresh, customer-focused take on OKRs. They stress the importance of shifting from output-driven goals to outcome-based objectives that are tightly aligned with customer needs and behaviours. A key theme of the conversation is the delicate balance between Business as Usual (BAU) activities and the implementation of OKRs. This episode explores how OKRs should not only complement existing operations but also help steer an organisation's strategy. They discuss the ideal timeframe for setting corporate OKRs, with an emphasis on quarterly check-ins and measurable key results that track progress throughout the year.The conversation also addresses practical challenges, such as fostering collaboration across teams and securing leadership buy-in, both of which are essential for successful OKR implementation. The speakers advise organisations to start small, gradually expand OKR adoption, and invest time and effort into their OKR process while still keeping an eye on BAU performance.In addition to their insights on OKRs, the guests share personal book recommendations and reflect on their own definitions of success, rounding out a rich discussion that not only offers practical advice but also broader perspectives on achieving meaningful outcomes in today's customer-driven world.TakeawaysOKRs should be customer-centric and focused on outcomes rather than outputs.Aligning goals with the needs and behaviours of customers leads to better products and services.Strategic goals should be set for a year, while tactical goals can be set on a quarterly or monthly basis.The conversation and alignment around OKRs should be a two-way process, involving input from all levels of the organisation.Flexibility and customisation are key in implementing OKRs, as each organisation's needs and context may vary. Set quarterly check-ins and key results that can be measured throughout the year.Prioritise customer-centric goals and focus on changing customer behaviour.Start small and gradually expand OKR implementation.Allocate time and effort to OKRs while maintaining business as usual metrics.Facilitate collaboration and foster leadership buy-in for successful OKR implementation.Continuously learn and acquire new skills to enhance personal and professional growth.Chapters03:13 The Power of Customer-Centric OKRs07:19 Balancing BAU and OKRs13:53 The Role of Strategy in OKR Implementation25:15 Setting the Timeframe for Corporate OKRs30:40 Setting Quarterly Check-ins and Measurable Key Results32:14 Prioritising Customer-Centric Goals for Changing Customer Behavior41:40 Challenges of Collaboration and the Role of Leadership Buy-in47:00 Starting Small and Gradually Expanding OKR Implementation49:16 Allocating Time and Effort to OKRs while Maintaining Business as Usual Metrics56:01 Continuous Learning and Personal Growth for Success

Josh Seiden – Customer-Centric Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

Becoming Preferred

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 16, 2024 35:22

SEASON: 4 EPISODE: 16Episode Overview:Everyone in every industry and every role has customers. Your success depends on how efficiently you can solve your customers' problems, adapt as those problems change, and influence their behavior to drive the results you want. Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, give you the framework to do that.However, adopting OKRs successfully is no easy feat. It requires changing the way you work, think about your work, and plan for the work you'll do in the future. So whether you're an OKR newcomer, or a pro needing a tune-up, my guest today will share his insights on how to put customers at the center, navigate uncertainty, and succeed with OKRs. Join me now for my conversation with author, speaker, and product innovation strategist, Josh Seiden.Guest Bio: Josh Seiden has worked with hundreds of organizations as an individual contributor, leader, founder, and consultant. As software designer–turned–coach, consultant, and speaker, he's helped organizations fuse strategy, become customer-centric, and utilize evidence-based decision-making to become more agile (with a lowercase “a”), make better products, and achieve greater success. Along with his co author Jeff Gothelf, he's written two previous books. Their new book is: Who Does What By How Much? A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs Resource Links:Website: Website: www.joshuaseiden.comProduct Link: https://www.joshuaseiden.com/booksInsight Gold Timestamps:01:16 Your latest book, Who Does What by How Much: A Practical Guide to Customer Centric OKRs01:45 OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results04:39 The most common misconception about OKRs 05:38 OKRs imply we're going to do something different07:18 As a leader, you've got responsibility for the whole company09:21 The challenge is that we lose track of who that customer is and what their point of view is10:52 The first step in OKR is….12:28 What are the factors that are success factors?13:19 We say OKRs are three things14:49 I work in HR, who's my customer?16:08 Who does what, by how much?20:50 They're a goal setting framework22:15 Innovation is the intersection of new capabilities and unmet customer needs24:08 We know leadership plays a crucial role in the success of the OKRs27:37 We don't necessarily know the answer beforehand28:24 It's asking the right question and measuring the right question29:45 I think there's an opportunity for us to have better conversations in the workplace32:38 Who's the target of my work? What are they trying to do? How can I help them do it? Connect Socially:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jseiden/Twitter: https://x.com/jseidenEmail: josh@seiden.coSponsors: Rainmaker LeadGen Platform Demo: https://bookme.michaelvickers.com/lite/rainmaker-leadgen-platform-demoRainmaker Digital Solutions:

innovation objectives practical guide okrs okr customer centric key results jeff gothelf key results okrs josh seiden

Podcast of “Get Down To Business” – 09/08/2024 - Josh Seiden, Ben Arendt, Heather Cox and Margot Machol Bisnow

Get Down To Business with Shalom Klein

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 7, 2024 40:24

Join Scott "Shalom" Klein on his weekly radio show, Get Down To Business with guests: Josh Seiden Ben Arendt Heather Cox Margot Machol Bisnow

klein shalom arendt get down to business bisnow heather cox josh seiden

From Output to Outcome, The Customer-Focused OKRs | Jeff Gothelf

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 31, 2024 36:26

BONUS: From Output to Outcome, The Customer-Focused OKRs with Jeff Gothelf In this BONUS episode, we dive deep into the world of OKRs with Jeff Gothelf, co-author of the newly released book, Who Does What By How Much? A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs. Jeff is a product management expert, author, and keynote speaker, renowned for his contributions to building better products and fostering innovation within organizations. In this episode, Jeff discusses the evolution of OKRs, their impact on teams and organizations, and how to adopt this framework effectively. The Motivation Behind the Book "We needed to change how companies approach goal-setting to focus on outcomes rather than outputs." Jeff shares the journey that led him and his co-author Josh Seiden to write this book. They began with Lean UX, a practical guide for designers that expanded into other company areas (see this podcast episode with Josh Seiden about that book). However, as they worked more with clients, they noticed a disconnect between the goals set by leadership and the methods used by teams to achieve those goals. This realization inspired them to tackle the challenges companies face with goal-setting, particularly with OKRs, which they observe, are widely used but often misapplied. The Shift from Output to Outcome "In a post-OKR world, success is measured by what customers do differently when we solve the problem the right way." Jeff explains the fundamental difference between traditional goal-setting methods and OKRs. Traditional methods focus on output—what gets produced. In contrast, OKRs emphasize outcomes, or how customer behavior changes as a result of solving a problem correctly. Jeff highlights the importance of this shift in mindset, especially in software-driven organizations where success isn't just about delivering a product but about making a meaningful impact on users. Overcoming the "Do the Thing" Mentality "Start by asking your boss, 'What do you expect our users to do differently?'" One of the challenges in implementing OKRs is moving teams away from a mentality focused on simply completing tasks. Jeff suggests starting conversations with leadership by discussing the impact and benefits of feature requests, shifting the focus from just doing the thing to achieving a specific outcome. He also advises starting with a pilot team to ease into this new way of working, emphasizing the need for customer-centric, outcome-based OKRs. Embracing Experiments Without Fear "We saved the organization money by invalidating assumptions—this is a success, not a failure." Jeff addresses the common fear teams have about experimenting and potentially failing. He shares examples from his work with teams who, after finding their hypotheses invalid, were initially afraid to communicate this to leadership. However, by reframing these experiments as cost-saving successes, Jeff shows how organizations can shift their perspective and embrace experimentation as a critical part of innovation. Structuring OKRs for Customer-Centricity "We reverse-engineer the problem and identify the human who cares about having that problem solved." Jeff delves into the importance of structuring OKRs around customer needs. He recommends starting by defining the problem teams are trying to solve and understanding the people who are affected by that problem. Encouraging teams to dig deeper into the actual human experiences they aim to improve ensures that the OKRs are not only business-focused but also enhance customer experiences and relationships. Redefining Roadmaps with OKRs "OKR-based roadmaps replace feature lists with behavior change hypotheses." For OKRs to work effectively, Jeff explains that organizations must also rethink their roadmaps. Traditional roadmaps often list features to be built, but with OKRs, the focus shifts to committing to specific outcomes and behavior changes rather than delivering features. This change requires a new approach to planning and prioritization, one that aligns with the goals set by OKRs. Starting the OKR Adoption Process "Adopt a cycle of OKRs, experiments, and goal-based roadmaps to ease the transition." Jeff provides practical advice for organizations looking to start using OKRs. He outlines a cycle that includes setting OKRs, conducting experiments, and adjusting roadmaps based on the learnings from those experiments. He also emphasizes the importance of clear communication from teams, including sharing what they've learned and how they've adjusted their course based on that knowledge. Jeff's approach is tested and proven, with much of the content first shared on his blog. The OKR Book To dive deeper into customer-centric OKRs, you can order Who Does What By How Much? A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs on Amazon. For additional resources and insights, visit OKR-BOOK.com and JeffGothelf.com. About Jeff Gothelf Jeff Gothelf is a product management expert, author, and keynote speaker known for his impactful work in building better products and fostering innovation cultures. He is the co-author of Lean UX and Sense & Respond, and advises executives and organizations on business agility, digital transformation, and human-centered design. Jeff's latest project is co-authoring Who Does What By How Much? A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs. You can link with Jeff Gothelf on LinkedIn and connect with Jeff Gothelf on Twitter.

Pessoas para seguir e Livros para ler, Com Rafael Frota no UX decodificado

DesignTeam

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 1, 2024 62:51

Olá, pessoal! Mais uma das lives da nossa Semana do UX Decodificado. Neste evento especial, vamos bater um papo com Rafael Frota trazendo diversas referências e recomendações de livros para enriquecer ainda mais seu conhecimento em UX. "UX Decodificado" foi escrito para fornecer um guia completo e prático sobre UX, destinado a novos designers, profissionais em transição, gestores, desenvolvedores e inovadores. O objetivo é disseminar conhecimentos valiosos, promover uma cultura de design centrada no usuário e ajudar profissionais a aplicarem práticas de UX de forma eficaz em seus projetos e carreiras. Já comprou o nosso livro "UX Decodificado"? Se você é um designer em busca de aprimorar suas habilidades em UX, ou um profissional de outra área interessado em migrar para o design de experiência, este livro é para você. Adquira já o seu exemplar e leve sua carreira para o próximo nível! Edição Física (Site da brauer) Amazon Brasil: https://amzn.to/3Wv4zVb (Versão Digital em português) Amazon Espanha: Compre agora! (Versão Digital em português) Amazon UK: Compre Agora! (Versão Digital em português) Livros Recomendados "Don't Make Me Think" de Steve Krug https://amzn.to/4fxgTNF Um guia clássico para a usabilidade de websites e produtos digitais. "The Design of Everyday Things" de Don Norman https://amzn.to/3WMQXGp Uma leitura fundamental para entender os princípios do design centrado no usuário. "About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design" de Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin e Christopher Noessel https://amzn.to/3WN7FoX Um manual completo sobre design de interação e usabilidade. "Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience" de Jeff Gothelf e Josh Seiden https://amzn.to/3A5PNgn Um guia prático para integrar UX e métodos Lean em projetos de design. "Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences" de Stephen Anderson https://amzn.to/46smPTT Foca em como criar designs que engajem e encantem os usuários. Profissionais Referência Don Norman Steve Krug Jeff Gothelf Alan Cooper Tem varios brasileiros citados no livro. Recomendo buscar. Alem claro dos que tem passado por aqui no bom dia ux e nesta semana. Sobre carreira: com ebooks Joe Natoli https://givegoodux.com/books/ Artiom Dashinsky https://dashinsky.com/ Álvaro Souza https://www.aprenderux.com.br/ Arquitetura de informacao Abbey covert e sua comunidade The Sensemakers Club https://www.thesensemakersclub.com/ Mercado, lideranca e metricas Jared Spool e a comunidade Leaders of Awesomeness Inerface, interacao e UI FeUX www.youtube.com/@feuxdesign Comunidades Jovens uxui Vagas ux https://vagasux.com.br/ Sites Recomendados para Aprender Sobre UX Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) nngroup.com Oferece uma vasta gama de artigos, relatórios e vídeos sobre pesquisa e prática de usabilidade e UX. É uma das fontes mais respeitadas no campo. Smashing Magazine smashingmagazine.com Publica artigos detalhados, tutoriais e recursos sobre design, desenvolvimento web, e UX. A List Apart alistapart.com Foca em padrões web, design e desenvolvimento, oferecendo artigos de alta qualidade sobre UX e UI. UX Design.cc uxdesign.cc Uma plataforma que reúne artigos, tutoriais, e links úteis sobre design de experiência do usuário. Interaction Design Foundation interaction-design.org Oferece cursos online, artigos e uma comunidade ativa para quem deseja aprender mais sobre UX. UX Matters uxmatters.com Publica artigos e colunas de especialistas em UX sobre uma ampla variedade de tópicos relacionados ao design de experiência do usuário. Usability.gov usability.gov Mantido pelo governo dos EUA, oferece recursos, guias e melhores práticas para criar interfaces centradas no usuário. Boxes and Arrows boxesandarrows.com Uma revista online que discute design de interação, arquitetura da informação e design centrado no usuário. UX Booth uxbooth.com Um blog colaborativo que cobre diversos aspectos do design de experiência do usuário. Medium – UX Collective uxdesign.cc Uma coleção de artigos escritos por profissionais de UX sobre tendências, práticas e estudos de caso. Esses livros, sites e profissionais são altamente recomendados para qualquer pessoa interessada em aprofundar seus conhecimentos em UX. Eles fornecem uma base sólida e insights valiosos que complementam os ensinamentos do livro "UX Decodificado". Adquira já o seu exemplar e leve sua carreira para o próximo nível! https://lnkd.in/dTU9S_Da

(S4) E044 Darren Wilmshurst on Solving Organisational Challenges and Demonstrating Value

Agile Innovation Leaders

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 28, 2024 52:32

Bio Darren, as the European Managing Director of Cprime, spearheads transformation initiatives in EMEA, leveraging over two decades of experience in banking and IT leadership. As a SAFe Fellow and renowned author, he drives strategic growth by defining innovative go-to-market strategies and deepening client relationships. Darren is responsible for overseeing Cprime's consultancy services, implementing complex programs, and negotiating multi-million pound contracts, positioning the company as a leader in organisational efficiency and performance optimisation. He co-authored the BCS Book “Agile Foundations – Principles Practices and Frameworks” and "SAFe Coaches Handbook". A contributor to the SAFe Reference Guide 4.5 and "The ART of avoiding a Train Wreck". Finally a reviewer of "Valuing Agile; the financial management of agile projects" and "Directing Agile Change” Interview Highlights 01:30 Pandemic impacts 04:00 Cprime 08:00 Wooing clients 09:15 Using the right language 11:00 Doing your research 12:30 Mistakes leaders make 15:30 Changing mindsets 16:00 Ingredients for change 17:30 Reading for knowledge 26:00 Three thirds 28:30 Disruption 31:30 SAFe Coaches Handbook 37:50 SAFe frameworks 40:20 Enterprise strategy Connecting LinkedIn: Darren Wilmshurst on LinkedIn Books & Resources - Strategic Leadership: How to Think and Plan Strategically and Provide Direction, John Adair - Tribal Unity Book, Em Campbell-Pretty, - Drive, Daniel H. Pink - SAFe® Coaches Handbook: Proven tips and techniques for launching and running SAFe® Teams, ARTs, and Portfolios in an Agile Enterprise, Darren Wilmshurst & Lindy Quick - Agile Foundations: Principles, practices and frameworks, Peter Measey - The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck: Practical Tips and Tricks for Launching and Operating SAFe Agile Release Trains, Em Campbell-Pretty, Adrienne L. Wilson, Dean Leffingwell - Industrial Devops: Build Better Systems Faster Dr. Johnson, Robin Yeman, Mik Kersten, Dean Leffingwell - Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results: Christina R Wodtke - Who Does What By How Much | Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden (okr-book.com) 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 It's a huge honour and privilege to have again with me as my guest on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast none other than Darren Wilmshurst, Managing Director at Cprime. Darren is an SPCT and a SAFe fellow. So for some context to the audience, Daz was one of the very first people I interviewed for the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast and this was about five years ago or so, and I actually wanted to have a way of speaking with Daz, and I didn't know how to, so I said, hey, can I interview you for a podcast? And long story short, I ended up heading on a plane to Oman, but that's a different story. So, Daz, what have you been up to since then? Because when we recorded the first one, you were not yet a SAFe fellow, it was afterwards that you became a SAFe fellow and lots of other things must have happened. Darren Wilmshurst Well then the pandemic started, and I think that that changed life for all of us, most of our consultancy work stopped because it was discretionary spend, people were in retreat in terms of trying to buckle down and understand, try and reduce costs as much as possible. I think the biggest impact was then training, because obviously we couldn't do training in person. We weren't allowed by the certificating bodies to train online, so they had to give us permission to do that, which they did, and then we had to think about, well, how are we going to do this online? You know, what conference facilities are we going to use? What collaborative tools are we going to use? And how do we deliver this experience to make it still interactive and engaging? So I think that was a major challenge for us as well, and if I'm honest, whilst we're still doing stuff online, we're starting to see some training, at least moving back in person, but my preference is still in person because it's a different experience. The theatrics in me, the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd is still really important as well. So I think that's the first thing I think has changed is that we had that period where everything was remote, I think we're back into a world now where we're more hybrid, which I enjoy the in person stuff, but I think we'll probably never go back to pre-pandemic where everything was in person, both consulting and training. So I think that was the major change, I think for us as well. During that time as well, our major founder wanted to retire, so we sold Radtac to Cprime and that all happened during the early days of the pandemic as well. We had a number of suitors, about six suitors, we decided on Cprime for, for me, two critical reasons and this is quite important, I think as well. Number one is that Radtac felt like a really family firm. We had a set of values and principles, there's a DNA to Radtac and we wanted someone that matched our DNA, I think it was so important for us. We could have gone to some other organisations, but we might have ended up selling our soul to the devil in some respects. Cprime, acquired a company in the US called Blue Agility a few years earlier, almost similar size to Radtac, very similar what they did as well, and what was key for me was that all the people in Blue Agility were still in Cprime. In fact, two had left and come back, so that was a good sign to me that we were aligned in terms of values and principles. So that was number one. The second reason was that Radtac had a heritage of all this training, you know, we're back to 1998. We had all this good training, we'd build up the consulting part of our business, so we're really good in terms of training and consultancy, but we were very agnostic about tooling and technology, because we didn't have the capabilities, or the brand awareness around that part of our business, and it used to frustrate me because, we'd go in, we'd do a great job in terms of way of working, somebody else would go in and maybe do the tooling set up, configure it in a way that wasn't aligned, that wasn't working and that was frustrating. Now we could see opportunities to improve the continuous delivery pipeline, but we didn't have the capability to sort it out as well, whereas Cprime had all of that heritage. So for me, it completed that puzzle where now we can do the training, the consultancy, the tooling to visualise the work, configure the ways of working as well, and also really help with that continuous delivery pipeline as well. So that was the defining decision. We completed that acquisition in February 2021, so literally 12 months after the pandemic. Cprime was at the time owned by a French company called Alten, massive company, not well known, but massive company. Cprime probably wasn't really core to Alten, they were a project management engineering company and Alten sold Cprime January 2023 to Goldman Sachs and Everstone Capital, so that's been a change. So again, we've had the pandemic, we've gone through the acquisition, and now we're owned by a private equity as well, which brings different challenges to the organisation as well, and actually the reality was that after the acquisition, after the earn out, I was looking to maybe semi-retire, spending a bit more time in Spain, fishing and playing golf, but actually this next phase is really exciting, so a testament to Cprime and Goldman Sachs as well, that I want to be part of the next part of the journey as well. So, I'm still here Ula. Ula Ojiaku Well, I am glad you are, and it sounds like it's been a rollercoaster ride and a journey, but part of it is the thrills as well. Darren Wilmshurst Look, we're very privileged, aren't we Ula, because I work with great people, I say that genuinely. I work with great clients, I'm very fortunate in that. And although, you know, if I don't want to work with a client, I don't have to do that, but actually all the clients I work with, I really enjoy working with and I love the work that we do. So it's almost like the Holy Trinity, great people, great clients, great work. Why wouldn't I want to carry on doing what I do? So I always think that we're very privileged in what we do. So, I'm very grateful. Ula Ojiaku And I'll say that the little I've worked with you, what I know is you are a genuine person and you're a great person as well. I can't remember who this quote is attributed to, but people tend to be mirrors. So if you're good, people mirror what you show to them. And I'll say that based on my experience with you, I've learned a lot in terms of how to treat people, being genuine and caring genuinely about their welfare, not necessarily about what you get from them, and that's key. So, that's the sort of person you are, that's who you are. Darren Wilmshurst That's very kind. Ula Ojiaku I want say thank you for that, because there are times when I'm in situations and I'm thinking about maybe somebody or potential someone, colleague or clients, and I'll be like, what would Daz do? How would he probably think about this situation? Now, part of what you do as director involves also wooing, wooing and winning the client and the customer. So, what would you say are your go to principles when pitching, to communicate the value you could bring before an engagement and maybe later on, we can talk about during and after the engagements? Darren Wilmshurst Yeah, I'm still Officer of the company, so I'm still Director of Cprime, the UK entity and also the European entity, so I have some corporate responsibilities as well. I'm still a practicing consultant trainer, so I still have to earn my supper every night as well, and that's the bit that I really enjoy. I'm also responsible for developing the capability of our people, and the products or the value propositions that we take to market as well. So that's part of it, but you're right, I do get involved in what we'd probably call pre-sale as well, so pitching as well. And I think the one thing I think I've learned over the last two, maybe three years as well is, is that I'm very conscious of the language that I use. What do I mean by that? We see a lot of stuff on social media about ‘is Agile dead', stuff like that. It's not dead, but actually if I am talking to a client and I use the Agile word or the ‘A word' it can create an allergic reaction, it can trigger them and in the same way that, just talking about a framework, SAFe, as well that can create a same reaction as well. So for me, it's not about Agile, it's not about SAFe, it's about actually what are we trying to do? What is the problem? What are the challenges that you're having as an organisation? And how can we help you overcome those challenges and create value in what you do? Now, what we will do is we will use ways of working, Agile ways of working, lean ways of working, stuff like that to help them, but what I try and do is try and avoid the triggering word, because I've seen it so often where they, well, we've been in agile for ages, well have you? Or we tried agile, it didn't really work, or we spent millions of pounds on agile transformation and we haven't seen the benefit. So sometimes you have to be careful in terms of the context you're going to. So for me, stop talking about frameworks, stop talking about words that might trigger, talk about their problems and their challenges and how you can help them overcome it, and the value that you bring to their organisation to help them overcome that as well. And that's really key for me as well. Ula Ojiaku That suggests to me that there would be some sort of background work to at least understand who you are pitching to, understand what their experience had been in the past, to know what those trigger words are. Is that something you could share about? Darren Wilmshurst It's an interesting question, because I interview a lot of people to want to come and join our organisation, and the first thing I say to them, can you tell me what you know about Cprime? And if they haven't done the research, it's like, so you've come on here, you want a job at this organisation and you have no idea who we are, and what we've done, and that just really frustrates me. So in return, if I was going on to talk to a client, then of course I'm going to try and understand what they do - what's your core business, there's lots of information on their website. If they're publicly listed, then go get their annual accounts because again, that would talk very much about their last training year and some of their issues as well. Having said all of that, we're still seeing the same problems and the same challenges across all organisations, regardless of the industry they're in. Every organisation, we have more demand than we have capacity. Fact. Everyone has that. We don't know how to prioritise our work. We need to reduce our costs, particularly now. That's becoming more prevalent now, certainly in this last six months than previously as well. Our time to market is too slow. Our ability to turn our ideas into actions needs to be faster. So they're the common problems we're seeing is again, too much demand, not knowing how to prioritise, reduce our costs, and we need to be able to be more adaptive and bring our ideas to the market or to fruition quicker as well. Ula Ojiaku What would you then say are the common mistakes leaders spearheading a transformation make? Darren Wilmshurst Yeah, it's interesting because again, a lot of the work that we're doing now, if we think about the Law of Diffusion of Innovation, and that's a product life cycle as well. If I take that model and apply it to organisations and their adoption, let's call it ‘of modern ways of working' rather than agile, I think we're probably in that late majority. Those large legacy, traditional organisations that maybe even tried the agile transformation years ago, but still haven't mastered it or conquered it, and I'm talking about large banks still, telecoms, pharmaceuticals, automotive, and I really fret for the automotive industry, not just here, but in Europe and across America as well, their time to market from design to launch can be anywhere between five and seven years, and yet the Chinese are doing it in two. Ula Ojiaku Could it be, because you've mentioned financial services, telecoms, pharmaceuticals, and the common thread is that they tend to be highly regulated. So could that be one of the reasons? Darren Wilmshurst I don't think it's regulation. I think they're just such large organisations, the hierarchy within that organisation, is huge, so this is why I come back to the leadership piece as well. Actually, and what happens is the leaders are too far away, they're not connected enough to the organisation systemic changes that they need to make in that organisation to make that organisation more effective. And they need to wake up and smell the coffee because Chinese are coming, they're coming in terms of automotive, they're coming in terms of pharma. True story, my daughter went to university a few years back. She'd been with HSBC for donkey's years as a student, a youth account, and she said, I'm going to university, can I upgrade my account to a university account? And the response from HSBC was yes, you can, but you need to make an appointment, and the next appointment is in six weeks time. And so my son, who's a bit older, he said, just get Monzo or Revolt, just go online, and if they don't wake up, they will just find that the whole generation will go ‘I will not wait'. Now, she waited six weeks, she did it, but a lot of them won't do that, so I think it's a real threat and I think the organisations are so big that, just trying to get into that leadership space so that we can start to work with them to help understand what they need to do. So back to your original question, I think there's three things, and this is hard. We need to move that leadership from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. They will be of a generation age of mine, so now they would have been schooled back in the eighties and nineties in ways of working, and they will have seen those ways of working as being successful because that allowed them to progress to the senior positions that they're in now, so I understand that, but those ways of working are not appropriate for the complex, adaptive, changing organisations that we now need to be in.We need to get them to move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, and that's easier said than done. However, I was inspired, this was one of the most senior guys in the government organisation and he was having lunch with the CEO of HSBC Bank and they're talking about change, and they agreed that there were three core ingredients to change organisations. Number one, a transformed approach to partnerships, and he said the language is really important here as well. Again, I didn't call them suppliers, I call them partners. If we call them suppliers, they will behave as suppliers. The reality is that we call them partners, because we don't have the capability or the capacity, but sometimes when we bring them in, third parties, we treat them as an alien organisation. They wear different badges. They have different privileges. They can't do this, they can't go here, they have to be accompanied, things like that. So he said, we need, a transformed approach to partners. We need to bring them in, they need to be part of our ecosystem, number one. Secondly, he said an agile approach to problem solving, giving power and capability to those closer to the issue, and we talk a lot about decentralised decision making as well. Now, you need to know those that have the information need to make the decision in a timely manner as well. But this is the one that really, really got me. Most importantly, a learning culture, including their leadership, where those with the most influence must do as much or more learning than anybody else. Now that's unusual, because normally, I'm a senior person, I've got to where I am because I know a lot of information, and I wouldn't be where I am, but we need to understand that that information was schooled in a different generation. So what we can't do, we can't say to you, well, okay, you need to come on one of my training events, they say, seriously, you've not read my badge, I'm an important person, I have not got time to go on a two day training event, and we need to recognise that as well, these are senior executives, and their time is precious, and trying to find two days in a diary is difficult, so we need to, I think, as agents of change for organisations, and to bring leadership on the journey in order to move them from a fixed to a growth mindset, not to put them on a two day training event, but find a way of educating them in a in a smaller, bitesize way, almost like a series of small, interactive workshops that happen over a series of weeks, that sort of stuff as well, and we need to make sure that the content tackles their problems and their challenges, and we mustn't get into too much of our, again, the words that might trigger them as well. So that's the first thing. So we need them to understand that they need to go on an educational journey, but we need to find an educational journey that will meet their needs in terms of content and their time. Number one. Once we do that, then they need to lead by example, and it's all very well educating them. One of my colleagues was saying, would I go on a plane with a pilot that's read a book? No, they need to be able to practice their skill and hone their skills. Now that might be difficult, again, because their team members, their employees might be well schooled in this and they might feel uncomfortable practicing a craft that they're not that familiar with as well. So what we try and do is get them to practice in a safe environment, i.e. let's work as an agile team, as a leadership team, as a leadership group. Let's think about having a backlog of work that we need to do as a leadership team. Let's think about how we prioritise that work. Let's work in a small group and then review that work on a cadence and then just retrospective and maybe have someone that steps up and be a Scrum Master or Product Owner for that as well. So again, getting them to operate and start to learn by experiencing within their own environment is a great way, because if we can do that, now they're educated, and they practice their craft in a safe environment, they are better empowered to lead the change. This is what we need to do, and this is what I'm finding is that we need the leadership to step up and lead the change, because if we're going to make fundamental changes to organisations, systemic changes, organisational changes, the leaders need to be able to do that as well. And this is what I find – it's great having teams working at a great way, but without that support from leadership, the impact that they will be able to make will be limited. Ula Ojiaku Yes, I resonate with the last statement you made about the limitation to the impact teams can have if the leadership isn't bought in and if they are not walking the talk. It's not like, go ye and be agile whilst we still do what we've always done. There was something you said about moving from fixed mindset to growth mindset and the need for the leaders to have that continuous learning as in really that continuous learning culture is that they need to learn as much, if not much more than other employees, and that reminds me of this book by John Adair, Strategic Leadership, and in his book, he was saying that the origin of the word strategy comes from the military, and typically people who rise to the ranks are people who have been there, done that. And if people have the confidence that you know the stuff and you've been there, done that, if not better than everyone else, you'd have more respect you'd have more buy in, it's less friction getting the troops and kind of corralling the troops towards that vision. Darren Wilmshurst Yeah, it's interesting because again, at school, I was definitely not a reader. I was into numbers, I was a maths person. I went to university, did a maths degree, stuff like that as well. So I was one of those kids at primary school where I'd be given a book at the beginning of the week, and at the end of the week, I'd hand it back to my teacher and she would say to me, have you read the book, Darren? I go, yes, I have. I hadn't actually read the book. She'd give me another book and I'd move up the ladders that you did back in the day. Never read. It's interesting now, I read now more than I've ever read in the past. And I think what happened was it almost became a bit of a bug. I think going on the SPCT program, there were certain books that you had to read, but the more I read, the more I wanted to learn. So I think that got me into that habit as well. Secondly, I think that if I'm teaching this stuff, then I need to understand the provenance of what I'm teaching as well, and I can't do that without reading. So again, you can't be leader, a strategy leader without having been there and done it. So for me, reading is really important to understand some of the provenance of what we're doing and also giving some of the narrative as well. Ula Ojiaku So what would you say changed? Although you've just painted a picture of you before, back in school, and after, what's changed? Darren Wilmshurst I don't know I think I just started reading, it's a bit sad really, because I go on holiday and then I take business books with me and then I'm sitting around the pool reading these books and people say what are you reading, and I'm reading this book thinking that's a bit sad. And I remember one holiday I was sat in on a lilo in a pool reading a business book and my daughter took a picture of me saying dad what are you doing, you're on a holiday and there you are reading Tribal Unity by Em Campbell-Pretty on holiday as well. I don't know, I think when I started this, I wouldn't say it was an addiction, but it was like now i need to learn more now, I need to learn more and more, and so once you started then you don't stop and I'm still an avid reader Ula Ojiaku It reminds me of this book by what you've just said, Daniel Pink's book Drive. So for me, it sounds like the intrinsic motivation, you knew what you stood to gain by doing it and you didn't need to have your teacher asking you, did you read it and you'd say yes when you didn't, but you knew there was something at stake if you didn't. Darren Wilmshurst Yes, I think it was definitely the SPCT program I had to read, but then once I learned stuff, I wanted to learn more stuff, and so you're right, that intrinsic motivation, you know, I think in the video they talk about, people want to play the piano or guitar and just want to get better at it. I just wanted to really become better as an SPCT and then eventually as a fellow just to understand the wonderful thought leadership that has occurred over the last 20 and 30 years that has informed the way that we think and act and work now. Ula Ojiaku Wow. You've kind of nailed it, because Daniel Pink's book says mastery, autonomy, and purpose. So, the mastery bits, but going back to the original question, and thank you for sharing your experience, there is this saying that you can lead a horse to the water, but you can't force it to drink. So, we could have the edict where, okay, all the leaders can make space for those bite-sized workshops or sessions, but once that ends, is there a way we could encourage them to keep at it, because a two day training or maybe six workshop sessions spread over six months probably wouldn't cut it, or wouldn't be sustainable. So is there something or any tips on how to tap into that intrinsic motivation? Darren Wilmshurst I think Dean Leffingwell said to me, he talked about the third, the third and the third, and I'll talk about that as well, he said, in an organisation, there'll be a third of people that get it and want to do it. He said, there'll be a third that I would call my sceptics, not sure, need to be convinced, and there's the third that say, no, I'm very happy with the way I'm looking at it, I don't want to do anything else as well. He said, I don't care about the first third. He said, I actually I care about the second third, those sceptics, if I can convince one of them to lead the charge, he said, that's great because then the others then will come along as well, and if I can get that sceptic to change in terms of, I understand it, I want it, they're almost like a reformed smoker, they become the greatest advocates of change because they say, I get it now. And he said, now I've got two thirds, now I've got a majority, he said, and that's the tipping point that allows me to make that change as well. And what happens is, he said, there are some in that final third will go, okay, I've seen enough social proof that I will make that change, I need you to convince me, I'll do that as well, he said, but there'll be some that go, I'm not happy with that, and they are the people that will either ride off into the sunset with either retirement or a different career or different organisation as well. So you've got to find someone in that leadership group that's going to be an advocate. You've got to find that one or two that are happy to lead the charge as well, and someone in the sceptic face is great because they become the reformed smoker as well, but you've got to find it and hope that they will then corral and cajole some of the leadership into doing this as well, but without that it's hard, even though the leadership understand the challenges, sometimes they're just reluctant to make that change, and I find that difficult to understand and sometimes quite frustrating as well, because, for me, there are some iconic British brands that I still worry about going forward as well. You know, we've just seen it recently, Body Shop, an iconic brand, again, just lost their way. I mean, retail is just so hard at the moment, with the stuff online, but we'll see it with automotive as well, we'll see it in some other industries as well, where if we don't wake up and smell that coffee, then I do fear for some real British brands. Ula Ojiaku I don't think it's only British brands, I think it's a global phenomenon and the fact is the olden perception of having different sectors or industries is being blurred. So think about brands like Apple. Now they started off building computers, but really they've cut across multiple industries, so before the watch industry, you think about Swiss-made watches with the mechanical things, but the Apple watch, they have this music streaming industry, and one of the things in the strategy course I did from the Cambridge Business School is this, they said, it's really about developing a platform. So if you have a platform where you can get your customers to depend on, it's easy to branch into multiple industries. So Apple, they make watches and their watches serve as healthcare monitoring devices and different other things, there are rumours they're building their own self-driving cars and everything is on that iOS platform, which allows them to branch into anything, they could go into pharmaceuticals, medical. So it's no longer about traditional sectors or segments, and the disruption in life is real and no sector, no country is spared, so it's really about moving from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset and saying, what are the things we're missing, and how can we think differently? How can we reposition ourselves? How do we build a platform that has a fort? Darren Wilmshurst Yeah, I think you're right. Apple has disrupted so many industries, in terms of, you know, who buys a torch anymore, who buys a map anymore, other things as well, I just go on. I think at the last count, there was like 24 different industries disrupted as well, and I think about Jeffrey Moore, who I remember presenting with on stage in Washington, I think that was 2019. And he said, what you can do, as an organisation, you can sit here and wait to be disrupted, and hopefully that you can be a fast follower, providing you're nimble enough and adaptive enough, you might be able to make that change. He said, but what might be better is, rather than we wait to be disrupted, be the disruptor. My worry is that some of these large legacy organisations, they are being disrupted, and I just fear that they are not nimble and active enough to be able to respond, they're so ingrained in the way they have done things for the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years that I just fear for them and you're right, it's not UK, obviously I care about the UK because I'm a UK citizen, but I think it's a global phenomenon. I know my colleagues in North America and their industries are having the same challenges as well, right. It's not just a UK issue, it's definitely a global issue. Ula Ojiaku I'd really like to just touch on your latest book, the SAFe Coaches Handbook. So before we go into some of the contents, could you share what led to your co-authoring this with Lindy Quick? Darren Wilmshurst So it's one of those itches I had to scratch, I suppose is the phrase that you use. I was a very small author of the BCS book called Agile Foundations. Peter Measey was a lead author and there were a number of smaller authors that contributed to that as well, and then I ended up reviewing two books. So again, a recognised review of a couple of books, Agile books as well, one around Agile financial management, one around Agile governance as well, the Em Campbell-Pretty, a fellow SAFe fellow wrote The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck, which I reviewed and contributed to, so again, I was contributing to that as well, and actually Em's updating that book because that book's five years old as well, so I'm reviewing that as well. And having reviewed a few books, contributed to a few books, being a part author, I suppose I wanted to write my own book. I think that was it as well. That was part of it. The other part was that I've delivered a number of Implementing SAFe courses since 2017, and for me, it's not just about delivering the education, for me doing that course is about, what are the tips and tricks, what's the stories, what's the narrative, how's the best way to do this, and all those things that I deliver in that course that goes way beyond the slideware what I wanted to do was capture all of that stuff that I deliver in those courses in a book. So I got approached by some publishers at Packt, saying, would you fancy being an author, write a SAFe book? And I thought, yes, I would. Then, we've got another author that's also interested in doing it as well. I'd never met Lindy before, we met and, yeah, we wrote the book. We started October 2022, and it got published June last year. It took a bit longer than we thought, but again, I learned in terms of task switching and refactoring, trying to write a chapter during a working day when you've got meetings and stuff like that and messages coming in, couldn't do that, because in the end I needed that concentrated effort to write. I can't do it with interruptions. So task switching was not great for me, so in the end I said, right, if I'm going to do it, everything has to go off, I just have to concentrate on this as well. So writing the chapter was really straightforward, it didn't take that long in reality. What I found was though, the cost of refactoring took a lot longer, as we talk about as well, you know, doing it right first time, doing the rework is a lot harder, and both Lindy and I wanted to make the book as best we probably can. So I reviewed her chapters, she reviewed mine, her reviews were great. Again, we have some other reviewers as well that are listed in the book as well, and all those reviewers really contributed to making the book better, but having to incorporate and refactor the chapter took me longer than writing the chapter in the first place. So it ended up taking a bit longer than we thought as well. So two valuable lessons. Task switching is real and refactoring takes longer than doing it right the first time as well. Ula Ojiaku So with this realisation, would you do anything differently in terms of how you approached writing the book? Darren Wilmshurst I don't think so. We were pretty good because again, we'd write a chapter and we'd get it reviewed, and the chapters are not particularly long, so that was pretty okay as well, and then what we found there, even though we had a high level design of the book and the chapters and the content, as we went through there as well, we realised there was some stuff missing as well, so again, there was no concluding chapter, there was no preface, we realised that we split the chapter into part one, part two, part three, part one was all about the team stuff, part two is all about the art level stuff, and part three was all about the portfolio stuff. Ula Ojiaku Well it sounds to me like you were following the agile principles, breaking it in small chunks, getting the review, and to be honest, having spoken with other authors that you started, writing in October 2022 and got published in June 2023, that was speedy, maybe not by your standards, that was fast. Typically it takes them like three, five years, and it's just them writing the book with everything else going on. Darren Wilmshurst Yeah, I don't think I could cope with that. I think it's great that the publisher had quite a forcing function, if it dragged on that long, I think you lose that motivation and I was on a roll and when you're on a roll, you want to get it done and dusted. Ula Ojiaku And I think the key thing, and what I noticed is, like you said, that the chapters are kind of not too long and easily digestible and it's easy to write, but it's about refining it in such a way that is to the point and, packed with lots of invaluable insights, that's an art and it does take time to refine from just having a mass of words to something that's simple. Darren Wilmshurst We didn't want to make it a reference guide, the framework is the reference. You go on the website, that's the reference guide. I suppose our target audience was SPCs that are newly qualified, if you're thinking about training this, here's some tips and tricks, here's some narrative, here's some stories you can use here's some support, and some of the things that we have made mistakes and learnt from as well. So it really is trying to be a practical guide to newly minted SPCs in terms of those that want to be able to train or implement a scaling framework. Ula Ojiaku It's definitely something I wish I had after I'd attended your training. So in the preface, you and Lindy were saying you can't implement SAFe to the letter you don't implement it like a rulebook, it's something you implement with your brain switched on and I was like, yes. Can you expand on that please? Darren Wilmshurst I get very frustrated. You see it on social media about SAFe is bureaucratic, it's a prescription, it's overly governed, stuff like that as well, and it's a framework, not prescription. For me, it's a wonderful toolbox, and every organisation we go into is different. They're not the same. They have different project and product, different risk profiles and budgets to plug different people, to create different things. So how can you have something that is an ABC guide, a recipe book, it can't be that as well. So I always say that if I'm putting a picture on a wall, I'll use a hammer and a nail. I won't use a chainsaw, but a chainsaw in the wrong hands can be very dangerous. So for me, it's a framework. So there are some fundaments in there, but you have to understand the context, you have to understand the appetite for change and how much disruption you want to bring, because if you bring too much disruption, you could end up traumatising the organisation. We don't want to do that as well. So, but, and then you think about, okay, what would be the most appropriate tools that I need to bring to change the organisation as well? And then I remember Dean saying this word that then, if you implement SAFe, or the appropriate tools out of the framework as well, and you're doing the same thing a year later, you're doing it wrong because you're not inspecting adapting about how you could then improve on that, and the way that the framework has improved since 1.0 back in 2011 to 6.0 last year as well, is through practitioners and organisations implementing SAFe, finding new ways, and experimenting with new ways and things as well, and bringing that back to the party and that being part of the evolution of the framework as well. And that includes myself, again, this is myself as a fellow, is part of it is bringing my thoughts in terms of what I've done with organisations back to the framework as well. So for me, it's a framework, not a prescription. In terms of scaling, there's some fundaments in there, there are always some fundaments as well, but you have to implement it with your brain switched on and every time I've implemented it, all the validation has always been different, with some underlying principles that support me in that ways of working. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, Daz. And there is a chapter in your book on enterprise strategy, which I think is interesting, but I have a question for you, which one would come first, enterprise strategy, or the adoption of skilled at being SAFe, which one comes first and why? Darren Wilmshurst Look, you've got to have a strategy. One of the things we say as SPCs and even probably SPCTs to some extent, we're not strategy experts. The framework is not there to talk about how you create strategy. There is some guidance on what we expect to see in a strategy but as we go into an organisation, we expect there to be some sort of strategy in place. If not, then we'd highly recommend that a strategy is created, and there are great organisations out there that can help organisations create that strategy as well, because we need to know what's the strategy of the organisation, and then from that, we can then think about how then we align what we're doing to deliver that strategy, and then when we talk about alignment and scaling the organisation, that is right from the top of the portfolio, through to maybe the teams of teams and the team as well. So that strategy and that works to a point where a person at the team level can understand how the work they're doing is connected all the way back up in delivering that strategy as well. So we need that strategy in place. Ula Ojiaku Definitely. I agree, and there are some SPCs who have that training and background in strategy, so it helps if that's there. Darren Wilmshurst Yeah. Yeah. Again, as an SPC, if you've got that, that's great. It's just that SAFe as a framework, that's not what we're looking to, but we expect it to be in place. Ula Ojiaku Exactly. So what are the key things then, in terms of the enterprise strategy and making sure that the teams are aligned with the strategy, what are some things when you are consulting with the leadership and saying, okay, giving them the guidelines of what the framework is saying, what are some key pointers for them to look out for and to be mindful in how they make sure the strategies align with the adoption and the rollout of the framework or the sustained implementation of SAFe? Darren Wilmshurst I hear a lot from execs that we have no idea what our team are doing, we have no visibility, we have no transparency what they're doing, so I think there's a couple of things that we need to talk about here as well. We need to make sure that the work that the teams are doing is visible in a way that is consumable by the executives as well. So we need to create the right dashboard. We go into organisations and the number of tool chains that exist in organisations that are not connected, there is no one version of the truth as well, is disconcerting. In a world where we're trying to reduce costs as well, the money spent on licensing stuff like that is phenomenal. So I think for me, having the right tool set that allows that work to be visible from the team all the way up to executive is really important, and so we need to make that work visible, but then also the leadership needs to come to the party as well. I think it's a two way thing, so we can make the work visible, but part of it is that one, we start doing our reviews of the work that we're doing, either a team level or at a team of teams level or at a large solution level, we need to be able to make sure that the leadership are involved in those reviews, and also in terms of prioritising and directing the direction of travel for the next cadence of work as well. I think that that's important. Ula Ojiaku Well said, Daz, I couldn't say it any better than you, you're the expert here. Dare I say that it's also important that the leadership would make the strategy visible to the organisation and in a way that can be consumed at the appropriate layers. So, this for this time frame, this is what we are trying to achieve, and that would help, so it's kind of almost like a virtuous cycle and complimentary, they are making their priorities visible and well in advance, whilst the team also work to make their work visible. Darren Wilmshurst You're right. It's bi-directional, isn't it, and we see it so often where a firm will go and create a strategy and then it's locked away in a drawer, no one ever sees it, and that strategy is a direction of travel. So then we think about, okay, what do we need to do to deliver that strategy, but you've got to make that visible and you need the support of the leaders, next leaders down to almost decompose that work into smaller chunks that that can be delivered, that then deliver that strategy as well. But you're right, we need to make sure that that strategy is communicated, again, in a way that inspires the people in the organisation. That's important as well, because you want to be, again, once you're inspired by the organisation and the work that you're doing, and you understand the work you're doing is connected to that strategy, I mean, how motivating is that? Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, Daz. So in addition to your fantastic book, SAFe Coaches Handbook, which I would highly recommend to RTEs, coaches, business owners, what other books have you found yourself recently recommending to people? Darren Wilmshurst So the one that I'm really quite passionate about at the moment, we talked at the beginning about that agile and SAFe can create allergic reactions, become trigger words as well, and increasingly, I'm working in organisations that, and Agile is a small part of what we do, Agile ways of working, yeah, it's important, but it's a small part. When you think about, if we're working with automotive, lean manufacturing, something I call cyber physical DevOps as well, we have cyber physical machines building cyber physical products as well. How do we automate more of that as well? And then there's the whole thing around system thinking and all that stuff as well. So, two of my colleagues from the SAFe world, Suzette Johnson and Robin Yeman, have written a book called Industrial DevOps, and that for me is gold dust. I like the rebranding, it's about industrial DevOps, so it's how do we take all our learning from lean manufacturing, Agile ways of working, cyberphysical DevOps, and bring it together to help those big organisations be more effective. So if I was to recommend one book at the moment, how do we build better, complex, industrial systems faster, then Industrial DevOps, Dr. Suzette Johnson and Robin Yeman, for me, is the book. Ula Ojiaku Thank you for that. Any other book? Darren Wilmshurst There's a lot of people talking about OKRs, objectives and key results, and on CVs people saying I'm an OKR consultant. I think, okay, well, okay, well that's great, but it's almost like they're saying OKRs, if we go in and implement OKRs, it is the panacea, it will solve all your ills. Look, it's just, it's another tool in the toolbox as well. One I read last year was Radical Focus, really good, talks about yes, it's great creating OKRs, but there's so much more to that than just creating the OKRs. People think if I create the OKRs, then the world would change, no, it doesn't. Ula Ojiaku Oh, wow. Thank you for that, and I guess I agree, OKRs is a is a tool, and it's really a great tool for connecting strategy with the implementation, and back to what you said about the transparency of strategy and the work of the teams OKR is a good way of actually helping with measuring, okay, is the work we're doing moving the needle for the enterprise and vice versa. How do we as the leadership team clearly communicate in a digestible way what our priorities are, what the strategy is over a time frame. So, yeah. Another one on that note I would recommend would be, well it's in the pre-release, but Jeff Gothelf, actually he and his co-author Josh Seiden have gone to do what you've just done with the SAFe Coaches Handbook, which is, okay, yes, there's all this buzzword about OKRs, but actually, what does it mean in practical terms, Who Does What By How Much: A Practical Guide to Customer- Centric OKRs, it's highly recommended. Just like yourself, I respect Jeff and the sense it's practical and actionable. And any final words for the audience? Darren Wilmshurst Well I think it's tough at the moment, we're seeing a lot of the big organisations, big SIs, laying off a lot of people as well, we're seeing a lot of the consultancy work is discretionary spend, and I think we're seeing a lot of people in the market that have not been engaged, but what I would say is that all these things are cyclical. We've seen it before where, certainly with the pandemic, no one was for six months, things stopped, but then the thing came back a vengeance as well, but if we focus on trying to solve the organisational challenges, if we focus on making sure that we are helping them solve those challenges, and we can demonstrate the value of what we're doing, then we'll be in a good place. Ula Ojiaku Thank you for those wise words Daz. And on that note, where can the audience find you if they want to get in touch with you? Darren Wilmshurst Darren Wilmshurst on LinkedIn is the easiest way to find it, always reach out to me on there as well, message me on LinkedIn as well. Normally what I do is I ask people to convert to email because I'm a bit old fashioned, email is my inbox is my to do list as well, so yeah, Darren Wilmshurst on LinkedIn. I think I've got a profile picture up there, so if you see this picture here, hopefully my profile picture looks something like this, what you're seeing here as well. Ula Ojiaku And if you're listening to the audio version only, the picture on the podcast art cover for this episode, that's the Daz you should be looking for. Well, thank you so much Daz for your time. It's always a great honour and I always learn a lot whenever I speak with you. So thank you for making the time for today's conversation. 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!

Who Does What By How Much with Josh Seiden

Unlearn

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 5, 2024 38:24

The definition of success can change everything. Properly defined, you have an agile organization where each team member can contribute fully. Poorly defined, you have stagnant teams and users that don't like the products. In this episode of the Unlearn Podcast, host Barry O'Reilly sits down with Josh Seiden, a sought-after designer, strategy consultant, and coach. Together, they explore the importance of understanding user behavior, how that behavior can be translated into goals, and how company alignment on Outcomes and Key Results can drive business outcomes. Josh Seiden has collaborated with top-tier brands such as PayPal, Johnson & Johnson, and 3M. His expertise lies in launching and building innovative products and services, as well as fostering agile and entrepreneurial mindsets within organizations. He is the author of “Outcomes Over Output” and co-author of “Who Does What By How Much,” "Sense and Respond," and "Lean UX," all cementing his reputation as a thought leader in the field of user-centered design and business strategy.When User Experience Became DesignWe know now that understanding how users will experience a product is a critical part of designing a new product, but back in the 90's when Josh began his career in the industry, it was a radical idea. "A friend told me, 'We're hiring designers here,' and I laughed, 'Why are you telling me this? I'm not a designer.' But that thing you're doing here, we call that design," Seiden recalls. This unconventional designation became an entire industry, and his unconventional path to it meant he brought a unique perspective to the field of user experience design. Barry notes that this is a story that gets told again and again on the Unlearn podcast; that the conventional wisdom on how to find or become an expert is often wrong.Don't Forget Why You're Building What You're Building Barry points out that companies often measure things like the speed of production, but forget to measure the consumer behavior change that would really demonstrate the value of the project. Josh explains that measurability is important over the life of a project, but keeping the focus on outcomes for actual people is the most important thing to track. This is the key premise of Outcomes over Output that answers the question: what is an outcome? Josh's definition, “An Outcome is a measurable change in user behavior that creates value.” If you need to identify the outcome you should be measuring for your company, answer three questions: Who?, Does What?, and By How Much?The Evolution of OKRs in Large OrganizationsDesign thinking works at the team level very easily, and as the industry developed the question became how to do it at scale? Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) have emerged as a tool for helping large organizations work in agile ways. Josh explains how OKRs can be used to manage outcomes at scale: “The O is an objective. What's the big audacious goal? And then the KR is the result. How do you measure it? The key result. For most people who look at the system, they understand that [...] you want those Key Results to be outcomes." This way of thinking helps large enterprises maintain focus and drive impactful results by clearly defining and measuring success as it matters to the people using the product.Read full show notes at BarryO'Reilly.comResourcesJosh Seiden on the Web, LinkedIn, X, Medium

evolution web medium respond sense paypal kr outcomes outcome 3m output objectives unlearn okrs key results lean ux key results okrs seiden josh seiden

Episode 11: Designing the Future: Powering Up Digital Transformation with Design Thinking with Andrea Järvrén

Share PLM Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 5, 2024 34:51 Transcription Available

Come join Share PLM for another podcast episode with Andrea Järvrén, the Transformation Manager, Methods and Practices in Tetra Pak. Andrea has a strong background in business transformation and global process driver roles with focus on problem solving with an iterative approach. She specialises in facilitation with Design Thinking mindset, Design Sprints and tailored workshops in an enterprise setting, doing everything from facilitating, distributing competence, transforming and scaling to accelerating transformation. In this episode, we are talking about:⚉ Introduction to Design Thinking at Tetra Pak⚉ Practical Applications of Design Thinking⚉ Design Sprint Methodology⚉ Facilitation and Preparation⚉ Measuring Effectiveness⚉ Adapting to Remote Work⚉ Scaling Design Thinking PracticesMENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:⚉ [Book] Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp - https://amzn.to/4c3ih84 ⚉ [Book] Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience by Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf - https://amzn.to/3KAMmzX ⚉ [Book] Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer series) by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur - https://amzn.to/4c9QHWR ⚉ Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin⚉ AJ&Smart - https://www.ajsmart.com/ ⚉ Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ) - https://www.workshopper.com/lightning-decision-jam CONNECT WITH ANDREA:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-j%C3%A4rvr%C3%A9n-56a1433/ CONNECT WITH SHARE PLM:Website: https://shareplm.com/ Join us every month to listen to fascinating interviews, where we cover a wide array of topics, from actionable tips, to personal experiences, to strategies that you can implement into your PLM strategy.If you have an interesting story to share and want to join the conversation, contact us and let's chat. We can't wait to hear from you!

Episode 156: OKRs for Focus and Alignment with Jeff Gothelf of Gothelf.co & Josh Seiden of Seiden Consulting

focus product consulting alignment okrs key results jeff gothelf lean ux okrs objectives melissa perri josh seiden

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 31, 2024 46:55

In this episode of Product thinking, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden join Melissa Perri to talk about their exciting new book on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). They tackle common mistakes made when implementing frameworks like Lean UX, and how OKRs can solve this. Plus they share all the insights they've learned over the last 10 years since their first book, Lean UX. Tune in to discover how OKRs improve your business, business unit, or team's overall focus and alignment.

130. Rich Mironov, Author of "The art of product management"

Productized

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 16, 2024 50:56

Rich has been doing enterprise/B2B product management since 1988, worked at 6 Silicon Valley startups, and has been an interim CPO or leadership coach for more than 200 large and small tech companies. He wrote "The Art of Product Management" and was the Founder of Product Camp. Rich has taught at top business schools worldwide, at conferences, and chaired the first product manager/product owner tracks at the annual Agile Conference. This episode dives into key topics: **Early days of the Internet **Life-Changing Moment **Explaining the Role of the PM **Addressing Roadmpa Amnesia **Prioritizing on Business Objectives **Dealing with Sales Requests **Product Led Organizations **Building Products that Generate Revenue **Driving Business Strategy **The Iterative Process of Strategy Development **Understanding the Company Business Strategy **Making Hard Decisions Recommended Resources: **What Do Product Leaders Do?** https://www.mironov.com/whatleadersdo/ **Business Cases Are Stories About Money** https://www.mironov.com/moneystories/ **Four Laws Of Software Economics** https://www.mironov.com/4laws1/ **Building and Scaling a Product Team (video)** https://www.mironov.com/prodanon/ Highlighted books: Continuous Discover, Teresa Torres, Outcomes vs Output, Josh Seiden, Managing the Unmanageable, Ron Lichty Anything from Jared Spool or Steve Blank or Holly Hester-Reilly Where to find Rich Mironov: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richmironov/ Dragonboat Website: https://www.mironov.com/ Where to find us: Website: https://productized.co/ Newsletter: http://bit.ly/3aMvWn2 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/school/produ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/productized.co/ Where to find Margarida: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margarida-cosme-pereira/

"Designing Success: Jeff Gothelf on UX, Lean Principles, and OKR Pitfalls"

This is HCD - Human Centered Design Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 5, 2023 48:48

We meet keynote speaker, trainer and coach Jeff Gothelf, and speak about how Jeff helps build collaborative cultures and adopt modern ways of working in organisations. Jeff tells us about his background in design, particularly the intersection of design and agile methodologies. He shares his experience in creating and popularising Lean UX, a process outlined in his book with Josh Seiden. The conversation delves into the challenges of selling and explaining user experience to businesses that didn't initially understand its value. Jeff emphasizes the importance of translating design work into language that business leaders care about, focusing on the impact on solving business problems. The discussion also touches on the evolution of user experience in tech and software businesses during a pivotal time. Jeff addresses the challenges in implementing Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) within organisations. He highlights the need for a qualitative approach to objectives and the importance of key results being metrics that measure human behaviour. The conversation provides insights into the foundations of UX and the current hurdles in fostering a deep understanding of OKRs within organisations. An interesting one to record and an interesting listen for sure. Enjoy! https://www.linkedin.com/in/gothelf

success principles designing pitfalls ux objectives okrs jeff gothelf lean ux key results okrs josh seiden

#ALIShorts Planting Trees, Nurturing Forests: A Deep Dive into Outcomes vs. Outputs

Agile-Lean Ireland (ALI) Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 11, 2023 2:41 Transcription Available

In this enlightening episode of ALI shorts, inspired by Josh Seiden's acclaimed article, we embark on a metaphorical journey through a vast forest. Using the allegory of individual trees representing outputs and the entire forest signifying outcomes, we challenge listeners to consider the broader, interconnected impact of their efforts. Drawing parallels between planting a single tree and introducing a new business feature, we stress the importance of understanding and measuring the true value of our contributions. Beyond mere deliverables, the episode underscores the significance of holistic growth, sustainability, and adaptability in today's dynamic business landscape. Join us as we reflect on the question: Are we merely planting trees, or are we nurturing an entire forest? Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

drawing deep dive outcomes nurturing forests outputs planting trees josh seiden

Leading cross-functional teams - Tobias Freudenreich on The Product Experience

cross hamburg functional product leadership product experience josh seiden

Play Episode Play 60 sec Highlight Listen Later Sep 6, 2023 32:18 Transcription Available

In this week's podcast, we were joined by Tobias Freudenreich, a product leadership coach and consultant based in Hamburg. This episode dives deep into the structure of cross-functional teams and explains how this structure can help us build great products that people love. Featured Links: Follow Tobias on LinkedIn and his website | Tobias' 'Introducing Cross-Functional Leadership' blog post | Tobias' 'Product Leadership' talk at ProductTank Berlin | Martin Eriksson's 'The Decision Stack' framework | 'Getting Started With Outcomes' post by Josh Seiden

#15: Peter Ord | Ignite Success: Mastering Product Development, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship

The Rollercoaster Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2023 55:25

Peter Ord, the CEO and creator of GUIDEcx, leads the team behind this innovative platform. GUIDEcx is a state-of-the-art solution designed to enhance client onboarding and implementation. Its primary focus is on improving client visibility and engagement, allowing you to efficiently manage projects, uphold transparency, and provide an exceptional client experience at every stage. Peter Ord's extensive expertise is further reflected in his role as a National Columnist for the Forbes Technology Council, as well as his prior experience as the Vice President of Sales at DealerSocket.On this episode of The Rollercoaster, Tyler and Peter discuss on how books have long been regarded as invaluable tools for acquiring knowledge and honing essential skills. When it comes to mastering the ability to build and ultimately deliver a successful product, there are several top recommendations that stand out. Three notable books worth exploring are:The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick challenges traditional feedback methods, guiding entrepreneurs and product developers to extract valuable insights by asking the right questions and actively listening. It equips them with effective tools to validate ideas and uncover hidden problems.The User Method by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden advocates user-centered design and agile methodologies. By prioritizing continuous feedback and user-centric approaches, it enables product teams to meet authentic user needs and aspirations.The Lean Startup by Eric Ries revolutionizes startups with a scientific approach to product development. It promotes a lean startup mindset, focusing on the build-measure-learn feedback loop.In any leadership role, whether as a parent or employer, the saying holds true: "It's easier to dampen a child's fire than to reignite it." This timeless wisdom stresses the importance of nurturing and harnessing natural passion and drive, rather than trying to revive it later. Like a flame, a child's enthusiasm burns brightly. As a leader, it's vital to recognize and embrace this inherent energy. By offering guidance, encouragement, and support, you can fuel their potential and ensure sustained motivation and growth.Embrace your entrepreneurial spirit and seize the moment to start a company. In the business world, the mantra is clear: "Just do it." Avoid hesitation and indecision, trusting your instincts and taking action. When pursuing entrepreneurship, it's easy to overthink and delay. However, true success lies in trusting your inner drive and having the courage to leap forward. Don't let fear or self-doubt hinder your potential. Starting a company requires determination, resilience, and a tolerance for uncertainty. Instead of overanalyzing, focus on planning, strategizing, and executing your ideas. Embrace the inherent risks, knowing that mistakes and failures are valuable learning experiences.Where to find Peter Ord:LinkedIn: Sirva SoundbitesExplores the latest trends and topics on global talent mobility and the future of work.Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify-Where to find Tyler Hall: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerchall/ Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/the-tyler-hall-archives-7018241874482122753/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/sirTHALL Work with Tyler: https://www.tylerchristianhall.com/

301. Introducing a New Podcast - Scaling Tech with Debbie Madden!

The Rabbit Hole: The Definitive Developer's Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 23, 2023 40:38

Today on The Rabbit Hole we are sharing an episode from Scaling Tech with Debbie Madden, who is the Founder and Chairwoman here at Stride. The podcast is well worth checking out and listeners can expect to hear some great conversations between Debbie and top tech leaders and experts on a wide variety of contemporary issues facing the industry. Here we are airing the chat that Debbie had with Josh Seiden, in which they cover the valuable idea of outcomes over output, a subject on which Josh has literally written the book!

founders tech scaling new podcast rabbit hole stride chairwoman josh seiden debbie madden

(S3) E029 Jeff Gothelf on What Makes a Great Product Manager: Humility, Curiosity and Agility

Agile Innovation Leaders

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2023 55:25

Bio Jeff helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the co-author of the award-winning book Lean UX (now in it's 3rd edition) and the Harvard Business Review Press book Sense & Respond. Starting off as a software designer, Jeff now works as a coach, consultant and keynote speaker helping companies bridge the gaps between business agility, digital transformation, product management and human-centred design. His most recent book, Forever Employable, was published in June 2020. Social Media · LinkedIn · Jeff Gothelf - coaching, consulting, training & keynotes · OKR-book.com · Twitter · Instagram · Jeff Gothelf - YouTube Interview Highlights 04:50 Early career 16:00 Thought leadership 19:10 Outsource the work you hate, it shows 23:00 Defining a product 24:35 Product Managers as navigators of uncertainty 28:15 Succeeding as a Product Manager 37:25 Strategy, vision and mission 42:00 OKRs 48:00 Leading and lagging indicators 54:10 Do less, more often Books and resources · Forever Employable - how to stop looking for work - Jeff Gothelf · Best product management books - Lean UX, Sense & Respond... (jeffgothelf.com) · Lean vs. Agile vs. Design Thinking: What You Really Need to Know to Build High-Performing Digital Product Teams: Gothelf, Jeff · Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously: Gothelf, Jeff, Seiden, Josh · The role of a Product Manager: Product Managers are Navigators of Uncertainty https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/product-managers-navigate-uncertainty/ · Information Architecture, Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango · The Lean Startup | The Movement That Is Transforming How New Products Are Built And Launched · Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, Tony Fadell · The Creative Act: A Way of Being: Rubin, Rick Episode Transcript Ula Ojiaku 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. So I have with me the legend, Jeff Gothelf, who is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, highly sought after keynote speaker I must add, coach and much more. So Jeff, really honoured to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast, thank you. Jeff Gothelf It's my pleasure, Ula, thanks so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. Ula Ojiaku Oh, good. Well, I usually start with a question for my guests to find out more about themselves as individuals. And during our pre-recording session, you mentioned something that was intriguing to me, that you actually played piano and you were part of a touring musical band, could you tell us about that? Jeff Gothelf Absolutely. I've played piano my whole life, my dad plays piano, there was always a piano in the house, and I had pretty big rockstar dreams as I was a kid growing up. It's really all I wanted to do. I can remember in high school everybody's like, what are you going to go to college for? I was like, I'm going to be a rockstar, figure that out. And, you know, I played in bands in high school, I played in bands in college, and towards the end of college I started playing in a couple of relatively serious bands, serious in the sense that they were decent bands, in my opinion. They were touring bands and they, you know, they made enough money to sustain themselves. They weren't jobs, they didn't sustain us as individuals, but they sustained the band system. And it's fascinating because, you know, at the time I was 19 and 20, I did this really until just about the time I met my wife, which, I was 25. And so I did it until about, I was about 25, and, you know, in hindsight you don't see it when you're in it, especially if you've never really done anything else. I'd always had jobs, but the jobs were always, you know, I delivered newspapers and I made sandwiches and I was a, you know, worked for a moving company, whatever, right? But in hindsight now it's clear to me that I was being entrepreneurial. In those days, the bands, each of them, especially the touring bands, were startups, you know, it's a bunch of folks getting together with a crazy idea, thinking that everyone in the world will love it, it's going to change the world, and doing everything they can and putting everything into helping folks realise that, and building that vision and, and executing on it. And, you know, scraping by and hacking things together and hustling and doing what you can to build a successful, in this case it was a musical group, but it was essentially a startup. And these days, not only do I look back fondly on those days and all those, all those guys that I played music with are my best friends to this day, we still talk almost every day, but I learned so many skills about being entrepreneurial, about experimenting, about learning, about failure, about iteration, about, you know, what's good, what's good enough, when do you call it quits, that's a really tough thing to do, you know, letting something go that you love is really difficult. And I know now, you know, 20 years later, that so much of that experience figures into my day-to-day work today. You know, even to this day, like if I get a new speech to give, if I get, a new client or a new, you know, assignment, I call them gigs. You know, I got a new speaking gig, I got a new consulting gig, I got a new coaching gig, that type of thing. It's impossible to remove that. And it's, it's amazing to me really, because at the time, you know, I could not have told you what I just said to you and, but in hindsight it's super clear to me what I was doing and what I was learning because I've put it to use over and over and over again in my life. Ula Ojiaku That's fascinating. It reminds me of what one of my mentors said to me, and he said, whenever you are given an opportunity to learn versus, you know, get more money doing what you already know, always choose to learn because there's no wasted knowledge. So it's more of tying it back to your days that, you know, as a musician, as a part of a touring band, you were learning and you're now using those transferrable skills, right? Jeff Gothelf Yes. Ula Ojiaku And would you, well, I don't play any instruments, but I used to be part of, you know, different choirs and my daughter also now does that, you know, kind of sings. But there are times when, you know, things would go wrong and you're finding yourself having to improvise so that the audience wouldn't know, okay, this isn't part of the script. Would you say that has also played a part in your experience as a band member did such? Jeff Gothelf I mean, the thing that comes immediately to mind is just comfort on a stage, right? Comfort in front of people and being able, you know, being comfortable in front of a room and performing to some extent or another. I think that that's, that came from that, the ability to, you know, hide or improvise, mistakes that happened. You know, I remember I was, we did this as a band all the time, and nobody ever knew really, unless they knew a particular song of ours very, very well. And you know, some things like that happen all the time when you're, giving a speech or teaching a class or whatever it is. I mean, I remember giving a speech in Budapest one time at Craft Conference in front of 2000 people, and the screen kept going out, my slides are up there in front of, and they kept flickering and, and going out. And it was just a question of, you know, what do you do? Do you just sort of collapse and be like, well, the slides are gone, I can't do anything, or do you keep going? And I think a lot of that drive and that ability to land on my feet in those situations came from being in that band and putting on so many shows. Ula Ojiaku And I'll say it helps that you knew your content as well, because if you had just read it 10 minutes before and you got on the stage, then it would be a different thing. Jeff Gothelf It would not have gone well. Ula Ojiaku Yes. Okay, now I understand you have a BA in Mass Communication and you also went on to do a Masters in Human Factors in Information Design, and in your previous life you used to be a software designer. Jeff Gothelf Correct. Ula Ojiaku How did the winding road go from band member, you know, through the academics, to Jeff we know today, I mean from software designer to now. Jeff Gothelf Yeah, it's interesting, it's a great question. The, look, the rockstar thing didn't work out, you know, there's a thousand reasons, but I think the bottom line is we just weren't good enough, that's, that's probably where it netted out, but… Ula Ojiaku And you were getting married, you said you met your wife. Jeff Gothelf I was getting married, yeah. You know, and having no money doesn't, those two things don't really play well together, you know, and so the band thing was ending and, you know, the web was starting, so we're looking at the late nineties at this point, just to kind of date myself a little bit, we're looking at the late nineties and in the late nineties as the band was, the last band that I was in, was winding down, the internet was coming up and I'd always been prone, you know, to computers and a little bit of computer programming, just very basic stuff, you know, and I started building websites, basic, you know, brochure websites for my band and for other bands, and I taught myself HTML to be able to do that. And then as the band was winding down, web 1.0 was happening and, you know, back in 1999, if you could spell HTML, you could get a job, you know, and I could do a little bit more than that, I did a little bit of graphic design, a little bit of, of HTML, and so I got a job, I got a job because it was easy to get a job back then, they took a lot of risks on people, and we learned on the job and that's what kicked things off, that got me doing web design and shortly thereafter I moved into Information Architecture, which was a brand new term and a brand new field as defined in a book by Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville called Information Architecture for the Worldwide Web. And that book really changed my life because it gave me a sense that I, instead of just doing kind of the last step in the process, which was the markup and the design portion, I could move further up the waterfall, if you will, in the website creation process and do a lot of the Information Architecture, and that was great, and that was really, that really spoke to me and having sort of landed in that position, as the web evolved and became more interactive and Information Architecture expanded into, well, more fields showed up in interaction design, UI design, UX design, I expanded my skillset into that world. And then that really began the trajectory of starting to build design teams and then going into product management, eventually launching our own studio, our own firm, and then finally after selling that studio, going out on my own and teaching all this stuff. But that's, that's sort of like how I went from band, to the web and everything, and there's, you know, there's a lot, I skipped a lot of steps there, but that's the story in general. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, Jeff, and I think you also told part of your story in your book Forever Employable, How to Stop Looking for Work and Let your Next Job Find You. Since we're already on this topic, could we just delve into that? So you said something in that book about, you know, in your job as a software designer, you know, Information Architect, I can't remember the exact role you had, but you had an aha moment where you felt you, quoting this in my own words, I'm not quoting your book exactly, but you felt like you could always be replaced in that role and you wanted to carve out a niche where you are always in demand. Do you want to tell that story in your words so that I stop butchering it. Jeff Gothelf Yeah, I mean, look, it was interesting, you know, I progressed in my career in the same way that, you know, most people progress in their career, the way that my parents told me the world works, you know, you go to college, you get a job. It took me, and there was a little, you know, band break in there for me, but, you know, I got my first job, and then you work hard for a few years and you get a promotion, and then you, maybe you move to another company and you get a raise and, you know, you just kind of move your way, you climb your way up the corporate ladder. And that's what I did, I did that for a decade and I, you know, I clawed my way up into middle management like everybody does, or like most folks do. And when I turned 35, on the morning, in fact, of my 35th birthday is how the story goes in the book, I kind of woke up in a panic. I was concerned, like you said, that this wasn't going to last. I was going to become more expensive, the number of opportunities available to me as you climb, available to anyone, as you climb the corporate ladder gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Right? Exactly. Right. That's by design, right? You want fewer managers and more people doing the work. And I was genuinely concerned that I was going to run out of, I was going to get fired, I was, there's, I was hiring people at the time and the people that we were hiring were younger than me, they were smarter than me, faster than me, they were better than me, and they cost a lot less than me. And so I was really worried, and I saw this with my friends too, I had friends who were maybe five years older than me who were struggling with this very thing. They were struggling to find a job or stay employed, and stay relevant. And I was terrified. I was terrified I wasn't going to be able to feed my kids, you know, that was the big thing for me. And so I made an explicit decision when I turned 35 that I was going to stop chasing jobs. Like, as the subtitle of the book says, How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You, I was going to stop looking for work, and I was going to create a situation where jobs were constantly finding me, where opportunities were finding me, because that way if something happens to my current job, well there's a stream of inbound opportunities available to me. And to kind of cut to the chase here, the way that I decided to do that, and the way that I write about it in the book, is through thought leadership. That's it. Like, that's the, you know, recognised expertise, personal branding, right, becoming somebody who people know and somebody who can help solve specific problems, and that's what I did. And look, it took me years, a lot of years, to really build up my reputation and my profile, and I've done it to an extent, and it's impressive to me today to see how many people are doing it so much faster than me. Now, you can credit it to the tools that's available to them, the nature of conversation online these days that's fundamentally different than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and these folks have just kind of nailed, nailed the system here. But it's thought leadership is what's worked for me to do that. Ula Ojiaku And I'll say, I mean, yes, there are people who might have done it faster than you did, but there is this saying that people are able, if I'm able to see as far as I did, it's because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. I'm just saying it's credit to you for sharing your experience because it's helping us to know what to do moving forward. Jeff Gothelf Look, and that's, I think that that's the benefit here, right? I think I talk about this in the book, right? About sharing generously, giving back to the community, helping people avoid the mistakes that you made, helping them skip a step. And to me that's, you know, a lot of folks would see that as, well, aren't you enabling the competition? No, I'm helping the community get collectively better. And eventually I hope that if I get to a position of need, the community will help me, that's what I hope. I don't expect it, but that's what I hope happens. Ula Ojiaku So how, how did you go about setting up the systems then? Because you, you got this realisation, oh my gosh, I am going to be, I may be obsolete in my current role faster than I'd rather admit, so you said you now went, you said, okay, you're going to be a thought leader. How did you decide on what area to start from and how did you then go about setting up the systems and the structure you have right now that are helping you? Jeff Gothelf The first thing was really to decide what I wanted to be known for. You know, in the book we call it planting your flag, but it's a question of what is, if I'm going to be a thought leader, if I'm going to build a personal brand of some kind, if I'm going to be known for something, what is that thing? And, and you know, our natural tendency is to go for professional things. What do I know best at work? What do I do best? I'm a Project Manager, a Product Manager, I'm an agile coach, I'm a software developer, I'm a designer, but doesn't have to be professional. Could be personal, right? I told you I play piano and I happen to really love old vintage electric pianos. And I used to have a fairly large collection of vintage electric pianos. I could have built my thought leadership around vintage electric pianos, right, and it's viable to an extent, but the target audience here, so this is where kind of the product management hat comes on, right? The target audience is tiny. It's tiny. Like, even if you took all the keyboard players in the world, right? And, and then all those keyboard players who play vintage electric pianos, which is a subset, and all the people who care about this kind of stuff. I mean, it's still an infinitely smaller audience than say, web design, or product management, or even agile software development or things like that where I ultimately ended up. And so I chose that I wanted to be known for User Experience Design, and more importantly, UX design with Agile, because that's the problem that I was solving at the time, or solving for at the time, and nobody had a really good answer for it when we started solving for it, and that to me felt like an opportunity. And then that was what I, so then I started doubling down on that. And what that meant was starting to write, starting to share generously, speaking at conferences, getting on podcasts, things like that. And really starting to, at the very least, tell the story of the work that we were doing at the time, as I was the Director of UX at TheLadders in New York City at the time, and we were working on a daily basis, on a Sprintly basis, to tackle the challenge of good user experience design and agile together. So that's what I was writing about. And that eventually led to Lean UX, the book. But that's how it all started and that's where the focus was. Ula Ojiaku Okay. And how have you then set up the structure? Do you have a team currently or do you work in a lean manner? Jeff Gothelf So these days there is a system and there is a team. It's interesting, years ago I did a gig in the UK, see I said gig, comes out naturally like I told you. I did a gig in the UK for rentalcars.com in Manchester. And at the time, their Head of Product or Chief Product Officer, was this fascinating woman named Supriya Uchil. And she was a fantastic client. I really enjoyed working with her. And when the gig was over, she emailed me, she said, hey, would you like to hear some feedback about what it's like to work with you? No client has ever done that, by the way, not before, and not since. And I said, absolutely. I would love to get some feedback about what it was like to work with me. And she gave me a bunch of feedback, a lot of the work. And I took a lot of notes and I took a lot of post-it notes. One of those post-it notes has stuck with me for years now. It still sits here on my whiteboard, I still have it here, and it says outsource the work you hate, it shows. Right. And that's what she said to me. And she said, look, it's obvious to me that you hate doing sales. She goes, every time we had to have a sales conversation, you were clearly uncomfortable and not really into it. Right. She was right. I hate doing sales, I really do, and so over the years, as I've built this business, as it's grown, as it's become a, you know, a viable, successful business, you know, business of one per se. I have built a team of outsourced professionals to support a lot of the work that I do today. So, for example, I have a content marketing team. Now that team takes content that I create and they repurpose it across multiple channels, and they help me build, you know, my email newsletter and they help me build my LinkedIn presence and other things like that. It's my content, but they do all of that work. In addition to that, I've outsourced all my accounting. I have a fantastic accountant who works with businesses, only with businesses like mine, and so they understand my business and my way of working, everything's online, everything's digital, and that's super helpful. There is a woman that works for me part-time who basically handles the entire logistics of my business, scheduling, calendaring, travel. And then on top of that, she also handles BusDev and sales for me. And so that, to me, all that does is it removes all the things out of my way that I hate doing, and it leaves me with a tremendous amount of free time to do the things that I love doing, which is content creation and delivery. And that has made the ability to generate that content and distribute that content far more efficient and successful. And I'm super grateful to be able to, you know, to be in a position to be able to do that. And it supports the lifestyle that I'm trying to create and it allows me to, again, to focus on the things that I truly enjoy doing. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for sharing that, that's really insightful. Now, going back to something you said earlier about putting on your Product Management hat, there are some people in the audience who might be wondering, okay, what would you define a product as? Is it always something tangible or could we expand that word to mean anything that someone consumes, which might also be intangible, for example, going to a show, would a show be called a product? Jeff Gothelf That's a great question. The simplest definition that I've used and that I like for product is the way an organisation delivers and captures value. To me, that's a product. Now, that product could be a service, right? And I don't want to open up that can of worms. So if you're a band and you deliver a show, you cap you. that's how you deliver value. And if you capture value, like you sell tickets to that show, and merchandise, and maybe streaming revenue, then your product is the music and the show. So, yeah, absolutely, right, that's the way that you capture value. And so to me that's the simplest definition, the way an organisation delivers and captures value. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that definition, and this leads me to my next question, which is, so how does it relate to the discipline of product management? What does a Product Manager do then? Jeff Gothelf I believe that Product Managers are navigators of uncertainty. So a Product Manager's job is to take an idea, right, or, you know, the way an organisation delivers value, and to take it from concept, to market, to successful business. Now, the challenge with that is that we live in a continuously changing world. The pace of that change is increasingly faster, and this idea that you can confidently predict exactly what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and be right all the time is false. There's just too much change in the world. I mean, think back three years ago, right? The world was radically different three years ago than it is today. Radically different from 10 years ago, we could, we could not have predicted the things. I mean, I started my job at TheLadders in New York City, I talk about this, in October of 2008. Everything was going great in October, in the early part of October 2008. Right, we had a roadmap, we had plans, you know, in three weeks after I started my brand new job as Director of User Experience, Lehman Brothers melts down, and the financial crisis ensues, right, and we, you know, we're a job market site and all of a sudden the whole ecosystem's upside down. And so, and so I believe that the Product Manager is a navigator of uncertainty. They take a specific set of skills, a specific set of qualities, like curiosity and humility, and they build a process for de-risking the product idea and maximizing its chances for success. That's what I believe Product Managers do at a very high level. How that manifests will vary from Google, to Bank of America, to Boeing, to whatever, to, you know, I'm thinking, I'm trying to think of something like Cisco, the food service people or whatever, right? Like every organisation is going to do Product Management differently for a variety of reasons. You know, domain, industry context, corporate politics, blah, blah, blah, you know, technology stack, whatever. But at the end of the day, I think if you're looking at sort of fundamentally what a Product Manager does is they help a team navigate the uncertainty of product development. That's their job. Ula Ojiaku I dare say that even within a sector, even an industry, the way it's carried out could also vary from company to company, would you? Jeff Gothelf A hundred percent, yeah, I mean, a hundred percent. I mean, it's absolutely true. And so I think to say like, oh, I did Product Management at Google, so I'm a great Product Manager. Well, you might have been a great Product Manager at Google, congratulations, right? Does that mean that you're going to be a great Product Manager at, you know, Barclays, I don't know. You're going to bring that skillset to bear in a completely different environment, in a completely different industry. So I think if you've got the fundamentals in place, you'll do great. But trying to sort of copy and paste what you did at Google very tactically into a different environment, I don't think it's going to work. I mean, happy to be proven wrong, but I don't think it's going to work. Ula Ojiaku So what are the fundamentals then that a Product Manager would have that would give them a higher chance of success? You know, transferrable success from one area to one another. Jeff Gothelf I'm going talk about two qualities that are, I believe are fundamental to the success of a Product Manager, and then kind of four things to keep in mind. And I think those are, I think that to me, those are the fundamentals. I think that the two qualities that a Product Manager needs to have is humility and curiosity. I think all successful Product Managers are humble and curious. And those are really two sides of the same coin, let's be honest, okay. There's really, there are two different ways to describe a very similar quality in a person. Now, humility simply means, people misunderstand humility. People think humility is a lack of vision or a lack of conviction or a lack of ideas. Or being a doormat. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it's not, humility simply says that, look, I have, uh, I'm going to use my expertise and my experience to come up with a strong opinion about what we should do. However, in the face of evidence that contradicts my strong opinion, I'm willing to change course. That's humility. That's saying, you know what? I was wrong about this. The evidence proves that I was wrong, so we're going to change course. The curiosity side of the story is the excitement in finding out if you were right or wrong, and to me, those two fundamental qualities of a person make for excellent Product Managers. Somebody who's willing to admit that they were wrong about their strong opinion, and somebody who's excited to find out if they're right or wrong about their strong opinion, and curious to see if maybe there's a better way, right? I think this is a good idea, but there's got to be a better way, no, let's go find it. To me, that makes for excellent Product Managers. So those are the fundamental sort of personality qualities. I think those are really hard to teach. I think you can train people to some extent but, you know, ego's tough and humility challenges the ego a lot. And so do the facts for that matter, facts challenge the ego a lot, the evidence you collect from the market. So then there's that. And I think the four sort of things to keep in mind for excellent sort of transferrable product management are customer centricity, agility, evidence-based decision making, and continuous learning and improvement. So a lot of agile concepts in there, you'll hear sort of a lot of agile concepts. You can argue all of them are agile concepts, although not exactly how all agile is implemented these days, but nevertheless, so customer centricity first and foremost, right? As a curious and humble Product Manager, your primary focus is making the customer successful, not shipping features, making the customer successful. That means understanding the customer, understanding the problem that you're solving for them, understanding what's getting in their way, understanding what they're doing today, understanding how the competition is solving this problem for people, understanding technology and how you might apply it to better solve this problem, understanding where the market is going so that you get ahead of it, you don't get caught behind, right? But it's all about understanding the customer. What are customers looking for? What are they trying to achieve? What's getting in their way? And really knowing them, not just quantitatively, but qualitatively, meeting them, talking to them, having regular conversations. To me, that's the first sort of key quality of a successful Product Manager. The second is agility, and that stems directly from those qualities of humility and curiosity. Agility is the ability to change course, it's the willingness to change course. It's the flexibility to say, you know, we started going down this path and I know we've spent a couple of Sprints heading down this path, but it doesn't make sense anymore, and so we're going to change course. And yeah, we burned two Sprints on this and that sucks, and I'm sorry, but we didn't burn two months on it, we didn't burn six months on it, right. And so we're going to shift to something more successful because of what we've learned in the past. And that brings me to the third point, which is evidence-based decision making. So those course corrections are being made based on data that you're gathering from the market, qualitative data, quantitative data that lets you know that, yeah, this is a good path to go down. Or, you know what, we really need to pivot here or to completely change course into something else, but you're making decisions based on data and not just opinion. And then finally, this continuous learning and improvement. This, again, this is that curiosity that says, we did a good job, we solved the problem, the product's successful, great. How do we make it better? How do we keep learning whether or not this still makes sense? Right? To me, that's what makes for successful Product Managers, right? Those multiple focus areas and two core qualities of humility and curiosity. I think that's what makes for good Product Managers. Ula Ojiaku That's awesome, thank you for that. And would you have, I mean you do, in your books, you've shared lots of war stories where you know, you had experience with product management or product leadership and to the audience, I'll say read the books, but is there any example maybe that comes to mind of someone who was a Product Manager that, you don't have to name names, you don't have to share like details, but that kind of brought to life all these personal qualities and focus areas and how that affected the work? Jeff Gothelf I mean, look, I've worked with a ton of remarkable folks over the years. I think I started really meeting folks who were working this way when I met folks like Janice Fraser who, in fact came up with the phrase ‘strong opinions, loosely held', which is exactly what I was just describing a few minutes ago. Janice has built multiple businesses and has really helped pioneer these ideas into sort of the mainstream. And I've seen her repeatedly do this. Eric Ries, you know, with The Lean Startup, really brought a lot of these ideas to light in a very easy to digest way, hence the success of his work in the past, and he lived this stuff in the businesses that he's built over the years. I had a colleague and co-worker and co-founder in a business named Giff Constable. Most recently, Giff was the Chief Product Officer at Meetup, but he's been a serial entrepreneur his whole life. Giff really embodied these ideas, like he's a smart guy, tons of experience, really great ideas, but he would test them all, and if he didn't get evidence that convinced him that they were right, he was willing to change course. And I learned a ton from working with him and building businesses with him. And it was inspirational because in many ways, you know, I appreciated his ruthlessness. You know, we all, it's hard, you know, this is personal stuff, this is my idea, all my ideas are great, I love my ideas, right. And he loved his ideas, but he was very, very good at separating emotion and evidence. And I really learned a ton from him as well. So those are three folks that kind of come to mind immediately. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, it reminds me in terms of what you said about Giff being ruthless, I think is a term in journalism to “kill your darlings” because you could write an article or, you know, write your first draft and you're so in love with it, but by the time the editor brings out their red pen or something and starts striking it out, you have to separate emotion from the love. Jeff Gothelf That's exactly right, kill your darlings is the reality of this, of good product management. It's, you know, if the data doesn't prove it, and the data we're looking for is changes, meaningful, positive changes in the behaviour of the customers that we're serving. And if the data doesn't show it, then no matter how brilliant this idea was, how much you love it or how much you thought it was just revolutionary, it doesn't make sense to continue to invest in it, we've got to find, figure out a different way. Ula Ojiaku That's awesome. I'd love to get to your take on the terms, you know, vision and strategy. How would you define these terms would be my first question, and my second question, and I'm happy to, you know, share this again, is how would you then tie this to, you know, for example, product development? How would they, how should they influence product development? Jeff Gothelf Yeah, so look, a couple things. There are, I'm not going to lie to you, you know, I struggle a little bit with, you know, vision and mission. Strategy is clear to me, but differentiating between vision and mission, some will say a vision is like what will the world look like in five years or something like that? Or if you're successful, what changes will you see in the world? That type of thing. Whereas a vision is sort of like the big motivational, like what was it for Google? Cataloguing all the world's data, that was their vision. Right? Ula Ojiaku Can I give you my own take? So my understanding mission is more like, okay, what do we stand for? We're going to save the world? And vision is like, okay, in this amount of time, you know, this is how we're saving the world. So it's kind of a picture from the future, say if we travel five years into the future and we see our customers, what are, how are they behaving? You know, what exactly does the world look like for us? While mission tends to remain constant. That's my understanding anyway. Jeff Gothelf Okay. Yeah. And so to me, look, it's directional, right? In the sense of like, we are, you know, we're going to make sure everyone is clean drinking water, like clean drinking water for everybody, right? That's our, is that our mission or our vision? I don't know. But like, or maybe that, maybe that's the mission and the vision is, you know, a world where no one's thirsty. To me, those are like you, I think you need that in the sense that like, you need to know sort of at a high level what problem is the company solving for in the world? I think that's important, right? Because I think that inevitably there are going to be initiatives that seem to stray from that. At the very least, you can point and say, look, is it our mission to bring clean drinking water to everybody in the world? And why are we like investing in a sports website? Right, doesn't make any sense. So at the very least, it gives us that perspective. Strategy, however, and I think strategy is really, really, really important. Strategy is super important for aligning the organisation so that everybody is pulling in the same direction, so that everybody is clear on what the short term goals are for the organisation and it gives people, if done correctly, it gives people the freedom to experiment and learn to figure out the best ways to achieve the strategy, because I do believe that strategy is a hypothesis. Our hypothesis is that we want to expand into the North American market in 2024. Okay, great, let's figure out all kinds of ways where we might start to build some market share in North America in 2024. Right. And to me, I think that that is the true benefit of strategy. I think that it can also be misused, at least, for alignment, that's very specific. Our strategy is, you know, North American market share and we're going to do it this way. And you can get very prescriptive with that. Now everybody's aligned, everybody knows what we're doing, but it doesn't allow for the flexibility and that push and pull that ultimately reveals a better way to do something or is more creative or more innovative. And so I think strategy is key. It's key to articulate it clearly and simply, it's key to disseminate it clearly and simply across the organisation. And I think no team in the organisation should have their project approved if they can't clearly state how they believe this might help achieve the strategy. That's what I believe. Ula Ojiaku And on that note, so you said no project or team should have their initiative approved unless they can show how it helps move the needle towards the desired strategy, the direction of travel, the organisation, I suppose that's what you mean, the organisation's direction of travel or what they want to achieve. Now how, because one of the shiny new objects, or, well, not an object per se, but more like a buzzword is OKRs, objectives and key results. So how can we use that? Or, let's say, can it be used to help with tying strategy with the work that, you know, the lower levels of the organisation might be doing? Jeff Gothelf I think it's critical to be able to tie the pieces together. Now, I don't expect an individual contributor necessarily to be able to do that, but certainly their manager can say, hey team, we're working on this very tactical thing because it's a component of these five other tactical things that when you put them together, they roll up and they achieve this much more meaningful thing together. Right, and so I, again, I think that there needs to be a clear, and it's rare, look, let's be honest, right? Everyone in the organisation needs to understand what the strategic focus is for the next six months, six to 12 months. Okay. And again, if you can't speak directly to why you're working on the thing that you're working on, then your boss should be able to answer that question for you. Ula Ojiaku So it's really about, what I'm hearing you say is that there needs to be a strategic focus for an organisation at least that looks ahead six to 12 months into the future to say, okay, this is what we're going to be doing. And for teams, they have to find a way of articulating how they are contributing to that strategic focus, to the fulfilment of that strategic focus. Now, how can OKRs be used? I know you said, okay, individual contributors may not necessarily use that, but in the situations where you feel they apply, how could they be, and by they, I mean OKRs, objectives and key results, how could this format help? Jeff Gothelf OKRs to me, are the key to bringing this alignment. So if there's a clear strategy. Without a clear strategy, the OKRs don't help, okay. But if there's a clear strategy and we've set success criteria for that strategy, for that strategic hypothesis, then, or we can start to say, okay, great. We are, our strategic focus for 2024 is North American expansion, we'll know we've achieved it when, you know, we've got 10% market share, this much revenue and a, you know, new customer referral rate of 20%, something like that. Right. All of a sudden, the organisation knows what it's targeting, not only what the strategic focus is, but the actual behaviour change that we're looking for. So fundamentally, every team in the organisation can then start to say, okay, we work on X, and X is a leading indicator of Y and Y is a leading indicator of market share. Okay. So the objective, while it should be local to the team, as well as the key results, they function as leading indicators for the strategic goal, right? So let's try to make an example on the fly, right? So we're talking about North American expansion in 2024. Let's assume that we are in the, you know, online furniture business, something along those lines, right? And so if, maybe you work on a merchandising team, right? And so there, in order to do proper merchandising, you need access to specific suppliers, right? And so there is a team that does supplier and vendor relations. Right. That team understands that for the merchandising team to be successful, they've got to build these relationships with these vendors. So their OKR is going to be about building those relationships, right? Those relationships in turn allow the proper merchandising to take place, which then allows for the proper, you know, for market share to grow in the North American market, for example. So, but that connection can be, you can literally draw it on a board because people understand the strategy. And so objectives and key results become the, sort of the tactical strategic beacons for each of the teams. Each team knows exactly what they're targeting and why, and they understand, in theory, how it might help achieve the overall strategy, which again is a hypothesis, it might be wrong, but at the very least, they've got a shared direction. Ula Ojiaku Thank you for that example. There's something you said about the leading indicators. So I assume that would fall under the key results part, because we'd have the objective which is like the, you know, ambitious statements and then the key results are like, this is what success looks like in terms of achieving that broad statement, the objective. Now, would you, I've read articles from respected thought leaders who say, okay, yes, leading indicators are good, but there also needs to be, you know, the lagging indicators, kind of a balance of, will I say measures, you know, leading, lagging and quality indicators. I don't know if you have any, I mean, I'd love to hear what your view would be on this, because if we're only looking at leading indicators, there might be a temptation to just be short term in our thinking and not also try to measure the lagging indicators, like okay, the actual revenue of the profit that you get versus our likelihood of getting that revenue. Jeff Gothelf Yeah. So look, so short answer is both are important, I think, obviously, and I think both are required. Slightly longer answer is the lagging indicators in an organisation often tend to be the, what we call the impact metrics for the organisation, the high level measures of the health of the business, like you said, revenue, sales, you know, customer satisfaction, etcetera. Right. So yeah, those things need to exist. Typically, they exist at the leadership level, and so then whatever's happening within the teams, tends to function as a leading indicator ultimately to those sort of high level lagging indicators. Right? So we're going to, you know, I've got a team working on email marketing, and they're working on email market opening click rates, right? Those are leading indicators of eventual sales, and those sales are leading indicators of revenue, which is a lagging indicator of the health of the business. And so those, that's,to me, both are needed. Typically the lagging indicators tend to be at the strategic and the leadership level. Ula Ojiaku I read on your blog post that you have another book coming up, whilst we're on the subject of OKRs, and you're going to be, or you are in the process of co-authoring yet another book with your co-author Josh Seiden. Could you tell us about that? Jeff Gothelf Absolutely. So, yeah, so Josh and I have been working and writing together for a long time. We have been talking about outcomes and OKRs together for a long time, and we feel there's an opportunity in the marketplace to build, to write a tactical how-to implementation guide for all, organisations of all size. And that's what we're doing. It doesn't have a title yet, we do have a website at okr-book.com where you can sign up and learn a bit more about it and then kind of be on the mailing list when we do have more info about it. We're writing it right now. To be honest, I've been writing it in public for the last two years on my blog every week at 500 to 700 words at a time. All those just kind of getting those ideas out there and experimenting to see what works and what doesn't and what gets feedback and what doesn't, and that's been super helpful and I expect this to be a popular book, and I expect this to be a very helpful and tactical book for organisations who are going through the process of implementing OKRs and are trying to make them work both as a goal setting framework, but also truly understanding the kinds of changes to ways of working that come after you've implemented OKRs. Agility, or agile ways of working, product discovery, Lean UX, right? Those types of activities as well, to help teams build that evidence-based decision making that we talked about earlier. Ula Ojiaku Awesome. Is there any timeframe or do we just go to your, to the website you mentioned and sign up to get more updates on the book as they unfold? Jeff Gothelf okr-book.com - that's the website? Ula Ojiaku Yes. And when do we expect it to be released? Jeff Gothelf October. Ula Ojiaku This October, awesome. So that would also be in the show notes. Are there any books or materials that you have found yourself gifting or recommending to people that have impacted or shaped the way you think right now? I mean, that is in addition to your, you know, Sense and Respond book, Lean UX. Unfortunately, I don't have the physical copy of the Forever Employable ones and, but yeah, are there other books that you could recommend to us? Jeff Gothelf Yeah, I think so recently I've read Tony Fadell, his book Build, the Tony Fadell of Apple and Nest and various other fame, Build is a really good book and really interesting insight as to how he works and builds products, and most recently I just finished the new book by Rick Rubin, legendary music producer Rick Rubin, it's called The Creative Act, and I found that book to be fascinating and really inspiring. I mean, it's, you know, he is very like, listen to this, you know, get into the zone and just the flow and, you know, there's a lot of that fluffy guru kind of stuff in there too. But I agreed with 90% of what I read in there about creativity, about, you know, working with an idea, about developing an idea, about getting feedback on an idea, about letting an idea go, about changing context and constraints to create more creativity and innovation. And I really enjoyed it. So it's called The Creative Act, it's by Rick Rubin, and it's an easy read and I would recommend that if you're looking for that kind of motivation, I think it was really smart. Ula Ojiaku Awesome. Is there anything else you'd like to ask of the audience? Jeff Gothelf I just hope that if you've got anything you'd like to ask me, don't hesitate to get in touch via Twitter or LinkedIn or my website. If you're interested in OKRs, do sign up for my newsletter, and go to okr-book.com and sign up there. And beyond that, I hope to see you online or in person sometime in the future, because it's nice to meet people in person again these days. Ula Ojiaku Great. Thank you very much, Jeff, for these. Any final words of wisdom for the audience before we go? Jeff Gothelf The pithy phrase I'll close with is this, do less, more often. That's the phrase that I would recommend for you. Ula Ojiaku Wow. Do less, more often. I am going to be pondering on that statement. Thank you so much, Jeff. It's been an honour speaking with you, learning from you, and I hope we would get the opportunity to do this again, hopefully. Jeff Gothelf Thank you, Ula. This was amazing. Thanks for having me on the show. Ula Ojiaku 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!

america god director head new york city google business uk starting apple strategy leadership work books masters innovation north america bank humility comfort product defining uncertainty manchester respond customers sense curiosity north american nest boeing ux agile budapest cisco project managers meetup ui product managers thought leaders product management slightly succeeding agility html user experience chief product officer outsource barclays lehman brothers rick rubin lean startups sprints mass communications okrs okr human factors stop looking eric ries navigators user experience design tony fadell harvard business review press giff jeff gothelf lean ux information architecture seiden information design cataloguing josh seiden making things worth making peter morville information architect lean innovation forever employable lou rosenfeld

Outcomes Over Output with Josh Seiden

Scaling Tech - The blueprint for successful tech teams

Play Episode Listen Later May 9, 2023 36:34

What comes first: the outcome or the output? Today I'm chatting to Josh Seiden about one of my favorite topics: outcomes over outputs. Josh is actually the author of a book with that exact title, Outcomes over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success.Josh is also the co-author of Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams, and Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously. For Josh, the answer is clear: if we can define an outcome as a change in human behavior that creates value, then it's worth putting that ahead of the output or 'thing' we are creating. This is a fascinating approach to redefining the way we work, the way we set OKRs, and the way we measure success. When the name of the game is efficient growth, defining your outcomes is crucial. How do we make sure we are committing to the right work, though? And how do we articulate that to the teams that we build? Let's find out! "Let's really think about what are the things that people value, what are the outcomes that we're trying to get, and then work backwards to get to the output we need to make." ~ Josh SeidenIn This Episode:- Why outputs follow outcome - Understanding how outcome is a change in human behavior (that creates value)- What do we mean when we say "outcome"?- What do we need to do to deliver an outcome? - What are AGILE teams committing to stakeholders?- How do we think about the way we organize our teams?And more!Connect with Josh Seiden:- Website - https://www.joshuaseiden.com/- Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success https://www.amazon.com/Outcomes-Over-Output-customer-behavior/dp/1091173265/- Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously - https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Respond-Successful-Organizations-Continuously/dp/1633691888- Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience - https://www.amazon.com/Lean-UX-Applying-Principles-Experience/dp/1449311652Connect with Debbie Madden:- Website - https://www.stride.build/- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbiemadden1/- LinkedIn Page - https://www.linkedin.com/company/stride-build/

customers sense outcomes agile output okrs agile teams josh seiden improve user experience

197. How to Drive Outcomes Over Output, with Josh Seiden

The Innovation Engine Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2023 45:47

Do you know the difference between focusing on outcomes versus outputs in product development — and why the difference can make or break a product? In this episode, we explore how shifting the focus from churning out features to driving business outcomes can help product teams deliver far greater value to users and organizations. Our guest, Josh Siden, is a designer, strategy consultant, and author of the book Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success. He spent two years working on a stock trading app that never shipped, which taught him the importance of putting products in users' hands “unreasonably early.” Josh presents three “magic questions” to help product teams focus on outcomes and introduces a new behavioral model that suggests teams should focus on changes in user behavior that create business value. He explains the importance of telling a specific story about the user journey, highlighting key moments that make a difference, and building a shared perspective and understanding to make collaborative prioritization decisions. Finally, Josh discusses the benefits of outcomes-based roadmaps, providing context for why the team is doing something and outlining traditional roadmap content, questions, and risks. Resources: Learn more at JoshuaSeiden.com Connect with Josh on LinkedIn Follow Josh on Twitter: @jseiden Read: Outcomes Over Output by Joshua Seiden Read Josh's recommended business book: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt Read Josh's recommended book on writing, which he cites as an inherently creative process akin to product development: Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg Learn more and get the full show notes at: 3PillarGlobal.com Produced by Nova Media

drive bones outcomes output writing down josh seiden

132: Jeff Gothelf

Agile FM

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 20, 2023 29:57

Transcript: Joe Krebs 0:20 Welcome back to another episode of Agile FM, my first recording of 2023. I'm going into my second decade of agile FM. And I'm super, super happy to have Jeff Gothelf back to Agile FM, author doesn't really need an introduction, but he's the author of Lean UX, Sense and Respond and Forever Employable and Lean vs Agile versus Design Thinking. And maybe there is another one in the making, we can talk about. First and foremost, Jeff, welcome to the podcast again. Jeff Gothelf 0:53 It's a pleasure to see you. We were just talking before you hit record how long we've known each other. And it's fun, it's fun to keep chatting all these years and seeing where these conversations go. Because because they do get interesting. Like they don't they don't get stale. And it all evolves, you know, Joe Krebs 1:08 thank you. Yes, and we go all the way back, I mean, to today's we're agile are very, very different. You wrote several books in between. I've been active not only here on the podcast, but also through work. And so our paths constantly cross. And obviously, you always have interesting content to share. Today, we want to talk a little bit about our OKR's. On social media, I see you a lot of responses and material you're releasing on OKR's. And you are obviously very, very interested in this topic. And it's not brand new. So there are some people that are talking about OKRs. What is OKRs? But I did some research on it. It's It's It's old, but obviously it hasn't really taken off at that time. So it really started like, way before, but Google really started introducing OKRs as far as that's my understanding, but even at that time, it wasn't really popularized. What's what's attracted you to OKRs? Jeff Gothelf 2:11 Yeah, super interesting, right? So it's a technique, it's been around for more than 40 years, Andy Grove at Intel. And for him, you know, managing by walking, management by objective, sorry, management by objective was kind of the first name for it. And then Google popularized it. What's interesting to me about it, and it's kind of like the same thing that happened with with sort of Lean and Agile and Lean startup and all these different things is that I think the reason why objectives and key results are having their moment in the sun right now. And everybody's interested, is because the technology that we use to deliver products and services, and build businesses on top of today is continuous. And it allows us to learn continuously, and at the pace of the market. So whereas if you think about, you know, when I started working professionally, in the late 90s, I worked in America Online, you know, it was far from continuous, right? We, it was very much not continuous, we worked for nine months to build software, and then print 15 million CDs, and then send them out, and then wait to see what happens, right? I think OKRs would have failed, because it would take too long to get feedback on whether or not you had a meaningful impact on the people who used your, your product or your service. And so as a goal setting framework, it would have been too bad. But today, you can get feedback instantaneously, if you've got enough of an audience size, and certainly very quickly in in a in the majority of cases. And so this is why this is an interesting topic. For me. Number one, I think this is why it's getting a lot of attention. The interesting thing here is that, in my opinion, and I can explain this in a minute, I think objectives and key results are the gateway to agility. Right? So if we can keep capital A agile out of it for just a second, right? And we talk about the the noun agility. I think that objectives and key results, when done correctly, demand that an organization behaves in an agile way that they increase their agility, we can explain why. But to me, that's why I'm so passionate about it these days, is because for all the organizations that have implemented some version of agile some version of Lean UX for Lean startup or design thinking, and I've struggled with it. I believe that if now if they if they kind of give it another shot and they start with OKR's as their goals, they stand a better chance of succeeding.Joe Krebs 5:02 Goal setting. And I actually like your your comment about the entry point or the the access point for for agility. That aside, I've been in my career I've been goal setting and goal and strategies and etc. I've been listening to this for a long, long time in organizations since I can think of in my professional career. Why is it so difficult? There? What do you think why, from a leadership perspective? Why does it seem so, so hard? The goal setting piece, I think, and I don't want to speak for everybody, but it feels like we're pretty good whether, you know, agile on the team level, building a product, maybe scaling, things like that. So there's a lot of things we have, but it's like the goal setting piece seems to be like, struggling, why do you think that is? Jeff Gothelf 5:52 Yeah, look, I think leadership has been trained on 100 years of management, Canon that's based heavily in production, right. And we've I know, we've talked about this in the past, but their managers are trained to optimize production even today, which doesn't make sense in a software based world as, as you know. And so you've got the, the staff of a team of an enterprise or an organization trying to work in an agile way. And they have demands being put on them that are very linear, that are production oriented, that are very prescriptive, go build me this thing, make sure it does these three things, doesn't mean this way, and just try to get it done by Friday, if you can, and that grinds the gears grind there, right? You got agile sort of turned teams trying to go one way, and the organizational and leadership demands going the other way. And but but it's first of all, management's comfortable with that way of setting goals. It's super easy to measure. It's binary. Right? But it's it's you know, did you make the thing? Yeah, here's the thing. I made it, right. Yeah. So if you made the thing, then you did a good job, and I should reward you and I can, and it's easy to measure, right? I didn't make the thing that didn't make the thing, easy to measure, easy to manage, easy to reward. When we change the goal. And this is what OKR's does, right? This is OKR's. At its core, when done correctly, and why it's powerful is the goal changes from output to outcome, it changes from making a thing to positively impact the behavior of the person using the thing, right. Now, the interesting thing about that is that that is not binary. So for example, let's talk, you know, you could say, an output goal could be build a mobile app. Okay, maybe we built the mobile app, okay. And outcome version of that said, we'd like to get at least 50% of our revenue to come through the mobile channel. Like we'd like people to spend at least 50% of the money that they spend with us through the mobile channel, right? That's a behavior change. Right? The goal is not deliver a mobile app, the goal is get folks to spend at least half of their of their, you know, lifetime value, whatever you want to call it. Through the mobile channel. Yeah. Now, let's say, let's say that you give that goal to a team. And at the end of a quarter, six months, they come back and say, look, we got you know, about 27% of the revenues coming through the mobile channel. What do you do with that team? Did they do a good job? They do a bad job? Did you fire them? Like they didn't they didn't hit 50%. And that becomes really difficult. That's one of the ways why this becomes difficult, right? Is this sense of... Well, I don't know what to do with that. Because like, what if they hit 42%? Or 27? May be right. But if they got to 42%, or 43%? What do you do with that as a manager? Right. And I don't think that leadership is the folks who are in leadership positions are necessarily equipped to deal with that today. And I think that's, that's one of the main reasons why this goal setting is challenging. The other reason why this is challenging is because I think leaders are used to telling people what to do. Go make this thing, build it this way and ship it by Friday, when you change that when you change from output to outcome, or build me the mobile app. Clear, super clear in the sense that like, okay, and I want the mobile app to enable online commerce and search and make sure everybody's got a profile. Okay. Right. Drive 50% of revenue through the mobile channel, does not tell the team what to do. And that is really scary for people in a leadership position. Because all of a sudden, they don't really have an answer to the question. Well, what is the team doing right now? What's the team working on? And that's terrifying, because they feel like they should know that and a certain degree they should. And they also feel like they should be telling them that. So there's that there's a trust that they have to have in a team that the team is making good decisions. Joe Krebs 10:14 Seems to be like a cultural changes is needed, not only for OKR, but also for everything that follows the OKR. Right? Because it's the it's not only the framework of understanding how to set goals differently, but it's also how to work differently, right, to your point like 42%. I mean, is that a negative result? You know, in 50%, we are on you know, if that was a lengthy process, let's say, of building a product, there could be many things could happen, that could be still a success, right? So it's an interesting thing. In terms of leadership, there is another tool for for leaders to acquire. Right? That's, I think that's what I'm hearing. Like, it's not only you understand OKR, but also to understand the Agile piece entirely working with teams. Jeff Gothelf 11:00 It's, it's highly complementary to Agile or Agility. Number one, and we'll talk about that in a second. But the it's such a simple concept. And yet it is so difficult to implement simply by switching from managing the output to managing outcome, right? So overall, if we just I can define it for you in 30 seconds, right? The objective is qualitative, aspirational, inspirational and time bound. The reason we get out of bed every morning, right? We want to be the go to destination for online furniture sales in Europe by the end of the year. Right? That's a qualitative aspiration. Why are we doing this? Because we're trying to be the go to destination for online furniture sales in Europe by the end of the year. Okay, easy enough? How do we know we've done that the key results are measures of human behavior, right, they are the things that people will do differently, that tell us that we are the go to destination for online furniture sales in Europe. Right? That is that, that that's critical. And it's things like, it could be average order value, could be repeat customer, the percentage of repeat customers, it could be referrals as plus lots of different behaviors that we could measure. They're super easy concept. But as you start to implement it, this is where it gets difficult. So we talked about measurement, right? We talked about the fact that you're not telling teams, what to build, and then and then on top, but the compatibility here with agile ways of working and agility is, is it's nearly an overlapping circle. Because essentially, what you're saying is team, I need you to go out and discover continuous learning and improvement and iteration, the best combination of code, copy, design, value proposition, business model, that will affect behavior change in this way. So the team conceives hypotheses, begins to do discovery work and discovery work is design thinking, Lean UX, lean startup research, etc. And then based on that evidence, they start to invest in the hypotheses that deliver the behavior change that they're looking for. And they remove effort or or pivot or kill the hypotheses that don't deliver the behavior change that we're looking for. And to be clear, changing course, based on evidence is being agile. So it's highly, highly compatible. But it takes this tremendous, to your point, cultural and organizational shift in understanding how, how work has to shift to to account for this new goal.Joe Krebs 14:00 We got the leadership, there's definitely a different kind of engagement and involvement is needed, right? Coming in, you know, using OKR's. And working with agile teams, if we're going on to the agile team level. So what I hear is, the teams are focusing on outcomes rather than output. Right. And but you also and this is very interesting, because I think that brings out the self-organization, part of an often team really clearly is the team's should not be focused on the features. So we shouldn't be focusing on features we should be focusing on the on the outcome. How do we have to see that that's an interesting piece. I came across one of your LinkedIn in posts recently, and it was it was quite interesting why so not to focus on the features but to focus on the outcomes that really drives a total behavioral change on a team level? Jeff Gothelf 14:53 Yeah.Joe Krebs 14:56 And so let's explore a little bit. Jeff Gothelf 15:00 Go back 20 years in time, the delivery of software to production 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, for the majority of organizations out there was an event. Right? It was a thing. Like, I mean, honestly, we had parties. Literally, we literally threw parties when we delivered software to production, because it took nine months to get there. Right. Right. And, and you know, and we get a t-shirt with the name of the project on and we celebrate the delivery of software, right? Today, you can ship software to production, if you choose to as an organization as fast as you want. There's literally no limit on it, Amazon's doing it once every second. That's, that's kind of the speed. And so the delivery of software is a non event at this point, right? Our ability to get ideas into the hands of customers, to learn whether or not it positively impacted their behavior in ways that we expect it or not. And then to react to that to ship sense and respond if you'll indulge me a little promotion of our second book, right. Is is it's in everybody's fingertips. Right. And so this, this idea that we're focusing on a feature doesn't really matter, of course, we have to ship the features. But we can ship anything we want as quickly as we want. And so the sooner at end, any of our assumptions or hypotheses are going to be wrong to some extent. And so the sooner that we can find out where we're wrong, and where we're right, allows us to change course, and to adjust more quickly, right, that's the agility that we're looking for. And so that begins. And because the delivery of software is is a non event, the focus isn't on, did we get the thing out the door? It's getting the thing out the door, shift the behavior in the right way? And if it didn't? Let's find out why. And if it did, let's find out why. And do more of that. To me, that's, it's a really difficult conversation for everybody involved in the management and the delivery of products, digital products and services. Because it's really easy to think about features. It's a concrete thing.Joe Krebs 17:20 Well, Jeff, you have so far published 4 books, right, if I counted correctly. And this is not the big reveal, I would assume and in the world of agile books, but there is a book 5 in the making. Jeff Gothelf 17:33 There is there is and I'm super excited to be co-writing with Josh Seidenn again, I've continued to work with Josh Seiden and continuously for 15 years at this point, we wrote Lean UX together, we wrote Sense and Respond together, we've built a couple of businesses together and we continue to deliver work together on a regular basis. And he had a tremendously successful that continue to be successful called Outcomes over Output. And so we decided to join forces again on a book and put out an OKR book, we're still working on a title, but the goal is to get it out in October of this year. And it's designed to be the practical, tactical guide for justifying OKR's and then writing them and kind of what happens next and how to implement them and what what to watch out for in a large organization. So if you think about sort of "Measure What Matters" John Doerr's book, sort of as the kind of the big, lofty introduction to OKRs, which has a few things in it that I don't necessarily agree with. Anything about Christina Wodtke's book, "Radical Focus", and if it was 2.0 is being fantastic. generally focused on a single team, though so it's kind of where's the sort of the practical guide for larger teams and teams at scale? That's what we are going for with this book. Super. Joe Krebs 17:33 Yeah, super exciting right. And you also have a course like a self paced course about OKRs when you do a JeffGothelf.com if you if you had to, you know have like a thread through like in terms of topics and how they are like intertwined and you know, linked together out of those books do you see like, like lean UX obviously was a that was a big book coming out in the beginning of not your career, but authors career, right. And then obviously, now there is a book about OKR how does this all connect with each other? If you had to say like, okay, I wrote Lean UX I wrote sense and respond then lean versus agile versus design thinking and now there comes the other one, maybe even the one from Josh, that book that somehow also topic-wise fits in. But what is the theme here? What is what is it? Jeff Gothelf 19:51 Yeah, it's a good question. And no one's ever asked me that question. So I liked this question. So lean UX was a sharing back of ways that we had figured out through trial and error for practicing design, user experience and design in Agile software development environments. That's kind of where it started in its first edition. And it's third edition. Now, it's a bit more broad about kind of how to how to teams design and build great products in an agile environment. The feedback from Lean UX since the day it came out was generally speaking. "I love the book", would love to work this way. My boss doesn't want let me my company doesn't work this way. And so to Josh and I, that was a clear call a sent a signal from the market that said, there's there's something to be done here. People want to work this way. But their bosses don't understand why or how. And so sense and respond was literally a response to the feedback that we sent from Lean UX. It was it was a business book, designed for leaders, I think we've met I think we may be used the word agile in there twice, in 50,000 words, and that was by design, right? It wasn't it was to try to build to write an evergreen book. And that that worked out well. And what's interesting is that, then folks began to take that advice to heart. And they started getting their team's training. And so we're hearing from our clients while we're in their training with with maybe with lean, lean UX, product discovery, design thinking. You know, there's a lot of agile training going on. And the feedback from organizations was looking for training everybody in lean startup and and Lean thinking and design thinking and lean UX and, and Agile and Scrum, and the magic isn't happening. Right? Why isn't the magic happening? And it's interesting, because I felt like we were pretty successful, like, convincing folks that stuff in Lean UX was good stuff in sense and respond was accurate. And now they were trying to make it all happen. But they were kind of buying sort of ad hoc training and trying to make it all together, make it all work together. So that's where Lean versus agile versus Design Thinking came from. And in hindsight, I regret not calling it lean and agile and design thinking, right? Like, that's the only the only change I would make, because fundamentally the the philosophies is the same in my opinion underneath those, those ideas. And so that would have helped people kind of get a better sense of how to unite those processes and build those environments. And then finally, kind of coming full circle to this OKR book today. It feels like, well, it's what we talked about before, right? It feels like the product development parts of an organization get it, right, they get, you know, lean agile and design thinking. But the leadership part of the organization is still making demands on them, that reflect reflect old ways of thinking and old ways of working. So, an OKR book, if it can convince an organization to set goals in this new way, paves the way for the product development teams to be successful with everything else. We've provided them over the last decade. So that's the thread between it all. And it's almost like we should have been done the OKR book first and come his way. But you know, here we are. Joe Krebs 23:26 Yeah, no, it's it's awesome is many of those readers out there listeners, when we have read your material, they will know that not only will you write about it, it was going to be a great book away and as the other ones too. But it's also going to probably going to create a bigger interest in in that topic. So I'm excited about that. Because OKR's from what I understand is also creating a higher level of experimentation. Inspires is something I'm personally very interested about. Right. Soleaders, obviously, as we already pointed out, is is something that that would need to be coming on board with that kind of concept. And I think holistically drive this. This is super interesting. Yeah, that is, so if material out you have you you have training about this topic, you're writing a book about OKRs. And the title is still unknown. We don't know that yet. Jeff Gothelf 24:26 It's TBD. I've been asking Chad GPT to help me and it's done. Okay, it's generated some decent site overall, at least at least. Something has sparked the brainstorm.Joe Krebs 24:39 Yeah. Two quick questions at the at the end here. Before we before we depart. So if some leaders out there it's like is first time I really hear OKRs maybe something's like I've heard about it, but I really have no idea about OKR, what what's your recommendation for Leaders how to get started with that or possibly get warmed up to the topic. And also for maybe the other side, we have touched on in this podcast the teams, right? Like let's say there's a Scrum team. Let's just make it very specific. Right. And let's say there's a scrum team. How does Scrum and OKRs? How does that all link together? In your opinion? Jeff Gothelf 25:21 Yeah. So, look, I think, I think there's a challenge. I wouldn't recommend Measure What Matters any more than what's on every executive desk, just because there's some things in there. Fundamentally, he's okay with, with outputs as key results, and I'm not. So so I have to disagree with that, I'm sorry. But otherwise, and I think like Christina's Wodtk's books are amazing, Christina Wodtke's Radical Focus is amazing. I just, you know, it's generally focused on startups and single teams. And so if you're looking for for sort of a quick primer, there is, first of all, is endless content on my blog, but the OKR course, which is, which is super, in my opinion, super affordable. It's 68 minutes of video. And I think that that's a fair ask, if you're looking for a very short distillation of that. I did a, I did a kind of a video podcast about two years ago, with a show called product beats. Swedish. Okay, folks, I think, and it was like 18 minutes long. And all I did was talk about OKRs for 18 minutes. And so if you just want to invest 18 minutes, that's a great, that's a great little podcast to get into. And that would really kind of break it down very, very clearly as to the what, how the why some of the, the traps and the things to watch out for. So those are good places to start. All those are good places to start. Joe Krebs 26:52 Yeah, maybe people will later refer to this 25 minute podcast of Agile FM and say like that might be the starting point of the starting points, right?Jeff Gothelf 27:00 I hope so.Joe Krebs 27:02 What about teams? What are the changes on a scrum team? For example, if somebody says, Hey, we're going to introduce OKR's into our organization, what's the impact on the scrum team, for example? Jeff Gothelf 27:11 So this is where it gets it. This is where it gets interesting, right? Because again, like, if you don't, if you don't tell the team what to make, they've got to go discover there, they've got to go figure it out. If they don't know how to do discovery, or if they're not allowed to do discovery, then they're just going to retrofit their existing backlog into the goals that you've set for them. And that gets us nowhere, right? Doesn't we've changed nothing at that point, right. And so what changes at the team level is you have to start doing discovery, and then building that into your sprints. So dual track agile, we know that term for a long time, by discovering delivery, with the same team doing both types of work, writing hypotheses, testing them changing things based on evidence, that's key. So if you don't know how to do that, you have to get training for it. If your company won't allow you to do that, but they're setting OKRs as goals, you have to raise your hand, you have to say, look, I appreciate you going down this path. But if we can't go and talk to customers, if we can't run experiments, if you won't allow us to carve time out of every sprint for learning, then we've changed nothing. You're not going anywhere. Joe Krebs 28:21 Oh, that's cool. That's great advice, Jeff. This is, this is awesome. So we learned a lot. Jeff is working on a new book, it's gonna be about OKR's or related content. We heard a little bit about leaders, teams. We got a little bit of advice, and it's all packed into 25 minutes. There's only one sad piece about this podcast, and that is that I heard that we are not having any kind of launch parties anymore, no more printed T shirts those days are over. So for everybody releasing software today, you're missing out. But other than that, we're gonna see great improvements. That's awesome.Jeff Gothelf 29:03 It is sad. I mean, I miss my projects diamond T-Shirt. Project emerald. That was the one after diamond. That was amazing. Joe Krebs 29:13 It's awesome. Thanks, Jeff, for joining me on this podcast. Jeff Gothelf 29:17 My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. It's great chatting with us. Good to see you again.Joe Krebs 29:23 Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host Joe Krebs. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www agile.fm. Talk to you soon.

Avoiding Burnout in Agile Teams, The Importance of Seeking Outside Perspectives as a Scrum Master | Gemma Murray

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 21, 2023 16:06

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. In this episode, Gemma discusses a project where the team was building a database of customer data and a UI to interact with that data. The team was highly motivated and excited about the solution they had come up with, but slowly started to conflate the solution with the outcome. They became so focused on the "one big idea" that they struggled to let go, which resulted in burnout for some team members. The team was great at inspection but not at adaptation. To avoid this type of situation, Gemma suggests seeking outside perspectives and speaking with your peers. As a Scrum Master, she fell victim to the team's energy in the beginning, but realized something was wrong and sought insights from an Agile Coach. It is important not to get too focused on the work without thinking about the process, and seeking outside perspectives can help to prevent this. To get different perspectives, and get out of the day-to-day work focus, why not join our podcast community to network and seek additional perspectives? Join us here. Featured Book of the Week: Scrum Mastery by Geoff Watts In Scrum Mastery By Geoff Watts (Geoff was a previous guest on the podcast), Gemma found a reminder that, even if the Scrum Master role can sometimes be seen as “the facilitator”, in practice it is much more than that. In this segment, we also talk about the book Right to Left: The digital leader's guide to Lean and Agile by Mike Burrows, that helps Scrum Masters understand how they contribute to the production of value in their role. In this segment, we also refer to the book Lean UX, whose authors were previous guests on the podcast: Jeff Gothelf, and Josh Seiden, and about Lean in general, an approach that can inspire how we implement Scrum in practice. Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches - Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM's that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome! About Gemma Murray Gemma works as an Agile Coach for MOO, a branding company whose vision is to provide 'Great design for everyone'. Having worked in various change roles using both waterfall and agile approaches throughout her career, Gemma believes in the diversity of teams to unlock innovation, creativity and delivering value. You can link with Gemma Murray on LinkedIn.

tips seeking perspectives agile sm ui scrum avoiding burnout scrum masters moo agile coach jeff gothelf lean ux agile teams josh seiden mike burrows christopher avery mike cohn linda rising scrum master toolbox podcast

Experimentation with Josh Seiden

The Agile Wire

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 30, 2023 64:30

Josh Seiden is the author of LeanUX, Sense and Respond, and Outcome over Outputs. YouTube: https://youtu.be/PQfvR_UKwJE

respond sense outcome experimentation outputs lean ux josh seiden

OKRs: The Gateway Drug to Agility & Good Product Management (with Jeff Gothelf, Product Management Consultant & Co-author ”Lean UX” )

One Knight in Product

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 22, 2023 44:08

About the Episode Jeff Gothelf is a product coach, author, speaker and trainer who is currently trying to get companies to work with outcomes, not outputs. He's written two classic books: Sense & Respond, and Lean UX, as well as a variety of other books covering various aspects of product management and design thinking. A message from this episode's sponsor - My Mentor Path This episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring, and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part, but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both! Episode highlights: Lean, Agile & Design Thinking can get along These came from different places, but the philosophies that underlie all of these ideas are the same: understanding our customers, working in shorter cycles, making decisions based on evidence, and continuously improving. Managing for outcomes is the hinge that everything else pivots from There are many principles of good product management, but moving away from output enables focus on the change in behaviour you want to see & have the humility to accept you don't have all the answers upfront OKRs are the gateway drug to agility and good product management OKRs are easy to explain, but difficult to implement. Used right, they can empower teams to make measurable impact towards an aspirational goal, without micromanagement or deciding on a fixed plan upfront. OKRs are for teams, not individuals OKRs enable teams to focus on impact, changing customer behaviour in a way that matters to their business & knowing whether they've succeeded. Cramming individual task lists into the OKR format doesn't achieve anything. Change is scary & might not work the first time Some people start with OKRs by mistake or give it a quarter & then give up. Using OKRs well takes work. If it's not working, make sure you have open & honest retros to understand whether it's fixable & whether you can try again. Buy "Lean UX" "Lean UX is synonymous with modern product design and development. By combining human-centric design, agile ways of working, and a strong business sense, designers, product managers, developers, and scrum masters around the world are making Lean UX the leading approach for digital product teams today In the third edition of this award-winning book, authors Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden help you focus on the product experience rather than deliverables." Check it out on Amazon. Buy "Lean vs. Agile vs. Design Thinking" "As companies evolve to adopt, integrate, and leverage software as the defining element of their success in the 21st century, a rash of processes and methodologies are vying for their product teams' attention. In the worst of cases, each discipline on these teams -- product management, design, and software engineering -- learns a different model. This short, tactical book reconciles the perceived differences in Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and Agile software development by focusing not on rituals and practices but on the values that underpin all three methods." Check it out on Amazon. Check out Jeff's courses Jeff is running some self-paced courses on OKRs, including in Spanish! Check them out here. Contact Jeff You can catch up with Jeff on his website. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn.

amazon change spanish managing agile product management design thinking co authors agility lean startups okrs okr management consultants gateway drug cramming jeff gothelf lean ux josh seiden

Outcomes Over Output

CFO Bookshelf

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 19, 2022 40:22

Output, Outcomes, Impact. Those are three strong words that seemingly go well together in any context. But is there a clear difference in each term?Josh Seiden is the author of Outcomes Over Output, and he provides one of the best definitions of outcomes I have ever heard--a change in customer behavior that leads to better business results.In this conversation, we learn how to apply outcomes-based thinking in any business environment along with hearing about a case study that ended in positive results when applying the philosophies in this book.

impact outcomes output josh seiden

OKRs for Agile, Outcome-Focused Organizations

The OKR Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 8, 2022 42:24 Transcription Available

Jeff Gothelf, business agility and OKR framework expert, organizational designer, author and speaker, sits down with Deidre to share his unique approach to cultivating a product-focused mindset across large, complex enterprise organizations. Jeff uncovers how agile organizations that manage to outcomes are fundamentally in opposition to legacy, command and control leadership practices - and more importantly, how leaders can empower their people with the right framework for autonomy, discovery, and learning. Jeff's Recommended Reads: Jeff Gothelf.com - Blog Sense and Respond - Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden Continuing Discovery Habits - Theresa Torez Lean UX - Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden

focused organizations outcome agile okrs okr jeff gothelf josh seiden

Defining Outcomes Over Output with Josh Seiden

change defining identify respond sense outcomes business success output lean ux melissa perri josh seiden

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2022 44:53

Josh Seiden is Melissa Perri's guest on this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Josh is a consultant and bestselling author of Lean UX, Sense and Respond, and his latest book, Outcome Over Output: Why Customer Behavior Is the Key Metric for Business Success. In this week's show, he and Melissa explore why saying “outcomes over outputs” is a lot easier than actually committing to it in practice, measurable outcomes, correlation versus causation, the problem with getting fixated on process, and how to keep your team focused on outcomes as a leader. Here are some key points you'll hear Melissa and Josh talk about: One of the challenges companies face that prevents them from becoming outcome-centric is the legacy of how they manage their work, Josh says. “Change in human behavior creates value, which helps us to take a huge step forward.” Josh advises that you build a logic model with impact and outcome. Identify the leading and lagging indicators that help you determine if your business model could be successful. Teams get so fixated on processes or methods that they don't look at the big picture in what they're trying to achieve and the whole ecosystem of their market. What data is out there already so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel? The surprising power of the words, “just tell me a story…” to help shift focus to data and figuring out what outcomes to go after. Josh talks about the success of the book and what he might add to a second edition. Josh says that most companies need to develop a risk-tolerant, psychologically safe environment, where employees are allowed to experiment freely to find what works best for the company. Resources: Josh Seiden on LinkedIn

Defining Outcomes Over Output with Josh Seiden

change defining identify respond sense outcomes business success output lean ux melissa perri josh seiden

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2022 44:53

Josh Seiden is Melissa Perri's guest on this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Josh is a consultant and bestselling author of Lean UX, Sense and Respond, and his latest book, Outcomes Over Output: Why Customer Behavior Is the Key Metric for Business Success. In this week's show, he and Melissa explore why saying “outcomes over outputs” is a lot easier than actually committing to it in practice, measurable outcomes, correlation versus causation, the problem with getting fixated on process, and how to keep your team focused on outcomes as a leader. Here are some key points you'll hear Melissa and Josh talk about: One of the challenges companies face that prevents them from becoming outcome-centric is the legacy of how they manage their work, Josh says. “Change in human behavior creates value, which helps us to take a huge step forward.” Josh advises that you build a logic model with impact and outcome. Identify the leading and lagging indicators that help you determine if your business model could be successful. Teams get so fixated on processes or methods that they don't look at the big picture in what they're trying to achieve and the whole ecosystem of their market. What data is out there already so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel? The surprising power of the words, “just tell me a story…” to help shift focus to data and figuring out what outcomes to go after. Josh talks about the success of the book and what he might add to a second edition. Josh says that most companies need to develop a risk-tolerant, psychologically safe environment, where employees are allowed to experiment freely to find what works best for the company. Resources: Josh Seiden on LinkedIn

32 - Sense and Respond- [Kitap değerlendirmesi]

Agile Kanban Istanbul

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 2, 2022 35:02

Bu ay Altuğ B. Altıntaş ve Meral Kızılkaya Demirtaş, Sense and Respond kitabını değerlendirdik. Kitaba erişmek için: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29502593-sense-and-respond Yazarlar: Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden https://twitter.com/agilekanban

respond sense alt bu kitap demirta josh seiden kitaba

Episode 193 : Lean UX II

Human sees Design

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 28, 2022 20:38

หนังสือเล่มนี้ Lean UX : Designing great products with agile teams แต่งโดย Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden ในส่วนนี้จะพูดถึงการทำงานระหว่าง Discovery และ Delivery ที่ผนวก Agile และ Scrum เข้าด้วยกันโดยจะทำให้เกิดกระบวนการที่สามารถตอบโจทย์ผู้ใช้ได้ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sakol/message

discovery delivery agile scrum jeff gothelf lean ux josh seiden

Episode 192 : Lean UX

Human sees Design

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 22, 2022 29:37

หนังสือเล่มนี้ Lean UX : Designing great products with agile teams แต่งโดย Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden ที่เน้นวิธีการของการออกแบบที่ทำให้ผลิตภัณฑ์ได้เร็ว เน้นการทำงานข้ามหน่วยงาน เน้นการเรียนรู้ พวกเขาได้ออกแบบ Lean UX canvas เพื่อเป็นกระดานให้คนในทีมทำงานร่วมกันอย่างมีประสิทธิภาพ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sakol/message

jeff gothelf lean ux josh seiden

Ep. 072, Metaphysical Kitchen

Underserved

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2022 30:03

Episode 072 of Underserved features Brian Durkin, Sr. Group Manager & Head of User Experience, Data & Analytics at BNY Mellon. Brian leveraged his art degree into some web design work but found his true passion was in information architecture. He came to this realization in the middle of an interview, which he politely asked to terminate. Instead, he was offered a new IA job the next day! Also covered: World IA Day, getting fintech to understand IA, and the fun parts of working for Nickelodeon. Charles Zicari, Brian's first real IA mentor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-zicari-90798/ IxDA: https://ixda.org/ UXPA Boston: http://uxpaboston.org/ World IA Day, Brian started the one for Boston: https://worldiaday.org/ Some of the past speakers of World IA Day Boston: Peter Morville - https://www.linkedin.com/in/morville Steve Portigal - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveportigal/ Josh Seiden - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jseiden/ Abby Covert - https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbytheia/ Aaron Irizarry - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaroni/ Todd Zaki-Warfel - https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakiwarfel/ Dana Chisnell - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-chisnell/ Christina Wodtke - https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinawodtke/

technology kitchen sr ia nickelodeon user experience data analytics metaphysical underserved bny mellon syrinx josh seiden christina wodtke steve portigal ixda abby covert peter morville dana chisnell brian durkin aaron irizarry world ia day

Josh Seiden on outcomes over output

Boss Level Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2022 29:17

Josh Seiden is a designer, strategy consultant, coach, author and speaker. He helps clients launch new products and services, and to create more agile, entrepreneurial organizations. He's the author of Outcomes Over Outputs and co-author of Sense & Respond and Lean UX. We discuss why it's important to focus on the outcomes of the work we do and not on the output. You can learn more about Josh on his website.Sponsor for the episode:- MinnaLearn - Go here to join the exclusive Boss Level study group and get 25% off the price

outcomes output boss level lean ux josh seiden

Outcome-driven design and team behaviors

Agile in Action with Bill Raymond

Play Episode Listen Later May 10, 2022 38:09

Josh Seiden is an acclaimed author in the lean and agile space, focusing on product design. Today, Josh shares how outcome-driven design can change human behavior, translating into improved customer value. Book LinkedIn Website Twitter

design behavior driven outcome josh seiden

79 / Create Outcomes That Change Human Behavior

Product Momentum Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2022 22:13

Josh Seiden broke into product development from the designer's perspective, crafting beautiful things he could be very proud of. Sometimes they worked; sometimes they didn't. “That deafening silence that comes when no users engage with your product is just a terrible feeling,” he says. So what we're always trying to do is generate the maximum … The post 79 / Create Outcomes That Change Human Behavior appeared first on ITX Corp..

outcomes human behavior josh seiden

Celebrating 150 episodes: The Product Experience podcast

experience podcast product experience melissa perri josh seiden

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 2, 2022 34:50

After over three years on The Product Experience, we have reached our 150th episode! With so many amazing guests and countless memorable moments, we reckon it's a landmark worth celebrating! In this compilation episode on the podcast, we look back at the highlights from some of our favourite shows. Tune in to listen to the best moments from our conversations with guests like Melissa Perri, Josh Seiden, Gabrielle Bufrem, and more! Episodes included in the compilation: Outcomes Over Outputs – Josh Seiden | The Black Mirror Test – Roisi Proven | Roadmaps Are Dead. Long Live Roadmaps! – Janna Bastow | How To Say No – Gabrielle Bufrem | The ABCs of Product - Melissa Perri

Outcome-Driven Product Teams - Becky Flint

ceo driven paypal rocks outcome flint pebbles product teams shutterfly another side dragon boat sprig product experience josh seiden

Play Episode Play 45 sec Highlight Listen Later Oct 20, 2021 41:36

We've talked about avoiding and escaping feature factories a number of times—but how do you take the next step, to become an outcome-driven product organisation? Becky Flint, CEO at Dragonboat, was able to provide all of the answers — after all, she built the product portfolio organisations at Paypal, Shutterfly, and others.Featured Links: Follow Becky on LinkedIn and Twitter | Dragonboat | 'Outcomes Over Outputs' - Josh Seiden on The Product Experience | 'Another Side of the Rocks, Pebbles and Sand Story' piece by Aditya Kothadiya | Dragonboat is hiring - work with BeckySupport our sponsorsGive Sprig (formerly Userleap) a try for free by visiting Sprig.com to build better products.

Interview with Josh Seiden

Agile Book Club

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 1, 2021 63:17

Get the book.More about JoshFind Josh on TwitterMentioned in the podcast:VaneStarlight ExpressThe Lean EnterpriseJoin our Slack community and talk about booksSupport the show (http://patreon.com/agilebookclub)

slack josh seiden bookssupport

#22 - Au coeur des Produits data centric

The Product Tape

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 12, 2021 64:43

"La question de l'intelligence artificielle éclipse celle de la donnée. On parle beaucoup de produit à base d'IA mais c'est souvent un abus de langage. Pour la plupart, les projets d'IA sont des projets data." Comment fonctionnent les Produits centrés sur la donnée ? Comment construire un bon Produit data centric ? Cette mission impacte-t-elle la structure et l'organisation des équipes ? Eglantine Schmitt est Head of Product de Citio, un éditeur de logiciel SaaS B2B orienté data permettant aux opérateurs et aux municipalités (AOM) d'améliorer les transports publics par la donnée. Diplômée de Sciences Po Paris et titulaire d'un doctorat en philosophie des sciences sur les big data, elle vulgarise pour nous les dessous des Produits data driven. Ensemble, nous avons notamment évoqué :

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Outcomes Over Output

Agile Book Club

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2021 70:26

Justyna and Paul talk about the new book by Josh Seiden, Outcomes Over Output: Why Customer Behavior Is the Key Metric for Business Success.Get the book.And here's a link to the Comic Agile book that we mentioned in the closing: https://www.comicagile.net/book/Support the show (http://patreon.com/agilebookclub)

outcomes business success output justyna josh seiden

Humane-centered e guidati dall'Etica

Strategia IT

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 13, 2021 68:32

sito del Podcast : https://strategiait.infosito transcribe service: https://transcribe.refacturing.comsito aziendale: https://www.refacturing.comcorso GTM: https://refacturing.it/corso-gtm-base/corso base API MVP : https://gumroad.com/l/HoYrSIT Newsletter su: https://it.refacturing.comVideo sulla playlist: https://youtu.be/ssrxbUYHWWIIlaria Mauric:https://tangible.ishttps://twitter.com/ilariamaurichttps://www.ilariamauric.itLean UX e Sense & Respond di Jeff Gothelf e Josh Seiden (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13436116-lean-ux https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29502593-sense-and-respond)La caffettiera del masochista e Emotional Design di Donald Norman (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3876199-la-caffettiera-del-masochista-psicopatologia-degli-oggetti-quotidiani https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841.Emotional_Design)Technically wrong di Sara Wachter Boettcher (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38212110-technically-wrong#)Ruined by design di Mike Monteiro (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44432844-ruined-by-design)

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#38 Climbing the confidence ladder with Lean UX - with Josh Seiden, Consultant & Author

The Product Bakery Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2021 37:31

Josh Seiden is a designer, strategy consultant, coach, and author. He started his career in the early 90s. Since then a lot of things have changed. That's why Josh decided to write and share his experience, and latest observations in amazing books such as "Lean UX" or "Outcomes over Output." In this episode, Josh discusses with the Product Bakers everything about Lean UX and how to work with hypotheses and problem statements. They've also touched upon the topic of lean experimentation to validate ideas as quickly as possible. Table of content: 00:30 - Intro Josh Seiden 03:30 - The change of Lean UX 04:30 - Making product & design teams work 06:25 - The notion of design thinking 08:25 - Defining good problem statements 11:40 - Defining good hypotheses 16:05 - Finding problems & defining success criteria 19:10 - Josh's definition of an MVP 25:20 - Perfectionism kills success 28:35 - Experimenting instead of solutionizing 30:35 - Josh's biggest learning with Lean UX 33:30 - Debrief Christian & Alex Follow Josh: Josh's Masterclass: Online masterclass outcomes for product teams Josh's books: Lean UX, Outcomes over Output Medium: @jseiden Linkedin: @jseiden Twitter: @jseiden ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩

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#55 UX Design y emprendimiento

Píldoras UX - Aprende diseño de experiencia de usuario

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2021 15:16

La idea de este episodio surgió hace unas semanas cuando me escribió Rubén Vasques para preguntarme si estaría interesada en dar una charla sobre UX y emprendimiento para la Hackathon que organizaba la comunidad de Code Up en la ciudad de Trujillo (Perú). Evidentemente si hablas de cómo puede ayudar el UX al emprendimiento debía de quitarme de la cabeza el proceso habitual de cómo se trabaja en consultoras o estudios de diseño por lo que enseguida me di cuenta de que tenía que hablar de cómo aplicar el UX con metodología Agile. En este episodio te hablo sobre el Lean UX un término creado por Jeff Gothelf y Josh Seiden. Si te interesa ver también la charla que daré este jueves 18 de febrero puedes informarte en las redes sociales de Code Up Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/codeupperu Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/code_up_peru/ REFERENCIAS DEL EPISODIO EN: https://pildorasux.com/55 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/pildoras/message

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#33: 8 Lessons Learned in 2020

ENLIVEN, with Andrew Skotzko

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 29, 2020 60:48

For the last episode of 2020, Andrew reflects on 8 big lessons learned from guests this year, and shares a few reflection questions to ask yourself. Wishing you all a peaceful end to this turbulent year. Here's to making things that matter in 2021!For the transcript and full episode notes/resources, go to: https://bit.ly/3rCEUcYAnd if you have a moment, I’d love it if you could give me a little feedback via this SurveyMonkey link. (It only takes one minute.)Click here to directly email Andrew your questions, comments, and feedback! He reads everything that is sent in (click 'Allow' if you get a popup): connect@makethingsthatmatter.comYou can submit your own audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/andrewskotzkoIf you enjoy the podcast, please consider subscribing and leaving a rating/review. It really helps!

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Conor Ward: Culture Change and Enterprise Design

Design Meets Business

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 6, 2020 38:33

Conor and I talk about how designers can prove their value in larger companies, why working in silos is a thing of the past, and how to transition from a design leader to a business leader.Connect with ConorLinkedIn, TwitterSelected links from the episodeBT's Medium Design blogShook's modelMarty Cagan, InspiredEric Ries, The Lean StartupJeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden, Sense and Respond

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Ep 42 How I Learnt To Win A Presidential Election (with Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden)

Business of Software Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 3, 2020 9:04

Back in 2016, Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf teamed up to explain how the Obama campaign testing their software systems early gave them an upper hand over the Romney campaign using facts and figures and rigorous testing. Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA 2016 in Boston, MA For more great talks, visit businessofosoftware.org/videos --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/business-of-software/message

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Episode #4 - Kerry McPhearson's UX job search story

UX Untamed Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 26, 2020 55:15

Kerry is our UX friend from Atlanta, Georgia. In this episode he will be sharing his UX interview tips, how to get a job as a product/UX designer, and some mental health recommendations while interviewing! Links to resources Kerry has mentioned: 1. AJ&Smart Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeB_OpLspKJGiKv1CYkWFFw 2. Fabricio Teixeira Medium page: https://fabriciot.medium.com/ and his UX starting guide: https://start.uxdesign.cc/ 3. Kerry's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/km1992/ 4. Cracking the PM interview (a book by Gayle Laakmann McDowell) 5. Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams (a book by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden)

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How to Plant Your Flag with Jeff Gothelf

The Top One Percent

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 15, 2020 37:24

I am pleased to welcome our guest for this episode, Jeff Gothef. He helps organizations build better products, executives build the cultures that build better products, and people build better careers. Jeff believes humility and learning are in short supply. To improve that, he teaches executives and teams -- through advising, workshops, keynotes, coaching & books -- to focus on their customers, learn from mistakes, and create an agile culture that continuously improves their products and services and the way they work. After co-writing the award-winning Lean UX (O’Reilly, 2013 & 2016) and Sense & Respond (HBR Press, 2017), Jeff co-founded Sense & Respond Press with co-author, longtime business partner, and friend Josh Seiden. Their goal is to bring customer-centric, evidence-based decision making, and agility back into corporate cultures. His newest book, Forever Employable, shares his story among others’ on how to capitalize on your experience and expertise to build a platform that generates opportunities for you continuously, making you forever employable. Grab a cup of coffee. Sit back, relax, and tune in as we dive into Jeff’s story, his expertise, and his idea of giving it all away. Episode Highlights: ● Background of Jeff’s Book, Forever Employable [5:20] ● Asking Yourself These 3 Fundamental Questions [9:00] ● How to Plant Your Flag [12:55] ● The Importance of Identifying Your Personal Story [16:00] ● Following the New Path [19:00] ● Tips for People Who Wants to Teach[24:15] ● Give It All Away: Sharing Unintuitively [28:00] ● Book Recommendations [32:00] AND MUCH MORE! Resources Mentioned In This Episode: ● If you are a future or aspiring business leader who wants to achieve the next level of success in your profession, get started by getting my FREE video short course: The Secret to Unleashing Your Top 1 Percent. ● Know more about building a platform that generates opportunities for you continuously by visiting Jeff’s website at jeffgothelf.com ● Have you found your Ikigai? Know more about Ikigai and how to build a successful agile team leadership here. ● Grab a copy of Jeffs’s book, Forever Employable, and take back control of your career and create your safety net, so you don’t get left behind. ● Connect with Jeff: o Email ● Book Recommendations: o Unlearn by Barry O'Reilly o The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay o Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet Quotes: “By design, the further you climb up the corporate ladder, the fewer opportunities there are.” “These days, teaching takes many many forms. Any opportunity that you have to share your expertise is an opportunity to teach.” “The more you teach, the better you are at defining and owning a specific vocabulary for your expertise.” “The more of your expertise that you can share publicly, the more that you give back to the industry, the more opportunities come back to you. ” “The more that you lift up others, the more that you share back, the more that you teach from your expertise, the better it reflects on you inside the organization.” Ways to Subscribe to The Top One Percent: Apple Podcast Stitcher PlayerFM Spotify

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Ep 23: Sense & Respond (with Josh Seiden)

Business of Software Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2020 56:34

Organisations that seek to thrive in the digital age must examine their core management practices. So much of our management practice was created in the industrial age and not all of it remains useful in the face of software. Managers and leaders inside and outside of the software world need a new set of principles for the next century of work. Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA in Boston, MA in 2017 For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/business-of-software/message

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Jeff Gothelf (Ep.110) - Coach, Speaker, Author & Consultant

Just Get Started Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 15, 2020 51:57

Episode 110 features Jeff Gothelf, a Coach, Speaker, Author, and Consultant and his new book, Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You, is out now!Book link: https://www.amazon.com/Forever-Employable-Stop-Looking-Work-ebook/dp/B086S5SJXMLink to the article he recommends from Josh Seiden called "How To Write"Find Jeff Online:Website: https://jeffgothelf.com/foreveremployable/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gothelf/Twitter: https://twitter.com/jboogieAbout Jeff:Jeff helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the co-author of the award-winning book Lean UX and the Harvard Business Review Press book Sense & Respond, and the upcoming book Forever Employable. Jeff works as a coach, consultant, and keynote speaker helping companies bridge the gaps between business agility, digital transformation, product management, and human-centered design. Most recently Jeff co-founded Sense & Respond Press, a publishing house for practical business books for busy executives.........Follow the Just Get Started Podcast on Instagram at @justgetstartedpodcast or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/justgetstartedpodcast and to learn more about me and what’s going on in my world check out https://www.brianondrako.com/now/ or find me on Instagram at @brianondrako or twitter @brianondrako As always, I’d appreciate a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts if you believe I’ve earned it. -> Leave a Review See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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Audrey Crane on Design in Organizations

The Informed Life

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2020 30:52 Transcription Available

My guest today is Audrey Crane. Audrey is a partner in DesignMap, a UX strategy and digital product design consultancy based in San Francisco. Audrey recently published a book called What CEOs Need to Know About Design, and in this conversation, we talk about the evolving role of design in organizations and why this book is needed now. Listen to the full conversation Show notes DesignMap TRS-80 Ashton-Tate Apple Netscape Hugh Dubberly Dubberly Design Office Hypercard What CEOs Need to Know About Design: A Leader's Guide to Working With Designers by Audrey Crane About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Christopher Noessel The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman Learning GNU Emacs: A Guide to Unix Text Processing by James Elliott, Eric S. Raymond, Marc Loy, Debra Cameron, and Bill Rosenblatt Zoom Accenture The Informed Life Episode 22: Andrea Mignolo on Designerly Ways of Being Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the full transcript Jorge: So, Audrey, welcome to the show. Audrey: Thanks Jorge! Glad to be here. Jorge: Well, it's great to have you. For folks who might not know you, can you please introduce yourself? Audrey: Yeah. My name is Audrey. I'm a partner at DesignMap. We're a design consultancy that does UX strategy and digital product design based in San Francisco. Jorge: And I'll say right off the bat that I've had the pleasure to work with you all over the last couple of years, and it's been a really great experience and the work that's come out I think is fantastic, so kudos on that. What is your background? Like how did you get to DesignMap? Audrey's background Audrey: Well it's kind of a long and winding road. I went to college and studied theater and math, specifically, pure mathematics. So, I wanted to get a theater degree, and my mother told me, you can do that, but you have to double major. So, I studied those two things, but my father actually was a computer programmer from the very early days. So, we had a Radio Shack TRS-80 in our house. I wrote computer programs on that. Very basic things, literally in BASIC, to play with as a kid. And so, I was always around tech. Like my summer jobs, I would do QA for Ashton-Tate or whatever company he happened to be working for. So, I was maybe the oldest person to grow up, or one of the oldest people who grow up with technology. And he had a great relationship with Apple. They would ship him computers before they released them, and he would write software for that computer, so they'd have something to ship the computer with. So, we had Apple IIs and Macs and stuff. So, after I graduated from college, I really wanted to get a day job that paid, and my dad was in Silicon Valley, so I went out there and I worked for a couple of companies, and this was in the early nineties, so kind of a long time ago now. And I ended up, through a series of incredible strokes of luck at Netscape and Hugh Dubberly, who we both know, was there and saw the double major on my resume actually, and said, that sounds ridiculous. I would like to meet this person. And so, I was, “Thanks mom!” Hugh interviewed me and brought me on actually as a producer there, but there I got the chance to understand “capital D” design. Which I think is a wonderful place for people who like to do right-brain and left-brain things. And so, after Netscape, I left and took some time off and then he started Dubberly Design Office. So, I got to be employee number one there and worked there for seven years and then left. And worked inside companies, running design teams and freelancing and doing various things, and then came to DesignMap, 10 years ago now, actually. And became a partner, I don't know, eight years ago with my other three partners there. “Capital D” design Jorge: You use the phrase “capital D” design, and I'm wondering if we could expand on that. Like what do you mean, “capital D” design? Audrey: Oh, now that I hear it played back to me, that sounds kind of ostentatious. But you know, Hugh used to say, “everybody is a designer,” and he was right. We all pick out what clothes we're going to wear in the morning. That's a design challenge by itself. But I think meeting Hugh and all of the designers that he introduced me to, which was – some of it was graphic design, but some of it was HyperCard, and sort of processes and workflows and that kind of thing – really introduced me to the idea that you could do this for a living, not necessarily as an artist. And of course, we love artists, but there's this, this other way of doing it. Which is to say, working within boundaries to solve problems or work on problems. Jorge: I'm understanding it correctly, it's the notion that somehow design work transcends any one particular branch of design or area of design or what people interpret as being an artifact of design? Audrey: I think that maybe the distinction in my mind is, designed for yourself versus designed for others. Jorge: Got it. Okay. Yeah, that's an important call-out, right? What is the ultimate intent of the design process? Audrey: Right. Decorating my bedroom is design. It's for me. I guess, arguably, picking out what clothes I'm going to wear… maybe it's for me, maybe it's for other people, but certainly when we're talking about service design or software design, experience design, we're talking about others. Jorge: Part of the reason why we're talking about this is that you've recently published a book about design, and I was hoping that you could tell us about it. Audrey's book Audrey: Yeah. So, the book is called What CEOs Need to Know About Design. The subtitle is, A Business Leader's Guide to Working with Designers published with Sense and Respond Press. So that's Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf. And this is one of that series of books that's pretty short, you can read it in less than an hour. But it came about because I got a call a couple of years ago now from a CEO of a small company, maybe 200 people, and he said, “I used to be an engineer, so I understand technology, and I've been promoted and over time I've learned about HR and finance and operations and marketing. I hear that design is important. I understand that it can move the needle for my business, based on reports that I'm reading and colleagues that I'm talking to. But I don't know what I need to know about design or how to know it. So, can you guys help me do that?” And that call kind of hit me like a bolt of lightning. Of course, he's asking this question and why aren't more people asking this question? I think we as designers – and maybe this is true of all professions, I'm not really sure – but we have conferences and we write blog posts, but a lot of it – and acknowledging the irony of me saying this as we're in a podcast with that designer talking to a designer – like it's a lot of like designers speaking to designers. And we're talking about really good, important, PhD-level stuff, which is great for furthering our profession and making us better at what we do, but it's not great for somebody who wants to know, honestly, what's a wireframe? And we have had, specifically at DesignMap and other places where I've worked as a consultant, we've had clients say, why is it all black and white? Or, when are we going to get the design maps? Like thinking that, like, oh, there's… there are maps. So many kinds of maps, but design maps are not one of them. And it's great that they're asking the question and I fret about how they feel when we answer it. And I was at a conference sort of pounding my fist about this in a chat with Josh and saying like, what are these men and women supposed to do that really want to know how to apply it in a business sense and don't even really know the basics? We can't… We can't hand them About Face. That's ridiculous. We can certainly ask them to read The Design of Everyday Things, but that's not quite it either. So, what are we doing to bridge the gap and to make it a little bit easier to work with us? And I think designers are doing a pretty good job speaking business more. And I also think that we can do better at helping them speak design more and understand, not just design for design's sake, but design because it's going to make a difference. It's going to help them personally, their business and their customers be more successful, or it has the potential to. So that's the genesis for the book. Jorge: So, what I'm hearing you say there is that the question that this is seeking to help answer is, what is it for? Like what's the purpose of this, right? Is that a fair take on it? Audrey: Yeah, I mean, it's certainly true, “what is it for?” is part of the book and there's a section that's just called the ROI of Design. There's also the how, and so it's not how do you design, but how do you build a design team and then work with that design team successfully as opposed to how do you design, which is what, so much of the content out there is about. So, there's a ton of material right now out there about the ROI design. And I guess I was lucky that I could just say point to a few reports and say, this is how it impacts the return on investment from my perspective. And here's a couple of good reports just to prove it to you. And then beyond that, it's how do you hire a team? And as part of this, I talked to several business leaders that I thought of as really great advocates for design CEO's, product managers. And it was interesting in those interviews that they had sort of 90% of the picture from my perspective. And then there'd just be these giant gaps. And again, this is my perspective, but they'd say, “I had a successful exit and I credit that to having a great design team.” “We had an acquisition that was fantastic, and that was a fourth hire than I made.” And then they would say in the next breath, “Of course, when the product managers make wireframes, they don't look quite as nice, but…” and I'm like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What? What are you…?” And doing a little digging in there, it turns out the designers are only around for the first few weeks of the project and then they go away. And so, trying to just create a level playing field, and you would be surprised, I think, how often… With our clients, we sometimes say, “Hey, we have a suite of workshops we'd be happy to offer one to use as part of our work together.” And one of them is feedback. And it is by far the most selected workshop. And at first, I was surprised because, you just sit back and kind of give your opinion, right? But, certainly one could do better than just sitting and giving one's opinion and it's, how would a product manager know what kinds of things are useful in a feedback session? What kinds of things are appropriate in a feedback session? Are they thinking that this room full of people is expecting them to be extremely knowledgeable about design? I mean, we're not asking them to do code reviews. Right? So, it's these kinds of things where I struggle with the book a little bit because it's 15,000 words, and if you said, okay, write 15,000 words about everything that anybody needs to know about the law in the United States, it would be a ridiculous assignment. And yet I gave myself, I think, a not quite as rigid, but a pretty ridiculous assignment. So, there's a lot that's left out. There's a lot that's over simplified. There's a lot more than I wanted to say. But at least we can have this basic shared understanding, which is how might a good feedback session look? What kinds of things might you ask designers in the interview process? And that's another good example is, how often we come across companies hiring designers without a designer on staff, and they're not doing portfolio review. They're just interviewing them kind of for culture fit or I'm not even sure what. So just getting this kind of basic shared understanding can be really helpful. And then teams and individuals can build from that is my hope. Jorge: Yeah. Having read the book, what it reminded me of – and I'm just going to try to bounce it back at you, because I think that this is the role that it fits – is it reminded me of how O'Reilly has these – O'Reilly the publishing house – has these very deep books on various technical tools and subjects and stuff, right? And, one that I always remember is, they have the book for GNU Emacs, this text editor. And it's a thick book, right? Because that's such a complex thing. But then they also have this other line of books that are like pocket references for these things that are… It's not that they're outlines – they're more fleshed out than an outline – but it really is the essence of what you need to know to either refresh your memory or find out what the basics are for the subject. And to your point, there are other books that are the equivalent of the big tome, and that's not what this is. This seems meant to be kind of an introduction for very busy people to the essentials that they need to know to understand both the relevance of design in their organizations, but also to operationalize it, right? Audrey: Yes. That's perfect. Thank you! Okay. I should have written that down. I'll listen to the recording later. Jorge: So, I'm wondering about a couple of things here. One is, the changing role of design. Because you and I have been in this industry long enough where we've seen organizations engage with design in different ways; like the way that organizations hire for operationalized design has evolved over time. And in the book, you cover several different ways in which organizations can engage designers. As you were saying earlier, they can build an internal team, they can hire a company like DesignMap, right? And that mix has been evolving over the past few years. Like over the last decade, there's been a significant move towards organizations building internal design functions, right? So that's one thing that I'm curious about, and I know that you do touch it a little bit on the book, but this book is meant as an introductory guide, right? So, I'm wondering about your thoughts on that. And then, I'm also wondering how the role of design might evolve given the current situation, if any. Design and the pandemic Audrey: Yeah. Well, maybe we can talk about the current situation first. I mean, it's really interesting how these tools that were business critical, like Zoom, but weren't what the whole company was running on? Like the role of those tools has really changed and alongside it, the massive change in the user base for those, so the people using Zoom. My Zoom account in any one day is used by my four-year-old. Tomorrow, they're actually going to the zoo; they're going to have like a guided tour of the zoo. And then, it's used by our office manager. It's used by me, who uses it all the time. And it was used actually a week and a half ago by my grandmother and my husband's grandfather to join our wedding. So, there's this massive growth in audience needs, audience goals, audience background and technical capability and interest level. And so, that's huge. Actually, I was just talking to a friend who's quickly repurposing a mobile ophthalmology tool to support a hundred percent remote doctor appointments with the ophthalmologist. So, these things are changing really dramatically. And I think, obviously, as we're seeing features updated in – just again to stick with Zoom as an example – we're seeing features updated weekly, so design can be really helpful. Research and design specifically can be really helpful in responding to that. Research is very interesting right now. I personally feel that when you're doing generative research, certainly in my experience, fundamental insights that really changed how a product was going to succeed or not, those insights were about how the product fit in with people's larger lives, and it's hard sometimes to get to that point in the conversation with people. There's a kind of a give and take of trying to build intimacy without the moderator putting themselves too much in the conversation or being in any way inappropriate, but also keeping the research participant comfortable. And now we're all looking in one another's bedrooms all the time. We're seeing each other's kids. I'm sure some kid will be wandering in here during this podcast – I can't believe it hasn't happened yet – kids and dogs and whether or not we make our beds in the mornings. So, there's a literal vulnerability. And then, there's an emotional vulnerability that I certainly am seeing in every meeting I'm in, regardless of what we're talking about. There are a few minutes of, how's it going? Oh, you guys just found out that your kids aren't going back to school this year. How's your mom doing? Are you guys seeing her again? Are you guys still saying away from… You know, there's that kind of personal conversation and vulnerability that suggest to me that in a research setting we can get to more meaningful conversation more quickly and understanding what really matters to people is how we make products more successful, right? Supporting those things. So that's kind of my thoughts on design right now. I don't know. I'm curious if you, what your thoughts are too. Jorge: Well, the thought that is on my mind as you are describing that is that it might not be clear to our listeners, because we haven't stated it explicitly, that when we're talking about design, we're talking specifically about the design of software. One of the effects of our response to the pandemic is that we have greatly accelerated the move to doing work and interacting with each other in various ways through software. Audrey: Hmm. Jorge: I wrote a book called Living in Information, and I could not have expected just how literal that would become and how much of our lives would actually be spent living in these information environments in such short term. And I think that their design has become much more pressing and urgent and important as a result of this situation. With that in mind, I'm wondering about the other aspect to the shifting role of design, this notion of the relationship between design as a function of the organization and design as something that organizations bring on board through an external actor like DesignMap. Design as a core competency Audrey: Yeah. So, my perspective is that design is a core competency and a company should always hire internal design teams. So that might sound crazy coming from a consultant, but I really believe that. It's sort of like if you were a software company, but you didn't have any engineers on staff, that would be ridiculous, right? So why would you not have any designers on staff? Design will be happening; it's just a question of who and how much you're paying to do that work and how skilled they are at it. Having said that, I believe that consultants and outside partners will always be useful in the same way that there still exists engineering consultants out there in the world, right? It's sort of impossible to imagine a world, in fact, without vendors that would sell you engineering services. And there's a reason for that. With design in particular, we believe that the pairing can be particularly powerful. So, if you have an internal team and then you have an external partner coming in, those two can work together in a lot of really effective ways. The internal team can provide a glossary, serve as subject matter experts, be guides to whatever political issues there are inside the company, and of course, be part of the team so that when that outside partner goes away, the internal team is better stewards and so the company basically gets better value for the work that they paid for. Because the internal team knows why that decision was made and has some skin in the game on that. Having said that, having a trusted outside partner can help people hire if they've never hired design teams before, as I alluded to earlier. And an external partner can point you to great recruiters, they can be part of the interview team, they can help put together processes and org charts and consult on compensation packages. And if you're actually paying an outside partner to do design work, that makes you a more attractive employer. I believe this with my whole heart. Designers do not want to be the only designer in the whole company. It's a miserable place to be, because you get stuck and there's nobody to turn to you and nobody really understands what you're up against, what's being asked of you, and so saying, we are truly investing in design today, and this is how, and it's now, and its tangible, can make employers more attractive to potential employees. And then of course, having a partner means that sometimes you've got to swallow an elephant, right? Like there's a new product launch. It's not going to always take as much time to design as it takes right now. And I guess another point that's certainly not in the book, but when there's uncertainty and you don't have head count, you don't want to have somebody with benefits on your payroll, because you don't know what's going to happen next quarter, but you need to get something done. They gave you some flexibility. They can level up your team. You know, there's lots of good reasons to do it, which I think apply to pretty much every other job in a software company. It's sort of curious that question is being asked so much of design right now, and I think it's just because maybe two years ago there was such a spate of the consultancies being acquired. That there was this conversation about, oof, you know, it's the end of the era of design consultancies. But again, nobody is saying like, is Accenture going away? Like Accenture's not going away. They're around. So that's kind of my two cents is the best, is a combination that gives you a lot more flexibility and a lot more capability in both kind of tangible and intangible ways, if that makes sense. Jorge: One other argument for. Having this mix of internal and external design teams is that as an external partner, by definition, you're exposed to different problems and different spaces that give you a different set of lenses when approaching a challenge, right? Which is something that you don't get when you're an internal designer focused just on the one organization. Audrey: Yeah. I think that you have two different perspectives, right? When you're internal, you have a deep understanding and you certainly have the perspective of history of what's been tried in the past. An outside partner has the perspective of maybe having tried the same thing at a different company or a similar problem in a totally different space, or the perspective of being totally clueless and really needing to start from the beginning. You know, in a way it's a hallmark of Hugh Dubberly, this like, let's just start from scratch, pretend I don't know anything. And it's not that it needs to necessarily take a long time to ramp up, but to be able to ask the dumb questions and call out opportunities that maybe other folks aren't seeing because you know, their perspective is different, they've been there a long time, you know, that opportunity opened up slowly. It seems obvious to someone new, but it was frog boiling from the inside. And then you combine those two and I think it can be really powerful. I think perspective, by the way, is the most valuable product in the modern world. If you think about like what people pay for, people pay crazy amounts of money for art and therapy, and you know, management consultants, it's all this like magic, which is a fresh perspective, the same information, but a new lens. And I think that's what Hugh does so well. But I also… like if I ever wrote another book, which I won't, so maybe you can write it! I think that this perspective thing is a really… You know, acid trips that help people in hospice expecting to die, they don't have any new information, they just have a new perspective. I think that people will pay any amount of money for that. Jorge: You're reminding me of this quote, I think it's by Alan Kay, where he said something like, point of view is worth 80 IQ points. Audrey: Hmm. Jorge: Right? One of the previous guests in the show, Andrea Mignolo, talked about the role of design in business and design as a way of knowing. You know, not just as a way of making, but as a way of knowing. And the conversation that we were having earlier about research points to this notion that one of the benefits of initiating a design project, like there's this very obvious tangible benefits is like you get a new product or experience or service or what have you out the other end… or an improved one, right? And that's kind of the thing that you're hiring design for, but there's a lot of less tangible benefits that have to do with, “You know, we had to do all this research to get to this point. And that research generated a bunch of new models, which sparked a bunch of insights that maybe lead to the creation of a new product, product line, or a new way of engaging with customers or what have you.” Right? Audrey: Or even just a shared understanding that changes the culture from being adversarial to having a shared goal or understanding. Closing Jorge: It makes a lot of sense, and that strikes me as a really good place for us to wrap the conversation. So where can folks follow up with you? Audrey: Yeah. I would love to hear what people think and chat about this stuff more. They can find me at DesignMap.com. My email address is audrey@designmap.com and pretty much everywhere else I'm audcrane. Or, the book is on Amazon. Jorge: Well, I will link to both in the show notes. So, thank you so much. It's been fabulous catching up with you. Audrey: Yeah. It's been really nice to talk to you too Jorge. I was mentioning before we started recording how lucky I feel to be able to continue to be working and, it's really nice to have people like you to have these conversations with and move things forward, hopefully. Jorge: Feeling is mutual. Thank you so much.

#18 Josh Seiden: How to create clarity and lead strategically with outcomes thinking

ENLIVEN, with Andrew Skotzko

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 2, 2020 80:35

Follow Andrew Skotzko Twitter @askotzko Instagram @skotzkoFollow Josh SeidenTwitter @jseidenLinkedInExplore these ResourcesIn this episode, we mentioned the following resources:Josh Seiden - Twitter & websiteJosh's book: Outcomes Over OutputsSense & Respond PressRyan Jacoby - Making ProgressAlan CooperAbout FaceGoal Directed DesignEric Ries - The Lean StartupAlexander Osterwalder - Business Model CanvasJeff Gothelf - Lean UX CanvasRisks dashboard - Giff ConstableNicole RufukuThe Logic Model Framework (see page 3 for summary)Feature FactoryMelissa Perri - The Build TrapDavid Marquet - Intent Based LeadershipSteven Bungay - The Art of ActionTaproot Foundation

thinking outcomes strategically create clarity josh seiden

Outcomes Over Outputs – Josh Seiden on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast]

mind product outcomes reilly rian outputs merwe barry o product experience john cutler josh seiden

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2020 43:15

One of the things we’ve learned from doing this podcast is that it’s important to schedule in time to reflect and to revisit some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way. It’s been a recurring theme, actually – something that’s been mentioned by Barry O’Reilly, Rian van der Merwe, and John Cutler – and [...] Read more » The post Outcomes Over Outputs – Josh Seiden on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

#222 Sense and respond with Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden

UX Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 24, 2019 40:07

Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf have together written the books Lean UX and Sense and Respond. We learn how they used their own methods to develop their second book based on the feedback from their first. We also discuss how to make change happen, using recipes as a starting point (rather than letting them become... The post #222 Sense and respond with Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden appeared first on UX Podcast.

strategy design digital web seo respond sense user ux interaction jeff gothelf lean ux josh seiden ux podcast

The Jeff Gothelf Hypothesis: Driving Business Agility Requires Humility, Curiosity, and Psychological Safety

The Product Science Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 8, 2019 47:54

Jeff Gothelf is the co-author of Lean UX and Sense and Respond, as well as the co-founder of Sense and Respond Press, in collaboration with Season 1 guest Josh Seiden. In this episode of the Product Science Podcast, we talk about how making the transition to Agile needs to be organizational, the common mistakes that happen when different parts of the business are out of synch, and how to fix them. Read the show notes to learn more.

humility driving respond sense curiosity requires agile psychological safety hypothesis business agility jeff gothelf lean ux josh seiden

21. Sinking Cruise Liners and Structural Baggage

Technology Leadership Podcast Review

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2019 21:45

Zach Stone on Drunken PM, Etienne de Bruin on Programming Leadership, Josh Seiden on The Product Experience, Pooja Agarwal on Coaching For Leaders, and Cate Huston on Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting September 30, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ZACH STONE ON DRUNKEN PM The Drunken PM podcast featured Zach Stone with host Dave Prior. Dave and Zack talked about Motivational Interviewing or MI, a technique for helping a person navigate the process of making changes in their life. They first talked about what doesn’t work. Walking up to a smoker of twenty years and listing to them all the reasons why smoking is bad for them is not going to change their behavior. It is the same thing when you are trying to change the way a person does their work. Listing the reasons you think they should change makes the change all about what you want when it should be all about what they want. The person you want to change is an expert in their own life. A big part of Motivational Interviewing is finding the natural desires, reasons, and needs for why they should change and making them visible. Dave likened the difference between telling people to change and using motivational interviewing to the difference between extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. Zach shared a quote from Lao Tzu: “A leader is best when people barely know they exist. When their work is done, their aim fulfilled, the people will say, ‘We did it ourselves.’” At the core of that quote, he says, is a sentiment around empowerment and autonomy. If we want to create an environment where people feel ownership and create sustainable change, people need to feel like that change came from them and is owned by them. Change is a never-ending process; it is not an event; it is not something that happens overnight. Dave asked, if we’ve been dealing the problem of organizational change for so long, why have we not yet solved it? Zach went all the way back to Theory X and Theory Y and how we are still often stuck in Theory X even today. He pointed out that the habits of how we work become almost like addictions we can’t shake. Dave says he tries to be a Theory Y person, but finds himself falling into Theory X all the time. Zach says that this is “change fatigue”. A big part of motivational interviewing is recognizing that we have within us the “righting reflex”: the reflex to correct and inform and tell people how they should be acting. It is not something that you can really escape; you can just own it, be aware of it, and work around it as much as possible. Zach says organizations have immune systems that fight the change you try to inject into them. The reason MI is so elegant, he says, is because it maximizes the work not done. In MI, you try to pull change by igniting the natural mechanisms that are already there rather than asserting yourself on top of that system. The textbook definition of MI is that it is a collaborative conversation to strengthen a person’s own motivation for and commitment to change. It is both a set of principles and a framework of techniques. The five main tools are open-ended questions, affirmations, reflections, summarizing, and informing. Zach told the story of speaking with a CIO about their technology stack. He shared with him that the developers at that company thought that innovation was stalling and technical debt was piling up. The CIO answered that they needed to develop new features and there was no time to address technical debt. Zach tried to affirm by talking about having seen some great innovation coming from this CIO’s teams and asking how they could keep it going. What became apparent was that the CIO was not going to budge. So he asked an open-ended question: “What do you think will happen if you let your technical debt pile up?” The CIO replied, “It is probably going to slow us down and hurt our ability to recruit top talent.” So Zach used reflection. Zach said, “On one hand, you feel you need to keep moving on developing features even if it means technical debt cleanup takes a backseat. On the other hand, if you do this, it is going to hurt your ability to recruit talent and eventually will slow down feature development.” He let that sit and thanked the CIO for his time because it was clear that the CIO was not ready to make a shift in his thinking. Two and half months went by and Zach leveraged the power of the group of this CIO’s technical leads. At a gathering of these leads where the CIO was present, Zach asked what their number one obstacle was and they all said, “Time.” Hearing it from people he trusted and respected, the CIO said that they would be launching an effort to address the technical debt issue. He used “change talk”: he made a commitment to change in a public forum. The research shows that the more people engage in change talk, the more likely they are to put plans into action. The next day, emails were flying back and forth, meetings were set, mechanisms were getting put in place for the tech leads and their teams to address this issue. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/motivational-interviewing-zach-stone/id1121124593?i=1000447916792 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/drunkenpmradio/motivational-interviewing-zach-stone-august-2019 ETIENNE DE BRUIN ON PROGRAMMING LEADERSHIP The Programming Leadership podcast featured Etienne de Bruin with host Marcus Blankenship. Etienne is the CEO of 7CTOs, a company that puts Chief Technology Officers into a peer mentoring environment to help them learn everything from situational leadership to achieving personal and professional goals. When he started the 7CTOs community, Etienne thought the conversations would focus on the software development lifecycle, technical debt, and managing the CEO’s expectations, but every time the focus went to the people challenges. He attributes the success of 7CTOs to how it addresses problems that require emotional intelligence (EQ) rather than IQ. Etienne told a story about when he first started a startup twelve years ago, he thought he was a fantastic CTO: he knew his stuff and he built the product’s first iteration with his bare hands. He had a reality check when he and his team did a retreat where they attempted to brainstorm ideas. He thought he was succeeding on inclusion and making every voice count from the most junior to the most senior. He was surprised to find that very few were participating. Until that moment, he hadn’t been aware of how fearful everyone was of collaborating with him because he was so blunt in his feedback and he was only happy if the idea was his own. He realized that he wasn’t going to succeed in the next level of his company’s development if he didn’t change. He had to let go of the idea that his employees were just there to execute his ideas and to see them as independent, creative human beings. He read the book Creative Confidence and it showed him that every single person is creative and we just vary in our confidence about our creativity. Marcus said that if employees are not there just to be extensions of ourselves, what kind of employees should we be looking for. Etienne said that there are two things we want to do when we hire. First, we want the candidate to fulfill the minimum requirements of the job spec. Second, we want the candidate to be set up to succeed inside of the team. Etienne has used personality tests like DISC profiles and enneagrams to get an idea of how well the candidate can meet the second criterion. They got into a discussion about the difference between avoiding emotions and having emotions but realizing you have a choice in how you respond to them. Etienne pointed out that you can rely on other people to help you through your emotions. You can increase your EQ with the help of others. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/putting-the-emotion-into-eq-with-etienne-de-bruin/id1461916939?i=1000447505984 Website link: https://programmingleadership.podbean.com/e/putting-the-emotion-into-eq/ JOSH SEIDEN ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE The Product Experience podcast featured Josh Seiden with hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver. Lily, referring to Josh’s new book Outcomes Over Output, asked Josh how he defines an outcome. He says it is a change in human behavior that drives business results. One reason that this is a useful definition is that it is specific. When you use outcome in the broad sense, it can be heard as a synonym for result or goal. A second reason is that human behavior is observable, concrete, and action-oriented. This definition for outcome lets you ask the questions, “What are we going to do to deliver these outcomes? How can we change people’s behavior through the systems that we are building?” These questions lead to concrete answers where you can observe the results. The reason Josh says “human behavior” is because he is referring to any actor in the system. In UX design, the actor is usually assumed to be the user. But, in this case, it can be the user, the customer, an internal person (such as someone in customer support), a journalist you want writing about your product, or any person who is participating in the system that is to be built. Lily said that in her own attempts to move more towards outcomes, she has had the problem of having too high-level an outcome. Josh says that the Logic Model framework from the non-profit, social-good sector can help with this. In this framework, high-level measures like profit, cost, net promoter score, or customer retention are called impacts. It is unlikely that an individual team can move such numbers on their own. So you ask what outcomes will create the impact that you seek and you get something that is scoped down enough to be actionable on the team level. Randy asked why it is so hard for organizations to change their thinking about this and stop setting goals around milestones, dates, projects, and outputs. Josh says that you can’t get around the problem of output because making stuff is how you get to the outcome. He gave the example of Scrum. Scrum is built around the sprint. The sprint isn’t complete until you create a finished piece of software you can ship. This is important, but it doesn’t mean that what you created has the effect in the world that you want it to have. Randy asked about the problem of the increase in dependencies and complexity as companies grow. Josh says you have to think about how to increase the independence of the teams. He says you should think of your internal teams (those that are not customer-facing) as having customers. If you are an internal team, you can ask, “What does the customer-facing team that is our customer need and what is the smallest thing I can give them so that they are unblocked and can start serving their customer.” By remodeling this relationship from a dependency to a customer service model, you can string outcomes down the value chain and hopefully reduce dependencies that way. Another alternative is to give teams a shared or aligned outcome. They compared Josh’s terminology with that of Objectives & Key Results (OKR). Josh agreed with Lily that his definition of an outcome matches up with a key result. He used the John Doerr example of how Google once had an objective of solving the problem of the Internet being too slow by making browsing feel more like flipping through a magazine, which became the Google Chrome program. The key result was based on the number of users actively using Chrome. It wasn’t that they shipped it. It wasn’t the number of downloads. When you ensure a KR is not an output but a meaningful result in the world, it drives you to an outcome-centric definition. Josh talked about a section from his book called “the three magic questions.” The first question is, “What are the user and customer behaviors that drive business results?” The next question is, “How do we get people to do more of these things?” The last question is, “How do we know when we’re right?” Lily asked how you build outcomes into your roadmap. Josh told the story from his other book, Sense and Respond, about a large startup in New York whose annual planning process was to produce an outcome-based roadmap. They might say something like, “We want to increase our marketshare in Europe” or “We want to shore up our business with this customer segment.” The product teams listed all the projects they could do, the demand from the market, and the things that need fixing. The product managers would try to reconcile those two things and choose the body of work that aligned with leadership priorities. They would commit to leadership to, say, increase marketshare in Europe by some percentage, but would not sign up for outputs. Instead, they would reserve the right to swap in and out projects based on whether they were moving the needle or not on the outcomes. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/outcomes-over-outputs-josh-seiden-on-product-experience/id1447100407?i=1000445191364 Website link: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2019/07/outcomes-over-outputs-josh-seiden-on-the-product-experience/ POOJA AGARWAL ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Pooja Agarwal with host Dave Stachowiak. Dave brought up that, in her book, Pooja says that the science of learning sits dormant in academic journals rather than being easily accessible. She says that we are all learners and we are all teachers. Teaching is something we do everyday even without thinking about it. Dave asked about the three stages of learning that Pooja describes in her book. Pooja pointed out that the three stage model is a simplistic model but is a helpful framework. The first stage is encoding or getting things into our heads. The second stage is storage. The third stage, retrieval, is where we pull information out. In higher ed, she says, we often think of retrieval as showing what you know, but we learn when we retrieve. By that act of retrieving, we are helping ourselves remember something in the future. Dave gave an example from a previous episode on delegation. He said that, after delegating a task, leaders often ask, “Do you understand?” A better question would be something like, “What are the key deliverables of what I have delegated to you?” This question gets the employee to articulate it to not only assess where they are in their learning but also to reinforce their learning. Dave asked about the statement in the book to stop reviewing things and instead ask for what was discussed. Pooja said that as leaders we often start meetings with, “Here’s what we did at the last meeting, so here’s what we’re going to accomplish today.” Instead, ask people to take a minute and write down what they can remember from the previous meeting. This engages them in such a way that it helps them to better understand the content of the present meeting. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/421-help-people-learn-through-powerful-teaching-pooja/id458827716?i=1000445006344 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/learn-through-powerful-teaching-pooja-agarwal/ CATE HUSTON ON DISTRIBUTED, WITH MATT MULLENWEG The “Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg” podcast featured Cate Huston with host Matt Mullenweg. Cate leads the developer experience team at Automattic. This team is concerned with what it means to be a developer at Automattic, including the challenges of distributed, remote development, how developers can learn from each other, and how developers can get the support they need to chart their own career paths. She says a critical part of the developer experience is the connection between the hiring process and the on-boarding process. They are thinking about how to make the hiring process a good experience where the candidate can see if Automattic is the right fit for them and Automattic can see if the candidate is the right fit for the company. They want this to carry through as the new employee joins the team and becomes successful in their new role. Because the Automattic organization is so large and the developer experience team is so small, they look for pivot points to maximize their impact. She gave an example: when a team gets a new lead, that is a pivot point. They support this new lead and help them develop and iterate on their process. Cate’s advice to Automattic job candidates is to be patient because distributed companies take longer to hire and there is a lot of competition for remote jobs. A well-crafted cover letter is a must. When Cate is hiring an engineer, she is looking for two things. The first is the ability to work with the kind of complex, legacy codebase they have. The second is to be able to respond well to feedback because you are expected to grow over time in your career. She talked about self-awareness. As an example of low self-awareness, she talked about how some people need to be seen as being “nice,” regardless of whether it is true or not. The gap between the way somebody talks about themselves and their actions reveals their lack of self-awareness. She listed some things that increase self-awareness: reading a broad variety of fiction, cultivating a broad network of people, and traveling outside your comfort zone. Matt added that you can travel outside your comfort zone without leaving your city by visiting parts of your city you haven’t traveled to before. Cate also recommends shedding defensiveness and getting curious. She also recommends asking for advice. People often don’t give advice when they think you are doing a good job. When she gives feedback to people, she asks them if they felt seen when they received the feedback. Matt tries to remind himself that feedback is a gift. Cate says that if somebody cares about you enough to tell you that they think you should do better, that means they think you can do better. Cate also recommends that we stop giving advice, especially without context or understanding of what someone is trying to achieve. Instead, pause, ask questions, get context, and reflect back to someone what they are saying to you. Last, Cate says to own up and admit what is not going well. She gave an example of her team recently doubling in size. Seeing her job changing, she asked the team what the most useful thing she does for them was and what she should stop doing. Matt asked what else makes a great engineering culture. Here is Cate’s answer: Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/automattics-cate-huston-on-building-distributed-engineering/id1463243282?i=1000447512202 Website link: https://distributed.blog/2019/08/22/cate-huston-distributed-engineering/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Ep. 166 - David Bland, Co-Author of Testing Business Ideas & Founder of Precoil on Rapid Experimentation

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2019 17:44

David Bland is the Founder of Precoil and the Co-Author of Testing Business Ideas, along with Alexander Osterwalder. David talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about risk, generating evidence through experimentation, and listening to customers. David’s new book is a field guide for rapid experimentation. Through tactical examples, it describes what he’s seen with various teams and testing in the market. It also describes product and backend business model testing, in addition to 44 experiments organized from low strength of evidence to high strength of evidence. Key Points - Think about risk - I have this risk. Should we do this? Can we do this? Companies need to generate more evidence before jumping to build. Learn about desirable, viable, and feasible. - What has changed in the experimentation process? Originally landing pages were it. Now we need to think about the hypothesis we’re trying to test. Experimentation terminology and processes are being adopted by product managers. - Business Model Canvas - People stop with how to address risk and making that a repeatable process. Need to connect to outcomes. Discovery isn’t a phase. It’s continuous. Look at retail and automotive. - Need for experimentation taking hold. Need to move fast and put learning into action. Learning from customers gets you farther. - Companies need to teach experimentation. Democratizing process. Multi-year journey. - Innovator Skills and Talent: Creative problem solvers that can deal with uncertainty and take initiative. Find and give people a chance to be entrepreneurs. Exhibit behaviors that are customer-centric, data influenced, and willing to test the status quo. - Environment for innovators is crucial. For More Information Check out David’s new book Testing Business Ideas at precoil.com, Strategyzer.com, or on Amazon. This week's podcast is sponsored by RSM - Audit, Tax, & Consulting Services for the Middle Market For similar podcasts, check out: Ep. 164 – Josh Seiden, Author of Outcomes Over Outputs on Being Outcome Centric Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO Ep. 126 – Barry O’Reilly, Author of Unlearn & Lean Enterprise Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play. FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Ep. 166 - David Bland, Co-Author of Testing Business Ideas & Founder of Precoil on Rapid Experimentation

Inside Outside

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2019 17:44

Ep. 164 - Josh Seiden, Author of Outcomes Over Outputs on Being Outcome Centric

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 10, 2019 15:56

Josh Seiden is the author of Outcomes Over Outputs, Sense and Respond, and Lean UX, in addition to being a designer, strategy consultant, and coach. He has worked with companies like S&P, Fidelity, and AMEX. He also started the Sense and Respond Press, which focuses on short, actionable books about innovation, product management, and digital transformation. Josh spends much of his time consulting and training teams to work together effectively and create business outcomes. In this podcast, Josh talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about applying outcomes over outputs. When thinking about being outcome-centered in a complex, emergent system, Josh suggests defining outcome as a change in behavior that creates business value. E.g.- Twitter. The challenge is to focus all work around outputs, rather than features. The highest level of outputs is impact, including revenue, costs, and customer satisfaction. Increasing customer satisfaction isn't solved through new features. Getting the outcome level right is a challenge. Outcomes must be measurable and observable. Testing these outcome assumptions is critical, as is collaboration among teams. E.g.- HBR.org Josh Seiden and Sarah Hudson will be at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit, Oct 20-22, in Lincoln, NE. For more information For more information, see Joshuaseiden.com, on Twitter @jsiden, or check out Senseandrespondpress.com. For similar podcasts, check out: - Ep. 156 – Jeff Gothelf, Co-Author of Lean UX, Sense & Respond, and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking on Building a Culture of Innovation - Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO - Ep. 126 – Barry O’Reilly, Author of Unlearn & Lean Enterprise Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play. FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Ep. 164 - Josh Seiden, Author of Outcomes Over Outputs on Being Outcome Centric

Inside Outside

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 10, 2019 15:56

spotify culture building testing respond sense increasing escaping outcomes agile design thinking co authors centric unlearn amex hbr outputs jeff gothelf lean ux melissa perri josh seiden barry o reilly inside outside innovation founder

Outcomes Over Outputs – Josh Seiden on The Product Experience

mind product outcomes outputs product experience josh seiden rich mironov

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 24, 2019 43:15

A nice bit of serendipity this week: this week’s guest, Josh Seiden, had his new book (Outcomes Over Output) recommended in last week’s episode by guest Rich Mironov. While we didn’t plan this, it’s no surprise – Josh is a respected author, speaker, trainer, and consultant, and the book is a fantastic read. As a [...] Read more » The post Outcomes Over Outputs – Josh Seiden on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Ep. 156 - Jeff Gothelf, Co-Author of Lean UX, Sense & Respond, and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking on Building a Culture of Innovation

Inside Outside

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 16, 2019 23:00

Jeff Gothelf, Co-Author of Lean UX, Sense & Respond, and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about building a culture of innovation. Key Ideas - Shifting from outputs to outcomes. - Changing incentives. - Find the person and team with the political capital to prove out the validity and scalability. - Reward learning in a way that focuses on ideas that are likely to succeed. - Incentivize learning and being transparent. - Story telling and marketing of efforts. - Overcoming national cultural traits. - Language and ideas are universal, but hard to implement. - Failure of the Corporate Innovation Lab. Create an innovation path. For More Information For more information, check out Jeffgothelf.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 37 – Josh Seiden & Jeff Gothelf, authors of “Sense and Respond” Ep. 90 – Teresa Torres w/ Product Talk Ep. 103 – Andi Plantenberg on Entrepreneurial Capabilities in Teams Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play. FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

spotify story failure overcoming language respond sense reward escaping agile design thinking co authors incentivize culture of innovation jeff gothelf lean ux teresa torres melissa perri josh seiden

Ep. 156 - Jeff Gothelf, Co-Author of Lean UX, Sense & Respond, and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking on Building a Culture of Innovation

outcome output intercom product teams josh seiden

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 16, 2019 23:00

Jeff Gothelf, Co-Author of Sense and Respond, Lean UX, & Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about building a Culture of Innovation. Key Ideas - Shifting from outputs to outcomes. - Changing incentives. - Find the person and team with the political capital to prove out the validity and scalability. - Reward learning in a way that focuses on ideas that are likely to succeed. - Incentivize learning and being transparent. - Story telling and marketing of efforts. - Overcoming National Cultural Traits. - Language and ideas are universal, but hard to implement. - Failure of the Corporate Innovation Lab. Create an innovation path. For More Information For more information, check out Jeffgothelf.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 37 – Josh Seiden & Jeff Gothelf, authors of “Sense and Respond” Ep. 90 – Teresa Torres w/ Product Talk Ep. 103 – Andi Plantenberg on Entrepreneurial Capabilities in Teams Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play. FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Josh Seiden on why your product team should focus on outcome vs. output

Inside Intercom Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 4, 2019 31:50

Josh Seiden, author of the new book Outcomes Over Output, joins the Intercom podcast to discuss why focusing on outcomes instead of outputs has become a rallying call for product teams today.

The Josh Seiden Hypothesis: Driving Outcomes Over Output Requires Understanding Customer Behavior

The Product Science Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 11, 2019 47:28

Josh Seiden is the author of three books, most recently Outcomes Over Output: Why Customer Behavior Is the Key Metric for Business Success, with twenty-five years experience in the industry. Today on the Product Science Podcast, we find out how to simplify the development process by focusing on getting the outcomes we want. Read the show notes for this episode to learn more.

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200 Outcomes Over Output is Product Management

This is Product Management

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2019 17:59

Josh Seiden, Author of Lean UX and Outcomes Over Output, shares what people get wrong about agile and how the nature of management has changed in the digital age. Get the latest updates from the show at www.thisisproductmanagement.com.

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08. Pricing, Alignment, and Hard-wired Deadlines

Technology Leadership Podcast Review

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2019 11:44

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

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#10 Gestão à vista e análises críticas

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2019 28:35

Para além dos OKR's, como manter os times engajados e motivados para alcançar seus objetivos? Confira neste episódio! Mande a sua pergunta/dúvida por áudio ou escrito para o Whatsapp 31 996977104 ou no email osagilistas@dtidigital.com.br que responderemos no programa! Referências: The Age of Agile - Stephen Denning The Meaning Revolution - Fred Kofman Sense & Respond - Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden

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#09 Mission Command: Squads Driving Business Agility

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Play Episode Listen Later Jan 4, 2019 27:55

Você já conhece o Mission Command da dti ? A partir dele, entendermos quais são os principais objetivos e resultados chave (OKR) de um squad para gerar valor ao negócio. Confira neste podcast como funciona o nosso Mission Command! Mande a sua pergunta/dúvida por áudio ou escrito para o Whatsapp 31 996977104 ou no email osagilistas@dtidigital.com.br que responderemos no programa! Referências: The Age of Agile - Stephen Denning The Meaning Revolution - Fred Kofman Sense & Respond - Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden

#08 Entrega em ciclos curtos e feedback concreto

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 27, 2018 22:36

Como gerar valor em ciclos curtos com o mindset ágil? Quais as principais ferramentas e modelos alternativos ao tradicional? Confira neste episódio! Mande a sua pergunta/dúvida por áudio ou escrito para o Whatsapp 31 996977104 ou no email osagilistas@dtidigital.com.br que responderemos no programa! Referências: The Age of Agile - Stephen Denning The Meaning Revolution - Fred Kofman Sense & Respond - Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden

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#07 A maldição do escopo

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 18, 2018 22:15

Qual o problema em definir escopos fechados? Por que na prática escopos fechados só deixam todo o processo de desenvolvimento mais lento? Confira neste podcast! Mande a sua pergunta/dúvida por áudio ou escrito para o Whatsapp 31 996977104 ou no email osagilistas@dtidigital.com.br que responderemos no programa! Referências: The Age of Agile - Stephen Denning The Meaning Revolution - Fred Kofman Sense & Respond - Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden

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#06 O negócio e a TI: Uma relação abusiva

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 10, 2018 24:30

A relação clássica entre negócio e T.I é históricamente complicada, não é mesmo? Frustrações para todos os lados. Agora temos o ágil e escalar este mindset para o negócio é fundamental para que as estratégias das organizações se traduzam em insights operacionais na T.I! Confira neste episódio! Mande a sua pergunta/dúvida por áudio ou escrito para o Whatsapp 31 996977104 ou no email osagilistas@dtidigital.com.br que responderemos no programa! Referências: The Age of Agile - Stephen Denning The Meaning Revolution - Fred Kofman Sense & Respond - Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden

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#05 Novas ferramentas para um novo mindset

amazon respond sense agile josh seiden

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 17, 2018 29:31

Claro que as ferramentas ágeis são fundamentais na cultura ágil, mas qual a forma ideal de aplicá-las? Será que é só colocar um kanban na sala e você virou ágil? Confira neste podcast a essência da aplicação do ferramental ágil de forma eficiente! Mande a sua pergunta/dúvida por áudio ou escrito para o Whatsapp 31 996977104 ou no email osagilistas@dtidigital.com.br que responderemos no programa! Referências: The Age of Agile - Stephen Denning The Meaning Revolution - Fred Kofman Sense & Respond - Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden

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Ep68 - Sense & Respond - Guest/Josh Seiden

Scope of Success

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2018 9:57

Brian and James are at Agile camp 2018 and spoke with Josh Seiden about speaking at Agile Camp and his book Sense & Respond. They discussed the difference between the assembly of yesterday and the immersion of Agile and the future of production. Check out his book on Amazon

Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden’s “Sense & Respond”

UIE Book Corner

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 4, 2017 21:25

Traditional marketing and communications often take the form of a one-way conversation. Things are put out into the market and it generally ends there. With the emergence of social media, a two-way conversation has also emerged. It leads to the opportunity for companies to sense what is happening in the market and respond to it. Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden previously co-authored the book Lean UX and in their latest, Sense & Respond, they investigate how companies can foster that two-way conversation. In particular, convincing companies that, no matter what industry they're in, they're software companies. In this podcast, Jeff and Josh share some of the highlights from the book and their research. Our hosts, Adam Churchill and Jared Spool dig into those highlights.

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Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden’s “Sense & Respond”

UIE.fm Master Feed

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 4, 2017 21:25

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0807 | How Successful Organizations Respond to Customers with Josh Seidan

Radio Free Leader

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 7, 2017 29:20

Josh Seiden is a designer who has spent most of his career working on the design of complex software applications and integrating design into the product development process. Over the course of 25 years working in technology Josh has developed specialities that include Lean UX, interaction design, service design, and user experience design in agile software development environments. Josh is the co-author of two books, both in collaboration with his writing partner, Jeff Gothelf. Eric Ries called their most recent book, "Sense & Respond," "A crucial framework for the modern world of business.” In this interview, we talk about the role of leaders in engaging customers in ongoing dialogue that shapes new, competitive products and services.

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Podcast 029 - Scott Showalter on Design Thinking

Cross Cutting Concerns Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 19, 2017 19:58

Scott Showalter is building the right stuff with design thinking. Show Notes: Design thinking Book: Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden "Agree to Disagree" comic, where two people observe the same thing, and are both correct from their point of view. I don't know if this is the exact comic Scott was referring to, but you get the idea. Marvel, a prototyping app Book: Build Better Products by Laura Kline Book: Lean UX for Startups Meetups: Columbus, Ann Arbor, Toledo (NW Ohio) ScottShowalter.com Scott Showalter is on Twitter Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical. Theme music is "Crosscutting Concerns" by The Dirty Truckers, check out their music on Amazon or iTunes.

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Master Series - Jeff Gothelf

True North

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 31, 2017 43:44

This is the first episode in a mini-series, between season 1 and 2 of True North, called the ‘Master Series’. Loop11’s co-founder Shefik Bey talks to Jeff Gothelf. Jeff is the author of the best selling book Lean UX and the soon to be released Sense & Respond. In this fascinating chat they talk about the new book Sense & Respond and why he and Josh Seiden wrote it (4:42). The pros and cons of siloed teams (8:00), creating a culture of continual learning (9:21), the dichotomy of rewarding teams based on shipping versus encouraging learning and thoughtfulness (13:16), moving a workplace from a deliberate culture to an emergent mindset and why you’d want to do this (18:37). Involving key stakeholders in the discovery phase (23:17) and how to quickly identify and understand an organization’s level of sophistication in relation to design and testing (28:25). They then dive into the anatomy of self-guided teams (31:35), when and why to pursue generative research (35:54). Finally Jeff talks about why he decided to move out of his consulting business Neo and the challenge many agencies now face (37:43). Follow True North on Twitter or subscribe to be notified of new episodes.

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Ep. 37 - Josh Seiden & Jeff Gothelf, authors of "Sense and Respond"