Podcasts about lean ux

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Aligning Business Goals with Customer Needs   Shep Hyken interviews Jeff Gothelf, author of Who Does What By How Much?: A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs. He talks about how aligning objectives and key results with customer needs can transform business success.  This episode of Amazing Business Radio with Shep Hyken answers the following questions and more:    What is an OKR?  How do customer-centric OKRs help teams focus on the right tasks?  Why is it important for businesses to align their objectives with customer-centric goals?  How does measuring customer behavior contribute to better customer satisfaction?  How can understanding customer patterns help prevent client defection?  Top Takeaways:    OKR is an acronym meaning Objectives and Key Results. They are a strategic framework for setting clear goals and measuring outcomes. By having clear goals and knowing what results are expected, everyone in the organization moves in the right direction. When these OKRs are focused on the customer, they help companies make decisions that make their customers happy and loyal to the brand.     Objectives are qualitative goals describing the end state you want your customers to experience. For example, you want to offer the best product or be the easiest to do business with. The key results are the quantitative measures of human behavior that tell us we've achieved that state. It answers: What will your customers do differently, and by how much?     Customer satisfaction is important, but understanding customer behaviors is crucial. Often, dissatisfied customers stop using the product. They show up less often. They spend less money. They stop telling their friends about it. If you can understand these patterns of your customer's behavior, you can proactively take action before it becomes a problem.    Determine which behaviors (trying out products, asking more questions, etc.) will deliver the results that your company is looking for. Then, create an environment, a system, a service, or a store that positively amplifies those behaviors for the customer.    Providing your team with the objectives and allowing them to figure out the best way to achieve them communicates that you trust your employees to use their skills to meet customer needs.     Not all strategies will work from the start. Organizations need to develop a culture of learning. It allows teams to learn from mistakes and objectively measure the success of an idea. Then, businesses can make informed adjustments and improve with each attempt.     Plus, Jeff explains why some employees end up working on the wrong tasks  and how organizations can avoid that. Tune in!  Quote:   "Customer centricity puts the customer at the center of all our decisions. Every time we make a decision, the critical question is—What impact do we think this will have on the customer? And, is that something that we want to do?"    About:    Jeff Gothelf is a business strategy and customer-centricity expert, speaker, and author. He is the co-author of Lean UX, Sense & Respond, and Who Does What By How Much?: A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs.    Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert, New York Times bestselling author, award-winning keynote speaker, and host of Amazing Business Radio.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a textIn this episode, we explore how Lean AI intersects with the lean startup methodology, inspired by Lomit Patel's book "Lean AI." Learn how startups can leverage AI to drive growth and improve customer acquisition by aligning AI automation with lean principles.We'll break down the "intelligent machine framework," discuss real-world examples like IMVU, and consider the "build versus buy" dilemma for AI solutions. We'll also touch on the overlap between Lean Project Management, Lean UX, and AI, focusing on eliminating waste and optimizing user experiences.Tune in to discover how to use AI ethically and effectively, accelerate growth, and build smarter, leaner processes.AI Assisted Episode  Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Do You Really Need a UX Researcher on Your Product Team? There are no easy answers on this podcast as we react to a provocative LinkedIn post. On this episode, Product Manager Brian and Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om debate the merits and challenges of having dedicated UX researchers on product teams. Listen as we explore:Are UX researchers a must-have or a luxury? Can product managers develop research skills?Does short-term thinking undervalue the impact of UX research?Could UX researchers upskill product teams?Join us for a delightfully balanced discussion about product management, UX professionals, and agile teams.= = = = = = = = = = = =Watch it on YouTube= = = = = = = = = = = =Subscribe to our YouTube Channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8XUSoJPxGPI8EtuUAHOb6g?sub_confirmation=1Apple Podcasts:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3Amazon Music:https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/ee3506fc-38f2-46d1-a301-79681c55ed82/Agile-Podcast= = = = = = = = = = = =Toronto Is My Beat (Music Sample)By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

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.

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

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In this episode of Beltway Broadcast, your Metro DC Chapter of ATD hosts Jeff Gothelf. Jeff helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the co-author of Sense and Respond, Lean UX and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking. His most recent book is called Forever Employable: How to stop looking for work and let your next job find you. In this episode, Jeff discusses what Lean UX is and shares how training professionals can leverage it to focus on learner experience rather than deliverables.  If you'd like to learn more about Jeff, visit his website. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are solely those of the individual speakers and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views and opinions of the Metro DC Chapter of ATD, hosts, or sponsors. For more info about the Metro DC Chapter of ATD, visit DCATD.org.  Episode Credits: Series Announcer: Julie Waters Hosts: Christina Eanes, Stephanie Hubka, and Halyna Hodges

Send us a Text Message.“Design's not in its infancy anymore but we can still find it hard to communicate our value.”Kris WashusenIn this episode you'll hear about:Adopting a Lean-UX approach: Why you should value rapid prototyping over extensive upfront discovery and what you can do to implement quick and experimental change cycles.The stickiness of design work: Addressing the challenges in implementing and achieving longevity in design work… and how to avoid design projects going nowhere.Impact of the ‘pandemic tools': The way tools and technologies developed during the pandemic have continued to accelerate and impact design processes, enabling faster synthesis of data and more efficient collaboration among design teams.Role of stakeholder engagement: How to ensure the successful implementation of design recommendations and strategies through ongoing stakeholder engagement and consultation.Balancing creativity and methodology: Exploring the tension between structured design methodologies like the double diamond approach and the need and value in creative spontaneity and quick decision-making in design processes.Key linksGareth Rydon interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMp6qbgTtu4Dovetail AI https://dovetail.com/launch/magic/Otter AI https://otter.ai/NAB https://www.nab.com.au/FigJam https://www.figma.com/figjam/Swaggle https://swaggle.com.au/About our guestKris Washusen (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kris-washusen/) is a Strategic Designer and Design & Product Practitioner based in Melbourne, Australia. Along with his UX, CX, product and strategic design roles, Kris's career in advertising and as an entrepreneur building, running and exiting successful businesses has allowed him to develop a unique problem-solving skill set. From research, strategy and transformational change design for both the private and public sectors through to product strategy and design for tech and startups, Kris has helped some of Australia's most respected organisations navigate some choppy seas.Kris's passion lies in implementing human-centred and Lean-UX principles to navigate ambiguity, explore the behaviours and motivations of the users of products or services and create delightful, intuitive, and accessible experiences that solve complex organisational problems.About our hostOur host, Chris Hudson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-hudson-7464254/), is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching & consultancy Company Road (www.companyroad.co)Chris considers himself incredibly fortunate to have worked with some of the world's most ambitious and successful companies, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Accenture (Fjord) and Dulux, to name a small few. He continues to teach with University of Melbourne in Innovation, and Academy Xi in CX, Product Management, Design Thinking and Service Design and mentors many business leaders internationally. For weekly updates and to hear about the latest episodes, please subscribe to The Company Road Podcast at https://companyroad.co/podcast/

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.

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.

Podcast Description: Welcome back to the "Future of UX" podcast with your host, Patricia Reiners. In this episode, we're joined by the prolific Jeff Gothelf, author of the influential book "Lean UX" and many others. Jeff is not just an author but a fountain of knowledge, channeling his expertise through workshops, consultancy, newsletters, and a strong presence on LinkedIn. Today, our conversation revolves around the pivotal concept of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). As UX designers, understanding the strategic positioning through goals and key performance indicators of products is essential. OKRs define the success of a product from its inception, and in this enlightening episode, Jeff and Patricia delve deep into what makes an effective OKR statement, its advantages, and the urgent need to transform our approach to goal setting and success measurement. What You'll Learn: The fundamentals of OKRs and their significance in product success. Crafting a compelling objective statement. Discovering and articulating powerful key results. A glimpse into the anatomy of a good OKR statement. The necessity to evolve our methods of goal setting and evaluating success. Key Learnings: The Art of OKRs: Learn the intricacies of writing good objective statements and how to pinpoint impactful key results. Balancing Act: Understand how OKRs aid in harmonizing business goals with user needs without compromising on user empathy. UX Designers & OKRs: Grasp the importance of UX designers in the OKR writing process and how they can influence it for a user-centric approach. Challenges & Benefits: Jeff shares the top benefits of implementing OKRs and the hurdles one might face during its adoption.

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 

Was versteht man unter Lean UX? Wie und wie oft sollte man Kunden und User befragen, um zu verstehen, was Sie wollen und warum sie sich für ein Produkt entscheiden. Darüber reden in dieser Folge Christiaan Vink, freiberuflicher UX-Berater, und Torsten Herrmann von chain relations GmbH, Host des "Lasst die Kunden kommen" Podcast

Wie funktioniert zeitgemäße Produktgestaltung? Wie wichtig ist eine spielerische Herangehensweise für Nutzer*innen und Designer*innen? Und welche Rolle spielen Technologie und Werte, die uns inspirieren? "Die Welt ist komplex. Machen wir sie einfach." - so der Slogan von Centigrade: eine der führenden Agenturen für UX & Gamification in Deutschland, die seit ihrer Gründung vor 18 Jahren von Thomas Immich (LinkedIn) geleitet wird. Thomas ist Systemdenker, er interessiert sich für Probleme, an die er gern ganzheitlich rangeht. Im Podcast erzählt er uns, was das bedeutet und was seine vorrangigen Spielertypen Disruptor und Free Spirit damit zu tun haben. Davon gibt's noch vier weitere, die allesamt dem HEXAD-Framework in verkürzter Form entliehen sind und von Centigrade aktiv im Designprozess eingesetzt werden. Probiert den Test selbst mal; auf Englisch gibt's als Ergebnis sogar ein Spinnendiagramm. Dann geht es auch schon auf eine über 20-jährige Reise mit Schwerpunkt menschzentriertem Design, die schon vor dem Studium in der Videospielentwicklung begann und zunächst über visuell und technisch elegante User Interfaces führte. === more to come === === Weiterführende Links [unvollständig] === von Thomas zusammengestellte Linkliste: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-C6hQCleqv_nnLcQbHyY0OoRxcXQ8cjH6o3l2ZCbrCk/edit?usp=sharing === Welche Dinge erachtest Du als wichtig für eine zeitgemäße Produktentwicklung? Komm gern auf ⁠⁠⁠⁠Discord⁠⁠⁠ und tausch Dich mit der spielsinnlichen Community aus. Hast Du Fragen, Anmerkungen oder Ideen? Jegliches Feedback erreicht uns natürlich auch via E-Mail, Social Media oder Sprachnachricht. Alle Links zum Podcast gibt's unter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠linktr.ee/spielsinn === Kapitel=== (00:03:57) Systemdenken (00:10:00) Player Types (00:21:28) Lieblingsspiel (00:25:01) Die Anfänge (00:46:30) Spielebranche heute (00:55:36) Studium (01:00:00) Gründung von Centigrade (01:17:22) Einsatz von Gamification (01:28:13) Warum "Centigrade"? (01:34:07) Saarbrücken & Remote first (01:39:29) Jobrollen, Tools & Lean UX (01:58:14) Berufsbild, New Work & Impact-driven Design (02:10:43) Community-Fragen (02:17:11) Abmoderation & 'letzte Worte'

Welcome back to the Learning Culture Podcast!This week's Learning Nugget comes from a conversation with Jeff Gothelf. This is a memorable snippet that captures the importance of storytelling as an essential leadership trait.Jeff is the co-creator of the methodology for Lean UX, and he's the author of the award-winning book of the same name (among many others). His work has informed the way thousands of companies approach software and product design.Our conversation revolved around his book, Forever Employable, which chronicles Jeff's transition from employee → agency owner → independent operator. Jeff applied his storytelling skills at every step of his journey toward thought leadership and the lessons from our conversation show how we can do the same. Sit back, relax, and enjoy this Learning Nugget with Jeff Gothelf.Jeff LinkedInAndrew LinkedIn

Join us for an insightful episode of LeanCast as we delve into the dynamic world of Agile methodologies and the challenges faced by UX designers. In this episode, host Behrad Mirafshar, helps you discover a fresh perspective on Lean UX Process as he unravels a unique approach that maximizes the potential of Agile development. Explore how to harness the power of a 2-hour design sprint and overcome the hurdles faced by UX designers within the fast-paced Agile environment.Behrad shares his expert insights on effectively incorporating UX designers at all stages of Agile development, providing practical strategies to bridge the gap between tech teams and product teams. So you gain a deeper understanding of how Agile methodologies can be optimized to deliver exceptional user experiences without compromising flexibility.If you're a UX designer looking to thrive in an Agile world or a product team member seeking to enhance collaboration with your development counterparts, this episode is a must-listen. Join us on this Lean UX journey and unlock the full potential of Agile innovation with Behrad Mirafshar.Tune in now to LeanCast for an engaging conversation that will revolutionize your approach to Agile and UX design!

OKRs are a simple concept but incredibly powerful because what it does is, it starts to move an organization towards better agility, collaboration, more customer centricity, more humility…creating the kind of culture and ways of working that tend to be more successful today. - Jeff Gothelf In today's episode “OKRs and Outcomes: Tools for de-risking uncertainty” we talk with Jeff Gothelf about why are OKRs such a fundamental tool for all organizations facing uncertainty, how do you start “doing OKRs' in huge enterprise to ensure the required culture change and finally, why OKRs are such a simple but challenging tool to implement successfully.  Finally, we're talking about Jeff's upcoming book - which is an OKR employee handbook, a practical guide for everyone in an organization no matter the department they are in. Jeff Gothelf 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 as well as the self-published Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking and Forever Employable. Where to find Jeff: Website Join Jeff's new book's waiting list: https://okr-book.com/ Where to find Johannes: LinkedIn Resources mentioned on the show: Books: Teresa Torres - Continuous Discovery Habits Barry O'reilly -  Unlearn Joshua Seiden -  Outcome vs Output: Why Customer Behavior is the Key Metric for Business Success This Podcast is a product by Workpath.

Welcome to an electrifying episode of LeanCast! In this thrilling installment, your host Behrad sits down with a true legend and one of his personal heroes, Jeff Gothelf. Known for his unparalleled expertise in helping organizations build exceptional products and executives foster innovative cultures, Jeff is an extraordinary guest who will leave you inspired.Jeff Gothelf, the co-author of the critically acclaimed book "Lean UX" and the Harvard Business Review Press bestseller "Sense & Respond," joins Behrad to delve deep into the captivating world of Lean UX. But Jeff's expertise doesn't stop there. With a diverse background as a software designer turned coach, consultant, and keynote speaker, Jeff is a force to be reckoned with, bridging the gaps between business agility, digital transformation, product management, and human-centered design.In this awe-inspiring conversation, Jeff and Behrad explore a wide range of captivating topics. Prepare to be enthralled as they touch upon Jeff's heartfelt passion for playing the piano, an art form passed down from his father. They dive into the exhilarating realm of leveraging new technologies, while shedding light on the resistance companies often face when embracing innovation and experimentation.What's more valuable: AI or experience? Jeff and Behrad engage in a mind-bending discussion, dissecting the merits of each and uncovering the intricate interplay between them. Lean UX takes center stage as they explore its core principles, the transformative Lean UX mindset, and the pivotal focus on human customers that drives its success.Hold on tight as they break down the concept of the variable being the feature and unveil the captivating secrets of the impact-outcome tree. Whether you're an experienced designer or just starting your journey, this podcast episode is an absolute must-listen.LeanCast brings you an extraordinary encounter between two brilliant minds, filled with insights, revelations, and a wealth of knowledge. Get ready for an exhilarating auditory adventure that will ignite your creativity, challenge your perceptions, and leave you hungry for more.Tune in to LeanCast and join Behrad as he unlocks the secrets of Lean UX with the extraordinary Jeff Gothelf. Get ready to embark on an unforgettable journey into the heart of design excellence.Follow Jeff Gothelf on LinkedIn here.Join our Discord Community here.

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!   

Come accennato poco prima, con Lean UX si intende un approccio dinamico al product design ed alla progettazione della UX, che permette di dare vita a prodotti e servizi in modo collaborativo e rapido.

Para aqueles que ainda não estão familiarizados com o termo, canvas é uma ferramenta muito popular entre os profissionais de UX e design, mas será que realmente vale a pena investir tempo e recursos nisso? Ou, será que isso limita nossas entregas? A utilização dos quadros Canvas como ferramenta de análise e criação de novos modelos de negócio tem com o objetivo criar, capturar e entrega valor. Precisamos considerar os prós e contras de utilizar um canvas. Por um lado, ele pode ajudar a identificar problemas e oportunidades, além de nos orientar por um caminho feliz, permitindo que criemos soluções mais efetivas. Por outro lado, há o risco de se concentrar demais em um modelo teórico e perder de vista as necessidades e desejos reais dos usuários. Existem os mais diversos canvas no mercado, com focos dos mais variados. Como o de proposta de valor, empatia, business, UX, Design Thinking, Lean UX, e muitos outros. Ao final deste vídeo, esperamos que você possa refletir sobre a utilidade dos canvas e decidir se é uma ferramenta que vale a pena usar em seus projetos. E você, já utilizou em seus projetos? Texto de inspiração: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ricard… Links úteis: Modelos de Canvas – 17 modelos para adotar e praticar a inovação https://www.gp4us.com.br/modelos-de-c… Livros sobre canvas: Value Proposition Design: Como construir propostas de valor inovadoras https://amzn.to/3zx7mSK Business Model Generation: Inovação Em Modelos De Negócios https://amzn.to/3MfF6M1 Lean UX: Projetando Ótimos Produtos com Equipes Agile https://amzn.to/3ZKHVaV Strategic canvas: conduza a estratégia do seu negócio por caminhos dinâmicos e criativos de forma inovadora https://amzn.to/437pXCH Mapeamento de experiência – 2 edição https://amzn.to/40GFdEK Business model you: o modelo de negócios pessoal https://amzn.to/40WEHlY Project model Canvas: Volume 1 https://amzn.to/42Wfytg ———————————— Esse é o Bom dia UX, um programa feito ao vivo no canal do youtube do Design Team, toda quarta-feira de manhã às 7 horas. Comente! Compartilhe! Deixei seu like ou deslike! Torne-se membro se possível! Acesse nosso site * ⁠⁠http://www.designteam.com.br⁠⁠ Junte-se ao Telegram * ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3dOea2Y

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.

Bio Dave West is the Product Owner and CEO at Scrum.org. In this capacity, he engages with partners, and the community to drive Scrum.org's strategy and the overall market position of Scrum. Prior to joining Ken Schwaber and the team at Scrum.org he was Chief Product Officer at Tasktop where he was responsible for product management, engineering and architecture. As a member of the company's executive management team was also instrumental in growing Tasktop from a services business into a VC backed product business with a team of almost 100. As one of the foremost industry experts on software development and deployment, West has helped advance many modern software development processes, including the Unified process and Agile methods. He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports. He also is the co-author of two books, The Nexus Framework For Scaling Scrum and Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for IBM/Rational. After IBM/Rational, West returned to consulting and managed Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. Then he served as vice president, research director at Forrester Research, where he worked with leading IT organisations and solutions providers to define, drive and advance Agile-based methodology and tool breakthroughs in the enterprise. Email –  Dave.west@scrum.org Twitter - @davidjwest LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjustinwest   Interview Highlights Growing up with dyslexia 03:10 & 10:20 Water-Scrum-Fall 07:40 Psychological safety 15:40 Lilian the rockstar - 'who have you helped today?' 18:55 Is 'project' a taboo word? 21:53 'Humble and Kind' - not just for country music 44:30 Books ·         Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design by Dave West, Brett McLaughlin and Gary Pollice https://www.amazon.co.uk/Head-First-Object-Oriented-Analysis-Design/dp/0596008678/ ·         The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum by Dave West, Kurt Bittner and Patricia Kong https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nexus-Framework-Scaling-Scrum-Continuously/dp/0134682661 ·         ARTICLE: Why Kindness Matters by Dave West https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-kindness-matters ·         Thank You for Being Late by Thomas L Friedman https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thank-You-Being-Late-Accelerations/dp/0141985755 ·         Scrum: A Pocket Guide by Gunther Verheyen https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scrum-Pocket-Companion-Practice-Publishing/dp/9087537204 ·         The Professional Scrum Series by various authors https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=the+professional+scrum+series&crid=1WVNY1VHR0QAQ&sprefix=professional+scrum+series ·         Zombie Scrum by Christiaan Verijs, Johannes Schartau and Barry Overeem https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zombie-Scrum-Survival-Guide-Professional/dp/0136523269 ·         The Professional Agile Leader: The Leader's Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations (The Professional Scrum Series) by Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner, Laurens Bonnema, foreword by Dave West https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Agile-Leader-Growing-Organizations-dp-0137591519/dp/0137591519/ Episode Transcript Ula Ojiaku (Guest 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. It's my honour to introduce my guest for this episode. He is Dave West. Dave is the CEO of Scrum.org and prior to joining Scrum.org as CEO, he led the development of the Rational Unified Process, also known as RUP with IBM. He was also Chief Product Officer for Tasktop Technologies and Managing Director of the Americas at Ivar Jacobson Consulting. He is a widely published author of several articles and research reports, as well as the books The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum and Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. In this conversation, Dave talked about growing up in the council estates, being raised by his grandparents who were of great positive influence in his life, especially his grandmother. He also talked about navigating the challenges of being dyslexic, especially as a student in secondary school with the silver lining being that he got introduced to computers. Dave also gave his perspective on one of the ongoing “agile wars” quote unquote, on the concept of projects and whether they still have a place in agile or not. Without further ado ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Dave, I am sure you would find it very, very interesting, relevant and insightful. Thanks again for listening. Ula Ojiaku So we have on this episode of the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast, Dave West, who is the CEO of Scrum.org. Dave, it's a pleasure to have you on this show, thank you for making the time. Dave West Oh, well, thank you for inviting me. I'm glad we've finally managed to make the time to do this. It's great to talk to you. Ula Ojiaku Yes, well, the honour is mine. Let's start by talking about, you know, getting to know about the man, Dave. Can you, you know, tell us a bit about that? Dave West Yeah, I'll try not to bore your audience. So I was brought up on a council estate in a little town called Market Harborough, just outside Leicester. I lived with my grandparents, and which has definitely, my grandmother's definitely shaped who I am, I think, which is fantastic. So I got into computers, sort of a little bit by accident. I'm dyslexic and I found school, particularly secondary school, very challenging. I don't know if any of your audiences had a similar experience, but, you know, I went from a very protected environment and secondary school is a, oh my gosh, it's like an experience that could scare any human being. And so my dyslexia really was a challenge there and there was a teacher at secondary school called Phil Smith. He drove a sports car, he was sort of like that young, you know those teachers that you remember from school that are the good looking young ones. And he ran a computer lab and it had, you know, RS236, it had these really old computers, well, now we would look at them, they were brand new at the time, computers and some BBC model As and some other things. And I helped him and he gave me a lot of time in the lab and it was my sort of like escape. So I got very into computing and helped him and helped other teachers who were rubbish, I'm not going to lie, with computing. So that allowed me then, you know, I went through, managed to survive school, went to a further education college called Charles Keene where I studied, well I did a computing course, so not traditional A'levels and all of that. And then got into Huddersfield that was a poly at the time, became a University whilst I was there. And I think that that gave me a great opportunity, it was a fantastic university, it was a very practical course. My dyslexia became less of an issue because of, you know, word processing and I'd be honest and, you know, the ability for it to read back, even though it was an awful read back, it was like listening to say, you know, to like an old fashioned Stephen Hawking, you know, sort of, and then got me a job at Commercial Union, which then led to me doing a Masters, which then led me to move to London, all this sort of stuff. The adventure was great. The thing about, I guess, my journey is that it, I was driven at a certain point, I became very driven by the need to improve the way in which we delivered software development at that time, and that led me through my Masters and, you know, Object-Oriented and then to a company called Rational Software where I became the Product Manager for RUP, the Rational Unified Process. Now for the agilists listening, they're probably like, oh, boo hiss, and that's totally legit. It was in fact, that's when I first met Ken Schwaber and he told me I was an idiot, which turns out he was right. Ken Schwaber the creator (of Scrum), who I work for now. Anyways. Ula Ojiaku I mean, who wouldn't know Ken Schwaber if you're a self-respecting agilist.  Sorry, go on please. Dave West Yeah, he's an interesting character for sure. Anyway, so I was the RUP Product Manager and I realised I went to this large insurance company in the Midwest and it's a huge organisation and I met this lady and she said, I'm a use case. I said, what do you do? She said, I'm a use case specifier, and meet my friend, she's a use case realiser and I'm like, oh, no, that's not the intent. And so I realised that there was this process that I loved, and I still definitely love elements of it, but was fundamentally flawed in terms of helping actually people to work together to work on complex problems and solve them. So that, you know, and I'd written a book and I'd done some other things on the way to this point, but this point really did make me realise that I was going wrong, which was a little scary because RUP was incredibly popular at that time, and so then that led me to work with Ivar Jacobson, tried to bring in Scrum to the unified process, spent more time with Ken Schwaber who'd finally realised I may still be an idiot, but I was an idiot that was willing to listen to him. Then I ended up at Forrester Research, running the application development practice, I became a research director there, which was super interesting, because I spent a lot of time looking at organisations, and I realised a really fundamental problem that I think probably will resonate with many that are listening to this podcast, that people were doing Scrum yeah, Scrum was incredibly popular and people were doing Scrum, but they were doing it in an industrial context. It was more like Water-Scrum-Fall. And I coined that term in a research document, which got picked up by the, InfoQ and all these magazines, it became this sort of ‘thing' – Water-Scrum-Fall. You know, they were doing Scrum, but they only liked to plan once a year, and there's a huge planning sort of routine that they did. They were doing Scrum, but they rarely released because the customers really don't want it - it's incredibly hard and dangerous and things can go horribly wrong. And so they were doing Scrum, but they weren't really doing Scrum, you know. And so that was super interesting. And I got an opportunity to do a number of workshops and presentations on the, sort of like the solution to this Water-Scrum-Fall problem with Ken, I invited him and we did this very entertaining roadshow, which I'm surprised we weren't arrested during it, but we were, it was a really interesting experience. I then decided like any good practitioner, I had to do a Startup. So I went to Tasktop working with Mik Kersten and the gang at Tasktop, and the great thing about Tasktop was it was a massive fire hose of doing Scrum, trying to make payroll, learning about everything around delivering a product in a market that wasn't really there and that we had to build. And it was just fantastic working with a lot of OEMs, a lot of partners and looking at, and then we got funding. We grew to five teams. I was running product and engineering. And Ken was continually talking to me through this time, and mentoring me, coaching me, but I realised he was also interviewing me. So he then said to me, one day, Dave, I don't want to be the CEO of Scrum.org anymore. I'd like you to be, when can you start? Ken doesn't take no for an answer, and I think that's part of the success of Scrum. I think that his persistence, his tenacity, his, you know, sort of energy around this, was the reason why Scrum, part of the reason him and Jeff, you know, had different skills, but definitely both had that in common, was successful. So I then came and joined about seven years ago Scrum.org, to run Scrum.org and it's an amazing organisation Ula Ojiaku And if I may just go back a bit to what you said about your time in secondary school, you said you were dyslexic and apart from the fact that you discovered computers, you had a horrible experience. What made it horrible for you? Dave West I think it was, you know, there's no support network, there's nobody checking in on you, particularly at secondary school. At primary school, you have a teacher that you're in the same room, you've sort of got that, you're with the same kids, but you go, you know, you, you go from one lesson to another lesson, to another lesson and if you're a little bit, well for me, you know, reading and writing was incredibly difficult. I could read and write at that point. I was about nine and a half, 10 when I finally broke through, thanks to an amazing teacher that worked with my primary school. And, but I was way, way behind. I was slower. I, you know, and teachers didn't really, it was almost as though, and I'm sure education's very different now, and both my children are dyslexic and they go to a special school that's designed around this, so I know that it's different for them, but the teaching was very much delivery without inspection and adaption of the outcome, you know, just to make it a bit agile for a second. So you go through all this stuff and I wasn't able to write all the stuff down fast enough. I certainly wasn't able to process it, so because of that, it was pretty awful. I always felt that I was stupid, I was, you know, and obviously I relied on humour and I was a big lad, so I didn't have any bullying issues, but it was very, very challenging. And I found that I could be good at something with computers. And I sort of got it, I understood how to write, you know, BASIC very quickly and maybe even a little Assembly. I knew how to configure machines, it just seemed natural, it certainly helped my confidence, which, you know, maybe I'm a little too confident now, but definitely had an impact on my future life. Ula Ojiaku That's awesome, and I'm sure there are people who would be encouraged by what you've just said, so I wanted to begin there. Thanks for sharing. Now, what about, what do you do when you're not working? Dave West What do I do when I'm not working? Well, I'm a, that's a hard question. Gosh. So I have a nine year old and a six year old, and two boys, so, you know, sometimes I'm refereeing wrestling matches, you know, I'm definitely dealing with having children, I was late to life having children. I'm 52 and I have a nine year old and a six year old. I thought that, you know, a single lifestyle, a bachelor lifestyle in Boston and, you know, loving my work, writing books, you know, doing this traveling the world was going to be survive, and then I met the most amazing girl and, who persuaded me that I needed to have children, and I thought, well, I really like you, so I'd better. And it's been an incredible adventure with these children. They've taught me so much, the most important thing I think they've taught me is patience. And it's making me a better human being, and many of those traits, just to bring it back to Agile for a second, are things that we need to build better into the way that we turn up at work because you know, the project, I think it was called Aristotle, the Google big project where they looked at the successful teams, they found a number of traits, but one of those traits that was so important was psychological safety, right? And that requires you to attend every interaction with a mindfulness, not of doing things that you want to do to yourself, which is that sort of golden rule, but that platinum rule, do unto others as they want be done unto. And, and I think that is so, so important and crucial, and it's something that I aspire to, I don't always succeed every day as a human being, you know, whether it's at the checkout at the supermarket or whether it's waiting in line, particularly at the moment in an airport, and it's just, you know, something that I think in an agile team is so important because that safety is so, so required to create that environment where transparency happens, to create that environment where you can have those honest conversations about what's happening next, or what's happened previously where you're running those retrospectives, where you're trying to really plan when there is not enough knowledge to plan. You know, those sort of things require that kind of environment to be successful. So, you know, though, yes, I spend my life either working or really spending it with my children at the moment because of the age they're at, I think it's helping me, the time I'm spending with my children is helping me be a better human being and be a better Agilist.  Ula Ojiaku There's something you said, you know, about psychological safety and being kind, it just reminded me that, you know, of that, the need for also to be respectful of people, because when you are kind and you're showing people respect, they would, that brings down the barriers and makes them, you know, more inclined to be open and to participate. What do you think about that? Would you say there's a link between respect and kindness, I know we're being philosophical right now… Dave West Well actually, yes, but no, it's incredibly practical as well. I think that kindness, so I've written quite a lot about kindness, because it's a trait that we, as a community, our professional Scrum trainer community, manifests and lives. It's something that we actually interview for when you join our community, and the reason why we do that, isn't because we're a bunch of hippies that just like kumbaya, want everybody to hold hands and be nice to each other, I mean, that would be great as well and who doesn't like a good rendition of kumbaya, it's a great song, but it's because we believe that kindness, ultimately, is beneficial to both parties, particularly the person that's being kind, because it creates, not only does it create levels of karma, but it creates that transparency, it creates that opportunity to learn that you may not get, if you go in in a very confrontational way and people don't intentionally be confrontational, but it's so easy for it to happen. You know, it's so easy for you to question, because, you know, somebody says something you're like, well, I don't agree with that, and that instantly creates an environment or a connection that is, you know, confrontational, you're in this position, it spirals, blah, blah, blah. So, but you can, instead of saying, I don't agree with that say, hey, well, that's interesting, let me have a look into that, and you're inquisitive. And if you try to approach everything with that sort of like kindness model, and I don't mean always being nice. Nice is different to kind, nice is like faking, I think, sometimes, you know, it's funny, you don't have to be kind to be nice, but you have to be nice to be kind if you understand what I mean. So you can fake niceness, niceness is part of being kind. So, you know, if you approach it in the right way, where you care about people and you care about what they're bringing to the table and you care about the environment that they're in, whether it's just simple things like checking in more frequently, you know, whether it's actually making time in this very scheduled life that we live now with zoom call after zoom call, to check in with the team, or the person that you're talking to, to see how are they turning up today? How has their day been? And I think that's, you know, super, super important. The other important element of kindness that comes out is this helping others element, you know, my gran, God rest her soul, Lilian, she was a rockstar on so many levels. And she used to say to me, when I came home from school, particularly from elementary school or primary school, I think we call it in England, right? She'd say things like, not what have you done today, I mean, sometimes she said that, but she'd say, who have you helped? Who have you helped? I'd be like uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, and she said it enough that I realised it's important, you know, it's important that you spend time with others, help them in their tasks, you know, because I think you can learn so much and build those relationships, build that safety that is so, so important to really develop. We work in complex environments, right, that's the whole point of agility. Complex environments require people to collaborate, they require people to look at things in different ways. They really benefit from diversity, diversity of mind, diversity of experience, diversity of skill. And you bring that together, but you can only bring all these different parts together when you have an environment that allows for it, and traditional project management techniques, fabulous as they were for building bridges and tunnels and everything like that, didn't allow that, they don't encourage that. They encourage people to be focused, to be efficient, to be managing to that model. And I think we have to step away from that and work in a slightly different way where kindness, psychological safety, trust, respect, use the word respect. And I think it's, you know, obviously it's a Scrum value, but it's crucial to effectively allowing independent people with diverse perspectives to work together in an effective way. And to be honest society doesn't have enough of that in general. I think we've definitely moved away from respect and trust. We don't trust in our governments, we don't trust in our institutions, we don't trust in our fellow human beings and we've become very much focused on ourselves and our individual needs. And the reality is there's no such thing as a self-made person, you're only there because of the success of previous generations. As you drive to work on a car, on a road that has been built by others, that's been funded by others, you know, so this idea that you are in it alone, you know, is completely wrong, and I think sometimes we bring that to the work and it creates an environment that is not as successful. Ula Ojiaku True, true. No, thanks for that, Dave. I completely agree. Now there are people back to this project program that feel like, you know, the word project in agile is a taboo, almost a swear word. What's your perspective on this? Dave West I don't think it's a swear word, I don't think it's taboo. I think, you know, Mik's book is a fabulous book and he's a fabulous person, but he was using it to emphasise the fact that, you know, that we have become too focused on this, you know, investment paradigm, this organisation paradigm, this structural paradigm of the project and that, ultimately, the idea of a product, this idea of a cohesive set of capabilities that's packaged in some way that has a clear boundary, that has a clear set of customers, that has some clear value, is a much better way of aligning your people and your investments. And so he was emphasising that, and obviously he emphasised the idea of value streams being the mechanism that we deliver value in this construct to these people in this packaging of products, and it's a great book and I recommend everybody should read it. Ula Ojiaku I have mine here. Dave West No, that's good. Yeah. I was fortunate enough to be involved in the development of the book a little, working with Mik, providing a lot of feedback and I think it's a great book. However, the idea of a project doesn't go away and all of that work that we did, that organisations that I respect deeply like the PMI and, you know, that even, dare I say, things like Prince2, all of that work, isn't wrong. It's just, we need to look at it from a different lens. The idea that complex work is there changes certain things, the fact that requirements and understandings and appreciation of what we're doing emerges over time, that is just a truth, and that was true of projects as well. We just need to build in the mechanisms to be better able to deal with that. The fact that we would invest hundreds, if not thousands of hours planning things that ultimately fell apart when some underlying assumption changed and then we'd create a change order to deal with the chaos that that created need to be, we need to step away from those ideas. Do we still have projects? I think yes, sometimes you will have something that has a, you know, put a man on, or hopefully it's not a man, hopefully it's a woman, but a woman on Mars. I don't trust men on, I think it'd be much more successful if it was a woman, but, anyway, or person. Men get old, they don't grow up, right? Isn't that the saying, but anyway, so putting that person on Mars is a project, right? It has a definitive, you know, plan, it has an end goal that's very clearly underside. It's very likely that we're going to build a series of products to support that, you know, there is, I don't think we need to get tied up so much on the words, project and product. However, we really need to step back a little bit and look at, okay, you know, like treating people as resources, breaking up teams and reforming teams continuously, treating people as fungible or whatever that is, they're just unrealistic. It's not nothing to do with project or product, they're just silly, you just can't deal with this. The fact that teams take time to form, you know, the fact that, you know, the most successful agile teams I've ever seen are teams that have a clear line of sight to the customer, clear understanding of what they're trying to do for that customer, have guardrails, have an enabling management structure that provides support to deliver that value to that customer. As long as you think about those things and you don't get so tied up with the dance or the routine of project management that you forget that, then I'm not concerned. You know, there's this big thing about, oh, should project managers be Scrum masters? I don't know, it depends on the project manager. Sometimes project managers make very good product owners because they take real clear ownership of the outcomes and the value that's trying to be delivered. Sometimes, you know, they make great Scrum masters because they care very much about the flow of work, the team dynamics, the service to the organisation, the service to the business, and they want to act in that way. And sometimes you just want to get stuff done and work in a team, as a developer on that increment. You know, I don't know, you know, people are like, oh, because, and I think this is the fundamental problem, and you've got me onto my soapbox here and I apologise, but the thing that I see over and over again is the use of agile in an industrial, mass production oil and mass production way of thinking about the world. So what they do is that it isn't agile or project management that's at fault. It's the paradigm that's driving the use of agile or the use of project management. You can do agile in a very waterfall way, don't get me wrong or a very industrial way, I almost don't want to use the word waterfall, but this idea of, you know, maximizing efficiency. I mean, gosh, the word velocity has been as synonymous of agile forever when ultimately it's got nothing to do with agility, you know, it's a useful mechanism for a team to help them run a retrospective sometimes. But it isn't a mechanism that you use to plan, you know, the capacity of your organisation and all this sort of idea,  what they're trying to do always is use an industrial, you know, sort of mindset in an agile context, in a context that doesn't support an industrial mindset or a traditional mindset. And that drives me mad because I see agility being used to deliver work rather than value, I see agility basically being missed, sort of like, almost jimmied in with a crowbar into these massive projects and programs where you've got fixed scope, fixed budgets at the start. They don't actually know what they're trying to achieve, but you've got all these contracts in place that describe all this stuff, very detailed up front. And then they say, we're going to use agile to do it, and you're like, okay, what are we, you know, what happens if the first sprint uncovers the fact that the product goal was fundamentally flawed? Oh well, we can't change that because the contract says, well, hang on a minute, what are we in this business for? Are we actually trying to deliver value to customers and help them solve a particular problem to deliver? Or are we trying to do something else? And they're like, no, we're trying to deliver on the contract. Oh, but isn't the contract a mechanism that describes that? Maybe, but that's not why we're here. And that's when it starts getting, going wrong, I think,  that industrial mindset that I just want, tell me what to do, give me a job, let me sit down, just give me that change order and I will start work. It's just wrong. And for certain types of project, and certain types of product and certain types of problem, you know, it probably works really well if we're building the 17th bridge or we're, you know, doing those sort of things. But the reality is in the digital age, that most knowledge workers, who are the people that really benefit from agile the most, that aren't working in that way, they're working with very changeable environments, very changeable customer understanding very, you know, it's a little bit more complex. Ula Ojiaku True, true. And what you're saying reminds me of my conversation with Dave Snowden, he's known for his work on complexity theory, Cynefin, and if it's in a complex adaptive environment, you know, you need to be agile, but if it's a complicated problem or a simple problem, so complicated is really about, you know, breaking it down into a series of simple problems but it's still sequential and predictable, you could use, you know, the traditional waterfall method, because nothing is going to change, it's really putting all those pieces together to get to a known end state, and so I am of the same mindset as you, in terms of it's all about the context and understanding what exactly are you trying to achieve, what's of value to the customer and how much of it do we know and how much learning do we have to do as we get there. Dave West Exactly. I'm obviously not anywhere near as smart as somebody like a Dave Snowden who just, I think he has forgotten more things than I've ever understood, but yeah, I mean he's an amazing thought leader in this space, but the challenge and he talks a little bit about this sometimes, or I think he does, is that we don't always know what's complicated or complex or the amount of unknown. And this is, you know, this is the classic sort of entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs aren't necessarily working in complexity, they're working in unknown. But the nature of complex unknown is really tricky because you may discover that something that you thought was known is not known, and then you then have to change how you approach it. So the reason in Scrum, what we do is we deliver frequently and that, ultimately, and we deliver the most valuable things or the things that will give us the most value, thus that uncovers those misunderstandings early in the process. Ula Ojiaku Yeah, completely true. And just to build on what you said in terms of understanding or realising that your product goal was wrong, you're working on the wrong thing. Sometimes you might have to also kind of say goodbye to the project or pull the plug. It depends. Dave West Yeah. And that's incredibly hard, sorry, just to lean into that. It's very hard because you've got people that are there and you've invested time, you know, there's the sort of classic fallacy of sunk costs, all that stuff, but the reality is it's not a fallacy of psychological sort of like sunk energy. You've invested all this time and money and effort and motion to get where you're at and then you're realising it's wrong. It's incredibly hard to step away from that. And so what you do, and you see this with startups all the time is, you know, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, but you don't really pivot, what you're doing actually is trying to find a way to get all that investment that you've spent to be useful to deliver some value, you know, and whether it's repackaging or whatever, so that you can say, oh, that's okay when actually, and you can spend as much time doing that as you did the original thing, and now you are even worse, in a worse situation and it's hard. Ula Ojiaku Yes. Completely agree. So there's something you said about, you know, you gave an example of people doing, if I will use your term, Water-Scrum-Fall, in their delivery. And sometimes, you know, they go into detailed requirements, you know, specification, and this is, and they write an iron-clad contract that would, you know, kind of specify all these requirements have to be met, and whilst from the delivery perspective, in terms of the teams who actually do the work, it's they are, they get it, they want to be agile, but it's always these constraints. And whenever we, as an agile coach, you know, you go into the root of the matter. It's the typical root causes of why there is this inflexibility it's either, you know, the leadership and/or, you know, the business or their clients not wanting, you know, having that traditional expectations, any advice on how to effectively deal with this sort of blocker? Dave West I think it's very difficult, particularly when it's like outsourced or you've got, you know, that sort of it's contract-based as opposed to internal in terms of commitments. So it's not budgeted it's actually contracted. And when, when that happens it's very difficult, because you know, you've got the deal because you know how to do stuff and you've done it before, and you've got all that experience with the customer of course, so it's well, because you've done it before and you've invested all this experience, you must tell us exactly what it is that we are going to do. And the reality is the customer themselves doesn't know what they want, really. And until you actually get into the process, it's very difficult. I think one of the big things that's going to happen over the next few years, and we're starting to see some of this with things like Beyond Budgeting, the new procurement contract models that the US is, is perpetuating with 18F and the work of the central government. It would sort of stop during the previous administration, but it's now back, you know, how do you do agile contract management, what does it mean? Speaking from personal use, you know, of external companies to do work for Scrum.org, we pay for sprints. We define a clear product goal that we evaluate continuously, that's measurable. We, you know, we have a product owner from Scrum.org embedded in the Scrum team, even if the Scrum team or in the Scrum team, so of course, if the product owner, they are part of the Scrum team, but even if the Scrum team is predominantly a third party. So we do things like that to, and because you can't just fund one sprint at a time. It's very, you know, these people have got to pay mortgages and you know, they've got payroll to hit, so you have to negotiate a number of sprints that you would do it that allows them the flexibility to manage those constraints whilst being realistic, that at the end of a sprint review, you may discover so much stuff, or even during a sprint, that questions everything, and requires a fundamentally, you know, shifting of the backlog, maybe a change to the backlog, assuming that the objective and the product goal is still valid. You know, so putting those things in place, having those honest conversations and partnership conversations with the client is crucial. And the, you know, service companies that serve Scrum.org are a little bit luckier because we actually come at that from a, we know that we don't know what we want, whereas most clients, it's a lot harder to get them to say that. We know what we'd like to achieve, so the other thing that's important and I think that OKRs are maybe part of this, we have a thing called EBM, Evidence Based Management, which is a sort of like an agile version of OKRs. The OKRs and if defining the outcomes that you're trying to achieve and how you're going to measure them up front, validating them continuously, because it's possible you're wrong, but it's a much less of a scary prospect than not describing anything at all, or just having some very highfaluting goal. So getting very clear and precise in what you're trying to achieve and actually investing the time up front to work out what that means, and getting everybody on the same page around that can really help solve those problems long term, because you build to that, and that ultimately becomes the true north that everybody's working to. So when you have those moments of oh, that's not what we thought then, you know, that's okay, because you are validating against at least something, you have some level of structure in all of this. Ula Ojiaku So let's get to some other questions. What books have you, you know, read that you would say have kind of impacted the way your outlook on, or view on the subject of agile agility or anything else, what would you recommend to the audience? Dave West So the books that really changed my life around thinking about this in a different way, there was a few. The one that actually has nothing to do with agile that made me step back from the way I was looking at the world was Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman. That book really sort of like reinforced the fact that the world is incredibly complex and is, you know, he's famous for The World is Flat, you know, the sort of like global supply chain thing, which we are all very aware of and it's fundamentally having a huge impact now on prices and inflation and the like because of, you know, it's been such a mess over the last two and a half years. So that changed my outlook with respect to the world that I'm living in, which I thought was quite interesting. In terms of straight agility, you know, I'll be honest, there's Scrum – A Pocket Guide that taught me professional Scrum, that's Gunther Verheyen's book that I'd never really thought about Scrum in that way. And then I have to plug the series, The Professional Scrum Series from Addison, well, it's Pearson now, sorry. There are some great books in there, Zombie Scrum is absolutely fabulous. And actually, coming out on the 17th of June is a new book about leadership, The Professional Agile Leader: The Leader's Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations. I just read that, so I did not remember it, but it's by three people I adore, Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner and Laurens Bonnema. They're awesome, you know, had lots of leadership positions, written a great book. I wrote an inspired forward just in case anybody's checking that, you know, that confidence thing certainly came back after middle school, right. But that's a really interesting book that talks about the issue that you highlighted earlier, that leadership needs, we've spent a lot, we've spent 25 years teaching Scrum to teams. We need to spend the next, probably 60 years, teaching Scrum to leaders and trying to help, and it's not just Scrum, it's agile, hence the reason why this isn't just about Scrum, you know, whether it's Kanban, whether it's Flow, whether it's Spotify Model, whether it's whatever, but the essence of that, you know, empiricism, self-management, you know, the continuous improvement, the importance of discipline, the importance of being customer centric, the value of outcomes and measures against outcomes, the value of community and support networks, you know, all of this stuff is crucial and we need to start putting that thing, you know, whether it's business agility, whether you call it business agility, you know, all organisations, I think the pandemic proved this, need to be more agile in responding to their market, to their customers, to their employers and to the society that they contribute to. We get that. Leadership needs to change, and that's not a, you're wrong and awful, now sort of old leadership bad. No, it's just the reality is the world has changed and the more mindful leaders step back and say, oh, what do I have to do differently? Now, my entire team is remote, my, you know, my work is hard to plan, the fact that we, you know, our funding cycles have changed, our investment models have changed, you know, stepping back a little bit. So this professional, agile leader book I do recommend. Obviously I had the benefit of reading it before it became a book and it's very, very good and fun to read. Ula Ojiaku Awesome, we will put the list of books and links to them in the show notes, so thank you for that. Now, is there anything you'd like to ask you know, of the audience? Dave West Oh gosh, I don't know. I mean, my only sort of like, if it's sort of closing, if we've unfortunately come to the end of our time together and I, you know, I did waffle on, so I apologise for using far too much of it. But I guess the question I, and we talked a little bit about this, but you know, this sort of, there is a propensity in our industry, like every industry, and every moment, and every movement to become very inward looking, to become very like my way is better than every other way, you know. And obviously I'm very into Scrum and I apologise, I accept that I am. But I'm not arrogant enough to believe that it is the only way of solving complex problems. I'm also not arrogant to believe that it is sufficient. You know, I love the work of the Lean UX, Agile UX, we loved it so much we worked with Jeff and Josh to build a class together. I love the work of Daniel Vacanti and in professional Kanban and the Kanban community in general, I love, you know, I love the work of the professional coaching organisations and what they're really doing to help me be a better human being dare I say. You know, the point is, as you sit at this moment in time, you as an agile practitioner, have the opportunity to draw on many different disciplines and many different experts to really help to create that environment. That can allow agility to thrive and value to be delivered. And I think the only thing that's getting in the way of you doing that, or the only thing that was getting in the way of me doing that, and it still does sometimes is uberous arrogance and just a lack of, I don't know, not willing, not being willing to step out of my comfort zone and accept that my predefined ideas and my experience, my diversity that I bring isn't necessarily always right and to be more humble and to be more kind. I know it's a country song, you know, humble and kind, right, which I'm, you know, obviously I live in America, so I have to like country music, it's mandatory, but if you can be a little bit kinder and to do what my gran asks, right? Not what did you do today, but who did you help? What did you learn? How are you going to be better tomorrow? If we can do all of those things, then not only are our projects and teams and products better, but our lives better, and maybe society could be a little bit better. Ula Ojiaku Those are great words, Dave, thank you so much for those. One last thing, are you on social media? How can people get in touch with you? Dave West Well you could always dave.west@scrum.org if you want to ping me on this thing called email. If you are under 30, it's this thing that old people like, it's called email. If you're younger and cooler, I do not have a TikTok account, I don't totally know what it is. My son says we need it. I'm not a totally sure that we do, but it's not about clocks as well, who knew that, what was all that about? Ula Ojiaku Well, just like Apple isn't the fruit… Dave West Isn't about fruit, how annoying is that as well? Anyway, and so many misconceptions in the world, right. Anyway, but, and M&Ms aren't Smarties, I know I get it. But anyway, sorry, David J. West is my Twitter handle, you know, but, you know, whatever, LinkedIn, you can always find me on LinkedIn, just do Dave West Scrum.org and you will find me on LinkedIn. Love connecting, love talking about this stuff, maybe a little too much. You know another saying that my gran used to say, “you've got two ears and one mouth, shame you never used it like that, David”. I was like, yes, gran, I know, yeah. She also didn't by the way, just for the record anyway. Ula Ojiaku Oh gosh, your grandma Lilian sounds like she was one awesome woman. Dave West Rockstar, rockstar. Ula Ojiaku Well, thank you so much, Dave. It's been a pleasure and I thoroughly enjoyed having this conversation with you, actually more learning from you and I hope sometime you'll be back again for another conversation. Dave West I would love that. Thank you for your audience. Thank you for taking the time today. I appreciate it. Let's stay in touch and I hope that we'll see maybe in person again soon. Ula Ojiaku Yeah, that will be wonderful.

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.

Gauthier est Head of Design chez Jump. Passionné par le design depuis toujours. Après son bac, Gauthier va rapidement suivre une formation de direction artistique. Qu'il va arrêter tout aussi rapidement pour rentrer dans la vie active en tant que freelance. En parallèle, Gauthier co-fonde Oh My Node, une entreprise de confection de nœud papillon made in France. Il commence par apprendre à coudre, fait quelques ventes et lance rapidement un site internet pour vendre ses produits. Par la suite, il recrute des couturières pour faire les nœuds papillon et développe son activité, malgré son jeune âge et le refus des détaillants de vendre ses produits. Au début, l'entreprise est seule sur son marché et fonctionne bien. Mais, la concurrence arrive rapidement, l'entreprise se diversifie et les coûts augmentent, Gauthier et ses associés voient la fin de l'aventure se profiler. L'entreprise évoluant en même temps que ses études, Gauthier à la possibilité de mettre rapidement en application ce qu'il apprend. Il fait évoluer la marque. Il profite aussi des retours de ses fournisseurs pour améliorer ses compétences et sa technique, qui lui serviront par la suite. En même temps, Gauthier co-fonde une deuxième société spécialisé dans la papeterie : Les Éditions de Carnets. Il met toutes ses connaissances et son expérience dans la création de la marque et de ses produits. Mais Gauthier se disparaissent entre le freelancing et ses 2 entreprises, en plus de problèmes de rentabilité, il décide donc d'arrêter aussi cette entreprise. Gauthier avait la volonté de développer ses compétences et d'apprendre autres. En fermant ses entreprises, il décide de se concentrer à 100% sur son activité de Designer freelance et sa mission chez WeClap, un site pour obtenir des invitations à des évènements culturels et sportifs. Dans un premier temps, il travaille comme graphiste. Il fait des bannières, des publicités, etc. Puis, l'entreprise à des besoins de plus en plus récurrents pour son site internet. C'est à ce moment que Gauthier se spécialise dans le Product Design. C'est également là qu'il découvrir que pour faire un bon produit, il doit discuter avec des utilisateurs et pas seulement suivre les demandes de son responsable. Quand il se rend compte que son patron ne souhaite pas connaitre l'avis de ses utilisateurs, Gauthier quitte WeClap et rejoint Everoad. C'est l'expérience qui deviendra son tremplin professionnel. Il y découvre l'UX Design, la recherche utilisateur et la méthode Lean UX. Au cours de cette expérience, il découvre et développe le Design System de l'entreprise. Après 1 an et demi, Gauthier décide de partir car l'entreprise a du mal à lever de l'argent et que sa manager était partie depuis 8 mois. Manager qui décide de le recruter dans sa nouvelle entreprise : Payfit. Gauthier rejoint l'équipe en charge la gestion des documents, puis celle en charge des droits des utilisateurs. Les sujets sont extrêmement structurants, mais pas forcément les plus intéressants pour un designer. Surtout que la dette technique accumulée réduit les possibilités. Dans le même temps, Gauthier arrive au juste avant le premier confinement et a dû mal à s'intégrer dans l'entreprise. Tout cel a l'amènera à rapidement changer d'entreprise. Mais, pendant le confinement, Gauthier un collègue sur un side project : Both, une application de défis pour faire les tâches ménagères dans son couple. Les retours sont très bons, Gauthier à la possibilité de discuter avec beaucoup d'utilisateurs pour améliorer le produit. Mais, avec la reprise de l'activité chez Payfit, le projet est rapidement abandonné par manque de temps. Gauthier rejoint ensuite Matera, tout en travaillant en freelance pour June. Il fait cela pendant 4 mois intenses. 4 mois très enrichissants, car il travaille sur des sujets différents, dans des écosystèmes différents, pour des cibles différentes. Après 4 mois, Gauthier ne peut plus tout gérer à la fois et se concentre sur Matera. Chez Matera, il travaille sur la partie bancaire de l'entreprise, qui n'existe pas encore : le terrain de jeu est illimité. Le succès de la branche est rapide et Gauthier n'y est pas pour rien. Dans le même temps, il apprend à devenir manager. Lorsqu'il se fait contacter par Jump pour prendre le rôle de Head of Product Design, Gauthier hésite, puis décide de rejoindre l'entreprise. Rapidement, il y devient Head of Design. Ensuite, Gauthier doit faire grandir son équipe, mais surtout gérer une refonte totale de la plateforme. Il doit tout créer de zéro, réfléchir à l'UX et l'UI, prendre des décisions fortes et rapidement. Il revoit le backoffice maison de l'entreprise. Mais surtout, il a 10 mois pour tout refaire, avec uniquement de fortes intuitions et les connaissances de l'équipe support. Gauthier nous explique comment il a découpé le projet, ce qu'il a mis en place et les différents points d'étape. Il revient également sur la sortie du projet, la récupération des feedbacks utilisateurs, les futures évolutions… Enfin on parle de l'équipe design chez Jump : comment est-elle composée, quelle est son organisation, comment travaillent les designers entre eux, quels sont leurs rituels, etc. Les ressources de l'épisode Jump Oh My Node : retour d'expérience Lean UX The Miracle Morning Intercom.design The Design Crew Les autres épisodes de Design Journeys  #24 Mathilde Gauthier, User Researcher @ Payfit #32 Léa Mendes Da Silva, VP Design @ Payfit #38 Théo Kopf, Brand Designer @ Matera #40 Jordan Warmoes-Nielsen, Fondateur @ The Design Crew #43 Julien Pelletier, Co-foundateur @ The Design Crew Pour contacter Gauthier LinkedIn Pour soutenir le podcast, n'hésite pas à mettre ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ sur Apple Podcast ou Spotify pour aider les autres designers à découvrir le podcast 

Mein heutiger Gast ist Oliver Heigl. Er ist Freelance UX Designer und Researcher mit mehr als 8 Jahren Erfahrung in den Bereichen Design und Nutzerzentrierung. Sein Team und er helfen Großunternehmen wie Seven.One dabei, digitale Produkte zu entwickeln, die auf den tatsächlichen Bedürfnissen der Nutzer basieren. Mithilfe des Continuous User Testing Frameworks führen sie User Testings durch und helfen dabei, dass diese schnellstmöglich zur Gewohnheit werden. Hierfür integrieren sie Testing-Routinen in die Prozesse der Kunden möglichst pragmatisch, einfach und effizient. Darüber hinaus hat Oliver eine Leidenschaft für Lean UX, Humanity-Centered Design, Minimalismus und Metal-Musik. Ich spreche mit Oliver darüber, wie genau sein Framework für Continuous User Testing aussieht und wir gehen mit euch gemeinsam jeden Schritt im Detail durch, um laufendes User Testing wirklich zur Gewohnheit zu machen. (04:55) Was ist Continuous User Testing? (06:58) Warum Unternehmen nicht testen - aber es sollten (14:00) Der ideale Testing-Prozess (20:30) Vorteile von moderierten User Tests (23:26) Wie Testing zur Gewohnheit wird (37:29) User Testing in Unternehmen einführen Olivers Links LinkedIn Instagram Website Olivers Buchempfehlungen The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you - Rob Fitzpatrick Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value - Teresa Torres Ressourcen Contiuous User Testing Website Testing Sprint Plan Sponsor Sponsor dieser Folge ist Userbrain - ein remote User Testing Tool, mit dem ihr schnell und einfach User Testing zur Gewohnheit machen könnt. Einen Test anzulegen und zu starten geht mit Templates innerhalb von Minuten und erste Ergebnisse eurer User Tests sind innerhalb von wenigen Stunden verfügbar. Und das Beste: Die Tester müsst ihr nicht einmal selbst finden, sondern ihr bekommt Zugang zu einem Pool aus mehr als 100.0000 Testern, die ihr nach Alter, Geschlecht, Ort, Sprache und zahlreichen anderen Kriterien auswählen könnt. Loslegen ist einfach: Geht auf userbrain.com/podcast und erstellt einen kostenlosen Account. Als Hörer von UX Heroes bekommt ihr die ersten 2 Tester völlig kostenlos. Ich hoffe, ihr fandet diese Folge nützlich. Wenn ihr auch die nächsten nicht verpassen wollt - abonniert UX Heroes doch auf Spotify, Apple oder eurem Lieblingspodcaster - ihr könnt uns dort auch bis zu 5 Sterne als Bewertung dalassen. Wenn Ihr Fragen oder Feedback habt, lasst uns doch eine Sprachnachricht auf ux-heroes.com da und wir beantworten sie mit etwas Glück in einer der nächsten Folgen. Ihr findet ihr mich auf LinkedIn unter Markus Pirker oder ihr schickt mir eine Mail

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

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.

Jeff Gothelf talks about the power of Lean UX and how it's evolved over the last 10 years, how he creates compelling stories, the importance of preparation, how we all need to ‘plant our flag' for success, and the tale of the human cannonball. If you enjoy the show, please share it with someone else who might appreciate it, and if you can, leave a review. Follow me on social media for video clips of the episode, or visit the website for more information.  Website: http://pitchguy.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dannyfontaine/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@pitchguy YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@pitchguy/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyfontaine/  

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

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

Jeff Gothelf 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.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-centered design.Most recently Jeff co-founded Sense & Respond Press, a publishing house for practical business books for busy executives. His most recent book, Forever Employable, was published in June 2020.Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find YouRafael Testai, co-hostABOUT BEING AN ENGINEERThe Being an Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.usWe hope you enjoyed this episode of the Being an Engineer Podcast.Help us rank as the #1 engineering podcast on Apple and Spotify by leaving a review for us.You can find us under the category: mechanical engineering podcast on Apple Podcasts.Being an Engineer podcast is a go-to resource and podcast for engineering students on Spotify, too.Aaron Moncur and Rafael Testai love hearing from their listeners. Feel free to email us, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe on Apple Podcast and Spotify!

It's ANU day, ANU episode, and in this latest edition of The Agile Coach, Vivek Khattri welcomes Anu Jayasinghe. Anu is the Design Lead at Publicis Sapient. Formerly a UX Designer at IBM, Anu would be a great resource of UX design insights and he will be sharing big chunks of it here, in The Agile Coach.HIGHLIGHTSHow Anu get into UXFinding the first jobAnu's first experience with agileThe UI-UX differenceCurrent projects and challengesHow to start with UX designWhat sets a designer apartQUOTESAnu: “My internships and all that I realized I loved what I did. But when I saw the reality of what that's like, professionally, it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. But I realized that UX and the whole digital space were a lot more interesting to me.”Anu: “We started doing agile in two weeks, sprints, all of that. And we would, at the end of every two weeks, delivered the design, to engineering.”Anu: “The biggest thing that sets apart a designer from an engineer or business analyst or product owner, whoever is that, for a designer, the, what they care about the most is that end-user, like the human being, who is using whatever the product or services, and that's what they care about, that's the person they care about.”Get to know Anu and what he's up to:About AnuAbout Publicis SapientAnu's WebsiteConnect with Vivek and find out more about what he's up to:About VivekAbout The Agile CoachAgile Coach WebsiteIf you enjoy The Agile Coach and are interested in learning more, you can check us out at the link below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-agile-coach-llc

Einer der Hauptgründe für diesen Konflikt zwischen den Prozessen ist der Glaube, dass es sich um radikal unterschiedliche Arbeitsweisen handelt, die von verschiedenen Disziplinen entwickelt wurden.Scrum ist nur für Entwickler und Lean UX nur für Designer, richtig?Nein!Beide Ansätze vereint der Wunsch, die Kunden zu begeistern. Auch wenn beide Vorgehen das gleiche Ziel eint, kämpfen viele Scrum Teams und UX-Professionals damit, beide Welten zusammen zu bringen.Fragst du dich, obDesignaktivitäten nicht einen Sprint vor der Entwicklungsarbeit stattfinden sollen?die Definition of Done auch für die Entdeckungsarbeit gilt?es auch irgendwie ohne dedizierten Designer im Scrum Team geht?reine „Lern-Sprints” in Scrum erlaubt sind?Wenn du nach Antworten zu diesen oder ähnlichen Fragen suchst, dann melde dich zu dieser Episode von „Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer” an. Dort beantworten die Professional Scrum Trainer Boris Steiner und Simon Flossmann alle deine Fragen, wie du Scrum und UX in einem Team vereinen kannst.Interessiert? Großartig! Dann vergiss nicht dich anzumelden.

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

Melissa Perri welcomes Jeff Gothelf to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. An experienced consultant in the Agile and Lean UX space, Jeff just released the third edition of his popular book, Lean UX. Jeff talks with Melissa about how he's shifted focus to teaching about OKRs, and why he encourages the companies he consults with to adopt this goal-setting framework to measure success. He breaks down what OKRs are, why they can't be the only product-led change a company adopts, how many OKRs there should be within an organization, what a good OKR looks like at the executive level, and why OKRs make a “great gateway drug” to organizational agility.  Here are some key points you'll hear Melissa and Jeff talk about: HR leadership, especially the performance, retention, and promotion factions, is taking an interest in new ways to measure success, Jeff shares. They want to learn how to deploy this new metric across their organizations so they can improve their overall internal and external performances. [5:03] Jeff shares how he educates clients about integrating their corporate strategy with their OKRs. “These things don't exist in a vacuum and can't be manufactured out of thin air,” he says. “They have to be derived from some kind of corporate strategy, product strategy, business unit strategy.” [9:19] Objectives are the qualitative goals that we would like to achieve; they are aspirational and inspirational, and the value of doing them should be clear. [11:02] When your teams are too independent, you run the risk of hyperlocal optimization, Jeff advises. “One of the better tactics that I've seen over the years is to take a set of teams and give them the same OKR set to hit,” he adds. “With those teams, we've defined what success is.” [19:09] Jeff describes an exercise he runs with most of his executive clients. They visualize the relationship between impact metrics and leading and lagging indicators in order to identify the outcomes they're going to work toward. What this exercise ends up becoming is a top-to-bottom customer journey map. [25:44] Typically, teams get told what to build; they make a roadmap and get it approved. In Jeff's OKR conversations with clients, he removes the output part of the process. They now have to discover what to build by practicing Lean UX, product discovery, and design thinking. Many organizations either don't know how to do that, or they do and they make it difficult or impossible to execute the work. [33:09] Quarterly check-ins allow you to reflect on whether it makes sense to go towards the goals you've set for yourself. [38:06] Being a good storyteller is a key component of being a good product manager. A vast majority of product managers have to rely on bringing people together on a vision they've either built themselves or along with a team through storytelling, as they lead without authority. If you can tell a concise and compelling story that ties in the necessary information, that will be a valuable asset. [41:45] Resources Jeff Gothelf on LinkedIn | Twitter

Melissa Perri welcomes Jeff Gothelf to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. An experienced consultant in the Agile and Lean UX space, Jeff just released the third edition of his popular book, Lean UX. Jeff talks with Melissa about how he's shifted focus to teaching about OKRs, and why he encourages the companies he consults with to adopt this goal-setting framework to measure success. He breaks down what OKRs are, why they can't be the only product-led change a company adopts, how many OKRs there should be within an organization, what a good OKR looks like at the executive level, and why OKRs make a “great gateway drug” to organizational agility.  Here are some key points you'll hear Melissa and Jeff talk about: HR leadership, especially the performance, retention, and promotion factions, is taking an interest in new ways to measure success, Jeff shares. They want to learn how to deploy this new metric across their organizations so they can improve their overall internal and external performances. [5:03] Jeff shares how he educates clients about integrating their corporate strategy with their OKRs. “These things don't exist in a vacuum and can't be manufactured out of thin air,” he says. “They have to be derived from some kind of corporate strategy, product strategy, business unit strategy.” [9:19] Objectives are the qualitative goals that we would like to achieve; they are aspirational and inspirational, and the value of doing them should be clear. [11:02] When your teams are too independent, you run the risk of hyperlocal optimization, Jeff advises. “One of the better tactics that I've seen over the years is to take a set of teams and give them the same OKR set to hit,” he adds. “With those teams, we've defined what success is.” [19:09] Jeff describes an exercise he runs with most of his executive clients. They visualize the relationship between impact metrics and leading and lagging indicators in order to identify the outcomes they're going to work toward. What this exercise ends up becoming is a top-to-bottom customer journey map. [25:44] Typically, teams get told what to build; they make a roadmap and get it approved. In Jeff's OKR conversations with clients, he removes the output part of the process. They now have to discover what to build by practicing Lean UX, product discovery, and design thinking. Many organizations either don't know how to do that, or they do and they make it difficult or impossible to execute the work. [33:09] Quarterly check-ins allow you to reflect on whether it makes sense to go towards the goals you've set for yourself. [38:06] Being a good storyteller is a key component of being a good product manager. A vast majority of product managers have to rely on bringing people together on a vision they've either built themselves or along with a team through storytelling, as they lead without authority. If you can tell a concise and compelling story that ties in the necessary information, that will be a valuable asset. [41:45] Resources Jeff Gothelf on LinkedIn | Twitter

What if you could stop looking for work and let your next job find you? Jeff Gothelf is a recognized Lean thinking and design evangelist and a global Lean UX movement founder. Now, imagine you could repurpose the principles Jeff has been championing and apply them to your career? That's exactly what he has done in his time in the corporate world and the businesses he established. In his new book, Forever Employable, he demonstrates how to create your content, use it to develop your expertise, and then scale it to build a continuous stream of income, interaction, and community. You can find me, Werner Puchert, on LinkedIn and Twitter. Catch my design tool reviews on YouTube and keep up with my latest live streams at the Creative Coffee Break.

Lean UX has become the preferred approach to interaction design, tailor-made for today's agile teams.

If you are wondering, how can you rapidly test whether your new business idea has a high likelihood of success and how can you dramatically reduce the risk of its failure, then listen to this episode, as I speak to the well-known Innovation practitioner and author, David Bland, about his new book which answers just that.David is the founder of Precoil, a long-time Agile, Design Thinking, and Lean Startup practitioner. He is an innovation advisor for fortune 500 companies and the co-author of Testing Business Ideas, the book we discuss in this episode. In today's discussion, we speak about:Making sense of Agile, Design Thinking, and Lean-Startup methodologies.What should you do to reduce the risk of developing a product nobody wants without using too many resources? What the Assumption Mapping and Lean UX  2/2 framework are about?What experimentations are and designed for and the kind of experiments you should run to reduce your Feasibility, Desirability, and Viability risks?How Large Corporates can test MVPs that are less than perfect without hurting their brand.The optimal team you need to work on a new product or a new business.Links:·         David Bland Website·         Testing Business Ideas·         High Impact Tools for Teams

Episode Summary: In this episode, Raymond and I explore: If it's possible for organisations to be 100% agile, Why a human-centred approach to product design is key How one can get started with their agile journey... and much more.   Guest Bio: Raymond Chike has over 15 years diversified experience in the Financial, Retail, Utilities, Energy, Consulting and Charity sectors. Proven record as a problem solver and aggressive commitment to continuous learning. Bringing together Human, Digital and Physical Interactions while enjoy working with businesses create innovative solutions, products and services. By recognising customer needs, validating new product and service concepts, assisting teams in developing mvp, and assisting organisations in transitioning to adopting new ways of working in a holistic human-centric way.   Raymond's Social Media: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chykeray/   Design Thinking Squad Meetup https://www.meetup.com/Design-Thinking-Squad-Gloucestershire/   URLs and Resources Mentioned Books/ Articles: User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton The Startup Way by Eric Reis Lean Startup by Eric Reis Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden Impact Mapping by Gojko Adzic Raymond's LinkedIn post on relationship between Design Thinking, Lean and Agile: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/activity:6505691705440894976/   Interview Transcript  Ula: 00:26 Hey everyone! How are you doing today? Can you believe it? We're nearly at the end of Season 1 of the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast and this is our 9th episode. A massive thank you and shout out to all of you who have taken the time to listen, support, to write, to encourage… I am very, very grateful. It never ceases to amaze me that you guys are listening from all over the world; from places and countries like New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, India, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, France, South Africa, Canada, USA, Brazil, Switzerland, Norway… of course United Kingdom where we live and many other places where I've not mentioned. I do appreciate the engagement – thank you so much. Keep it coming and keep getting in touch. Now, in the course of launching the podcast, I've also had a number of you get in touch with me to say, ‘Hey, we really are interested in this ‘Agile' thing. How can we learn more about it? How do we get started?' And for some of you, you've had some sort of Agile initiatives going on in your organization and you don't know how you can make this better, make it work because it's not working as well as it should. Well, if you fall into any of these categories, today's episode is for you. I'm pleased to introduce my guest. He is nobody else other than Raymond Chike. A seasoned Agile Innovation professional with over 15 years of diversified experience in multiple sectors – Financial, Retail, Utilities, Energy, Consulting and Charity. And he is a big proponent of design thinking and basically blending agile, lean start up thinking, UX design and design thinking to provide a rounded and human-centered way of working. You just have to listen to this episode! So without further ado, my conversation with Raymond. Enjoy! Ula: 03:04 Raymond, thanks for making the time for this conversation. It's great to have you on the show. Raymond: 03:09 You're welcome. I'm excited as well Ula: 03:11 Great. Now let's kick off. We want to know who Raymond is as an individual. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, and how your life experience has led you to choosing a career as an agile professional? Raymond: 03:25 My story is one of those I'm passionate about telling people. So, I'm a native of Nigeria, back in Africa. And I think the whole journey started off as me looking at the whole world in perspective. And I thought to myself, I want to see how things get done in the Western world – United Kingdom and America and all that. That led me to journey into the UK. So, on coming here, I found my first contract was more of an IT security administrators service contract or something like that. And along the line, I started noticing that I was good at connecting the business and the technology. Little did I know that that was what business analysis was. Then, business analysis became popular, but already I'd found out I was naturally a Business Analyst. But then I thought, ‘Okay, let's go on that journey.' And while in the journey of a Business Analyst, I started realizing that things took too long to happen. So, people are building (a) project and before the project finishes, in two years, the world has moved on. And I said, what is the best way of doing things quicker. I mean, that was where agile started coming up in my mentality. Then I thought, ‘Alright, I think I've got an agile mindset as well.' So, I think I'll take a perspective from a natural point. So, professionally, that's how I found my way/ journey into the Agile world. I live in the UK, permanently now for 14 years, 15 years or so. I've got (a) family, as well. So, my primary location is around Southwest of Cheltenham, but most of my consultancy has been around London, and I travel around anyway. I think. Yeah, that's me in a nutshell, and that's my passion. And, then yeah. Ula: 05:11 That's quite an interesting story. It's funny, because we all start off one way, but the thing about us as humans is that there are things about yourself, you know, your natural inclinations or giftings, or things you're really good at, you wouldn't know until you actually get started. So, it's interesting you recognised the knack (i.e. abilities) and probably people around you also recognise the knack whilst working as an IT Security Specialist, that you also had the ability to connect business with technology. Just out of curiosity, what was your educational background? Raymond: 05:46 Yeah, I graduated with a first degree in Electrical/ Electronics Engineering. Ula: 05:50 Oh, okay. Raymond: 05:51 And… yeah, that is me really. I haven't furthered anyway in terms of educational academia. I've surrounded myself with lots of training and certifications… I've gone, I mean… I don't know if I have enough time to start to name them. But, that's my educational background anyway. Ula: 06:11 I mean, education is not necessarily having more degrees or as many degrees as a thermometer. I'm also Nigerian and I also got my first degree - funnily also in Electronic Engineering. Raymond: 06: 21 Really? Ula: 06:22 Yeah, yeah. Raymond: 06:23 What a coincidence! Ula: 06:26 From your profile, I can see that you are quite big on marrying agile thinking with lean, UX design and design thinking. I'm a big fan of that, because it's really about focusing on what value you're bringing to the customer, whether it's internal or external, and ruthlessly eliminating anything that the customer does not value and is not willing to pay for. So, what are your thoughts on marrying design thinking with lean methodologies? Raymond: 06:56 My thoughts are certain in the sense that it must be married. Looking at the world we live in now, (we're) in an adaptive world. I think the most important service to me is customer service. At the heart of every product, at the heart of everything we do, if we can't link it to customer service, then we just building what we think we like, yeah? And before you can build something for a customer, I always look at it in this perspective, you have to design that thing, you have to then build it, and you have to engage with the people to use the product. And that's the heart of Human Centered Design, or rather you can call it Customer Centric way of doing something. So, that is me thinking about how you bring together the human perspective, and link it with the digital and the physical interaction. Now, this is where you need to combine a whole lot of techniques and thinking and I always say it this way, ‘Agile is not a way of working, agile is a way of thinking than the way working.' Because your behavior modification cannot change if your mind is not transformed. So, at the center and the heart of agile, is the thinking. The same applies to design; at the center and heart of design is thinking - Design Thinking, Agile Thinking. So, call it this way: Design Thinking, Lean Thinking, and Agile Thinking. And to marry them is - Design Thinking makes you get to the heart of the customer. Like, ‘What is the problem you're about to solve? What is the pain point? Empathy. What is this? Why are we doing this thing? What is the problem? The pain point; you empathise with the customer. Now, at that point of empathy - this is where you begin to think about Lean. Where Lean thinks, ‘All right, I think I've empathised (with) this problem and I understand this thing – I feel I understand it.' Then, what's the barest minimum I can test to see it's working? This is where Lean Thinking comes in, right? So, then when you use the Lean Thinking and it works or you get good feedback (you say), ‘Okay, okay. I think we now see a way this is gonna work.'  ‘Okay, let's produce it in some sort of scale now and still get feedback and learn.' This is where you now bring in the principles on Agile, like the Scrum, and the Kanban, or the Extreme Programming, or SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework). Then you now want to say, ‘Okay, this thing is getting bigger now; we're about to blow up now', so you want to scale. You scale the product, you engage with the people, then you might… So this is the journey of a product from its inception of human-centric pain point up to the development, and this is how I marry Design Thinking, Lean Thinking and Agile Thinking. Ula: 09:41 Wow, (I've) never really heard it put this way. But it does make sense and I do agree. So, would you say that Design Thinking is the same thing as User Experience design? Raymond: 09:51 It's an interesting conversation but it's not the same. But what I usually say - Design Thinking is a big umbrella. Like, you'd say, Agile thinking. So if you… Like, what you've asked me now is like, ‘Is Agile thinking the same as Scrum Master?' It's like, ‘Oh no, Scrum Master sits under Agile.' That's the same question. Design Thinking involves a lot of skills. Ula: 10:16 Yes Raymond: 10:17 Now, it depends on the way you want to go with it. If you want to do a short design… bear in mind it's a (way of) thinking. Ula: 10:23 Yeah Raymond: 10:23 If you now want to bring it to reality, in terms of skill you might want to map it to, say, a researcher can be involved. A researcher... Now does that mean you cannot be a researcher? You can be (one) but in a professional office, maybe there's a (dedicated) researcher. Okay, UX design - alright, what makes you think you're not a UX designer? Okay, I want to develop an app. I can just sketch something on paper with a wireframe and I've got some understanding of UX concepts. Now, that's my minimum viable (product). Maybe I need a professional UX designer to a prototype for me. Okay, then you need a UX (designer) it might be - depends on the product. If my product is around…  (say,) building a bottle, I don't need a UX designer for a bottle. I might just go get a fabricator to make a bottle, you see what I mean? So regardless of the product, the principles stand. But when you talk about the product you want to do maybe a web design, then the skill set comes into play. That is why the UX design now is a skill. Yeah, that's a connection. So, it's like Agile - is Agile the same as… product owner? No, within agile umbrella, we might need a product owner, we will need a scrum master. Okay, maybe we don't need an engineer really. Okay, okay. While you're developing an agile product, what if the product is a pharmaceutical product? Do you need a developer? No, you need the scientist. So, you see the point. So, the takeaway, because when we talk about Lean agile, people just focus straight ‘Oh! (We're building a) website, app?' Ula: 11:49 Software development… Raymond: 11:50 But… it's not about websites. It's not about apps, not about it. What if it is a pharmaceutical company developing a prosthetic leg or pharmaceutical company developing a fake eyeball, what do you say then, you know? So, I try to get people away from products first, think about the human-centric way of connecting digital and physical interaction, then I think everything will fit into place. Ula: 12:15 It's interesting how you've highlighted the fact that there are general principles underpinning Agile thinking or Design thinking and the principles are separate from the products. Now the products could vary, the principles remain pretty much the same. But now depends on the context - which you can now adapt it (the principles) to the context of the product or service probably that you're providing to the end user or the customer. Am I right? Raymond: 12:44 That's right, well-articulated. Ula: 12:47 Okay, well, thanks. That's interesting. You said that there is this misconception that agile is about the things people do. Now, based on what you're saying that agile is first a mindset so and the International Consortium for Agile, or the ICAgile organization, they said on their website, it's about first being agile, before you do agile. Raymond: 13:11 That's right. Ula: 13:12 So, what would you say are the steps then, towards being agile and when would you know that you are truly agile from a ‘being' standpoint? Raymond: 13:24 Okay, I think the best way to say (it is) this way: there is nobody that's 100% agile. Ula: 13:30 Hmm! Interesting. Yeah. Raymond: 15:31 Definitely, nobody, nobody. Because why I say that is, if you are 100% agile, it's like… if you say yes, I am 100% agile, it does not marry up with the name agile itself, because agile itself means changing. So, you say you're 100% changing. So, I am 100% changing, so you're still changing. So, what agile, what I try to say about agile is (it's) about how we're learning that's Agile. So, (it) automatically tells you, you are constantly learning. So, have you learnt? No, you are constantly learning. So, the thing at the core of Agile is a mindset, your mind has to be ready. That's the height of it is your mindset knows that things must change. The principles and the values lie within and the practices follow and the tools and processes that help it. So, but you need to get at the heart of it that it… So basically, the world, is ruled by companies who learn faster. That's it. So, how are you learning faster? That's why agile comes in. So, are you… if Facebook comes tomorrow and said, ‘We are now agile; we are the best agile (practitioners)', that's wrong, because they're still going to have challenges that come up tomorrow that they'd have to think and say, ‘Guys, what's the next solution here?' Ula: 14:46 True Raymond: 14:46 This is where I feel agile is just, agile in itself is even a part of a product. As I've just explained Lean, design thinking, lean and agile… all that stuff. So, it's a complete mindset shift. But we there yet? We're not always going to be there in terms of 100%. But we are on a journey. Ula: 15:06 Yeah Raymond: 15:06 So, we're on a journey… we're not definitely going to be ‘there'. So, to answer your question, I don't think anybody's 100% agile. But I guess the thing is, to what degree of Agile are you? To what degree of learning or what degree of flexibility? What degree do you apply the principles better? I think that's the key message. And I mean, the only way to answer that is more of your outcomes, really? So, when you check into your outcomes, you know if you are really, truly agile and how responsive you are to the market and how adaptive you are. Ula: 15:41 Well put. So you said, yes, no one is 100% agile. You're constantly learning and that's probably why agile and lean - they're complimentary because lean is also about continuous improvements and focusing on improving processes to achieve certain goals. What would you say about the frameworks then? Is it possible to purely apply one framework in an organization's operating context, to the exclusion of others? Raymond: 16:13 Great question. I think you will do yourself a favor to mix them up. I always tell people this … if you study Scrum, the next thing… they (people in organisations) call me and say, ‘I'm doing Scrum', (and the person) goes on saying ‘I'm writing user stories.' And I say, ‘Okay, but I'm sorry, user story is Extreme Programming. So, you're already mixing it up, right? Then you get people who are doing Scrum. Then they go, ‘Oh, our Jira board is a Scrumban board.' So, what's that about? Ula: 16:41 It's a Kanban board… yeah… Raymond: 16:42 So, what I tell people is this: I'm not dogmatic about any (framework). If you bring any framework tomorrow and call it… ‘Jump' … whatever you want to call it. My question to you (would be), ‘Is it solving human problems? Are we inspecting and adapting faster? Is it prioritizing collaboration over ‘blah'…? Is it prioritizing responding to change over following a plan? Is it tied to the principle?' (If the answer is) ‘Yes', that's it! I don't want to know what else you call the name. I mean, I was in a conference the other day and I said to someone, ‘Look, let's be honest.' (If) she goes to Facebook now, (and) I go to Netflix (and) ask them what (agile framework/ methodology) they're following, they probably would not tell you anything. Probably tell you, ‘I don't know what's Scrum - we just inspect and adapt quickly. We just learn fast. We have a system that helps us learn fast.' That's it. No one is gonna tell you, ‘Do three weeks sprint, do four weeks sprint… do one thing or the other…' It depends on the product. Depends on the product. Some people do one-week sprint. Some companies do one-week sprint, two weeks sprint, three weeks sprint. Some pharmaceutical companies do one-week experimentation. I've seen companies do design sprint zero, then go on and do one-week sprint. The thing is, where are you learning fast? How are you learning fast? And agile is just (a means to) the end game; it's the building of the product. Remember, I said design thinking? Where is the place (for empathy in Agile)? …No agile principle talks about empathy. Nothing like that. Ula: 18:05 No Raymond: 18:06 They (some agile frameworks) just tell you, ‘Sprint planning - boom, boom, boom, go!' But, how do I know the product to build? I mean, this was what inspired me to (write) my last post where I said… I did post something on LinkedIn the other day. (That's one of) the key things that I was trying to say to the team. I read that from a book called The Startup Way by Eric Ries. This is the same guy who … Eric Ries is The Lean Startup guy. So, here is Toyota (for example). Toyota known for all the things they do around production and lean and all that stuff. But yet someone in Toyota could say he thinks there's a missing part. And that is because they are good at creating things. But they don't have a system that tells them on (how to) discover what to produce. Scrum does not help you discover what to produce, you know… Kanban does not help you discover what to produce. They just help you produce but they don't help you discover. So, this is why I say, I'm not precious about any framework, as long as that framework can help me easily inspect and adapt. That is my key (requirement)… and it's transparent. That's my own, I don't really cherish… I'm not gonna say I'm a SAFe man (or it) must be SAFe. (Nor would I say) it must be Scrum, or it must be Kanban. But then, does it mean I haven't gone on training for all of them? I have – I'm not hung up on frameworks. (I've gone on training for every one of them) because I want to know what I'm talking about. I want to learn because I'm also an aggressive learner. So, I want to know what you're talking about. But then I always ask myself the question, what is the “why” you're doing this? Why are you doing it? If it connects with (the agile) principles – yes. If it doesn't… hmmm… I'll pick and choose what I want from it and throw the rest away. As simple as that. That's my view on all frameworks, really. Ula: 19:48 Makes perfect sense, actually. Raymond: 19:51 You don't want to be hung up around frameworks really. Going into this conversation the other day, someone talked about (the) product owner (role) and I said, ‘Listen, I've done a Product Owner course for Scrum. And that is not up to 2% of what it takes to be a Product Manager.' It's not! If you think you've done a Scrum course, on product ownership, and you think you are now a product owner? I'm sorry, it's not (the case). Because the Product Management (responsibility) is a big piece - from design, to engagement, to development. So, there you have several of those sideline courses, you have to go to; to understand the market, to understand the proposition, to understand business model presentation, Lean Canvas…, then, you know what I mean? Where goes all the certifications and frameworks again? It's all about just learning. Just see it all as learning; adding that to your toolbox. You know, focus on the human-centric problem you want to solve. Ula: 20:44 I quite resonate with what you said. As in likening these frameworks, the concepts - to look at them as tools in a toolbox. You pick the one that most appropriately suits the work and the organization you are in - in my opinion. I'd like to know what you think about this. But I also think it is possible that a team, an organization you know, or even within a project, it could evolve in such a way that the tools that you're using… or the practices and the tools and processes that you're using to try to accomplish an outcome might need to change midway. So, it doesn't necessarily mean that what you start with is what you end with at the end of the project. What do you think about that? Raymond: 21:30 Yes, I mean, it is. I've worked with several big companies trying to do agile or are doing agile. I've seen it. I've got the scars on my back. I know what I'm am saying. It's very painful when you see people who want to fix it (an ill-fitting framework) into their hole. I say to them, ‘You have to be pragmatic.' Like this consultant… I don't remember his name again. But he said, ‘Agile has a way of making people drop their smart brains at home and come to work.'  If you come to work, (that) you do agile doesn't mean you're not smart - you're smart. Just know that you're smart. Look around the process, see how it's going to work well for you. If it's not working, find another way it's going to work. Remember, the principles still apply. Keep the principles at your forefront. We're talking real stuff here, yeah? So how do we make Kanban work for us? How do we make Scrum work for us? Okay, yes. Okay. How do we draw funds, investment? Because we need seed funding to do this experiment and prove to our manager it works. Okay, you want to start up something now? You're starting small? You're (i.e. Ula is, for example) not going out now opening an office and buying a podcast device of 10 grand or 20 grands? You're being lean here; trying to make sure you're experimenting here, right? Ula: 22:39 Exactly, you have to know if someone wants… Raymond: 22:41 You (Ula) are applying the same principles. You've got the mindset; you've got the mindset. That why you're doing what you're doing right now. And it's the same principle applied at a scale. Ula: 22:49 Thanks! You mentioned something that you've had scars on your back as a contractor working with teams and organizations. Is there any one you wish to share? Raymond: 22:58 I think for me, the behavior is the same. What I can say is, every company wants to be agile; that's the market drive - just get that right. Every company wants to be agile. In fact, you can almost sell anything to any company now in the name of Agile. Ula: 23:12 It's a buzzword, right? Raymond: 23:14 Yes. But then I always say this, ‘If I get in there, how can I add value to you?' So, you get in there, you stumble on arguments. Now one coach prefers SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), another Coach tell you Scrum, another coach tells you Kanban is the way. Then I always challenge them by saying… When I come in with design thinking mentality, they look at me like, ‘where does this guy come from? Who are you? We are agile.' I say, ‘yes, but how do you draw funds from the manager to tell him you're agile?' They'll say ‘Hmm! That is a Product Manager's responsibility.' I say, ‘Oh really? I thought that's still under Agile, because a  Scrum Product Owner course teaches them (i.e. the Product Managers) how to draw money? Is it a “no”? Okay'. You see, when you find that a… That's what you see in companies. I think what we need to start to understand is…  I tell people, ‘Guide yourself with mentors', experience is key as well, you know. My experience, tells me that many companies are still on the journey, and I said agile is a journey. My gauge tells me every company now knows: there's no argument we have to be agile. So, we've crossed that stage. They know that we have to be adaptive. They know that now. The challenge many companies are facing now is, ‘How?' They now know, but it's the ‘how' now. (My) advice is, based on my experience, there is no pattern. All I can say is, as long as you have these three pillars in the mindset of what you do; the design thinking, lean thinking, agile thinking… I always wrap it up by saying (you must have) almost an entrepreneurial mindset as well. Ula: 24:46 Oh yeah. Raymond: 24:47 That will help. A bit of that will very, very help (i.e. help very much). The reason why I say entrepreneurial mindset is because then you're thinking differently. You are not there sitting down in a company waiting for your salary every month and just go home. You're inspired to say, ‘What problem are we solving? What customer problem are we solving out there? How can we be fruitful?' Now you're thinking entrepreneurial. I think that drive will start to send a different message to company structures; you start inspire people to work, in fact inspire people for new products. And because people love working agile, when you put agile in any office, (for example) Kanban, people love it. Why? Because it is liberating. Ula: 25:27 It is. The transparency... Raymond: 25:28 It has that way of making… The transparency! People love it. That's the key to (the) successful companies we see these days everywhere. We don't know how they succeed. But this is the principle they've been applying years ago when it was not branded anything. Now is becoming branded, whatever we call it now. Ula: 25:44 Yeah, I mean, it's interesting… Yeah… it helps to put a name to something but it's more about not enshrining it and kind of stifling the spirit of what that thing is meant to mean (therefore) losing the value. Raymond: 26:00 Yeah, I agree with you 100%. Ula: 26:02 Now, you mentioned the book, The Startup Way and I assume that you might have read some other books. If you were to gift or recommend, say two or three more books that have greatly shaped your thinking; your agile, lean, design thinking - which ones would you recommend? Raymond: 26:21 Wow, there are key ones, I think, if you want to be different. If you want to be ‘agile- different', like I mean, set yourself apart. You need to have a hold of this set of books, you know. I would say go for The Startup Way (by Eric Ries), Lean Startup (book by Eric Ries), Lean UX, Impact Mapping by Gojko, User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton. These would get you started. Ula: 26:47 Okay Raymond: 26:48 These are books I've seen that stood the test of time when it comes to this whole ‘game' of Agile. You, kind of… They will set you apart in your Agile thinking. Someone is going to be like, ‘You just became holy again in agile.' I'm telling you. With every page you read in this book, you'll probably read them again and again and you'll be wondering, ‘Where have I been in this world?' Ula: 27:11 Kind of reminds me, there are some books that I have read yet across different disciplines - although I tend to read more of business and self-improvement books. And there are some that are out there, which I'dd read quickly and I'll make a mental note to read them again at a slower pace. However, I also have a lot queued up. Raymond: 27:31 I have so many books but I buy physical books. Ula: 27:33 Yeah Raymond: 27:34 The kind of books I buy are around technology, innovation, entrepreneur… Ula: 27:38 So, there might be other professionals out there or people who want to make a headway into the lean, agile world as consultants or contractors. Now you said you came from Nigeria to the UK, so how did you get your first agile related role? Raymond: 28:00 Yeah, I think it's more of the experience first - in the four walls of the company, that's it I mean, there are two levels I call it like I do some private coaching and training for people who want to get into like a fundamental business analyst role. Then maybe progress to an agile role. But I would say, most of these things... As I said, the first thing is the mind. I always say this, it's difficult to teach you agile, (if) you don't understand Agile, it's difficult. So, I think what I tend to do is… there is a level of experience I hope you'd have experienced in the four walls of a company, deep problems. Then you can do some training or in most cases, enlightening yourself with some of these books. Read them, be sure you understand what they're saying. I always say understand why people use Agile. Don't understand Agile. Just understand why and relate it to your real world. Bring it home. Always bring it home because… How we bring it home? I tell people, look at the things you use from day to day. When you started using WhatsApp, it's not what it is now. WhatsApp started with just a message. There was no video, there was no record, there was no that whole thing. So, there were messages then later. This is agile. They were changing things, giving people what they want, changing it again, adding this, moving the colors. Now, connect Agile to your daily world. Then when you get to the company, it just starts to make sense. Because the companies you might get into, they are also as confused as you think you are. So, I guess the most important thing is passion. Get that passion in your mind. If you are agile, it would come out of your mind(set) and the way you talk, people will now know it's agile. But if you don't have it in your mind, as a project you (need to) change your mind(set). I always teach people this. Look at your life as well. You want to look for a house or a project you want to work on or you want to buy a new car. You thought you wanted to buy a Volvo. Suddenly, as you started going (car shopping), you find out that you don't like a Volvo. You decided to change it (the desired car) into Mercedes, why? Your requirements are changing even as a human - you haven't even gone a month and you've changed three decisions already. So, that is the adaptive behavior the world is (aiming) at. The system can manage it. What technique will manage this changing requirement every day, yet give the business (its desired) business outcomes, give customer, customer satisfaction. This is… my coaching to people is always (to) connect it with your day-to-day life first - make sense (of it). Then every other thing people are talking about can be reality now. Then, you can do the training, you can do the coaching, you can do the workshops, and they all begin to join dots together. I do workshops as well but then that's more… my training and workshops are more experiential. I bring case studies into the room and by time you go out, you understand what it means. Yeah, that's the way I look at it, really. Ula: 31:04 So, are these workshops public? Raymond: 31:06 At the moment, the organisations I consult with – I run them with them. But then I do them public, but that is once in a while. My plan this year is to have some public sessions, but I haven't put them in the calendar yet. I'm still trying to work out what customers want. I'm still going through a design thinking phase around it because I feel I don't want to just produce what I like; I want to see what people really want. And see where I can do something barest minimum that can help satisfy the need. So, say I'm at that stage where I'm a bit lean about it as well. But then I'm also willing to do anything on demand. If there's a certain group of people that come together and say, ‘I want to learn this thing. We're 10 of us, we are 20.' I do things like that sometimes. I did one in Cardiff last year (2018). A group of people came together - 12 of them - said they wanted to understand Business Analysis, how it links to agile and all that stuff. So, I did a bespoke material for them and I went and delivered it for a full one day. So, things like that I can do as well. But as I said, there is no one public (course) at the moment . Ula: 32:14 Okay, fantastic. Once you have finalized your calendar for some public training or workshop events, where would be the best place for (finding) this info? Raymond: 32:25 I think professionally, the best way to get me is LinkedIn. Ula: 32:27 Okay Raymond: 32:29 So, Raymond Chike, LinkedIn, that's the best way to get me professionally. Ula: 32:34 I'll put your LinkedIn profile URL in the shownotes. Raymond: 32:38 Yes. I have a meetup group in Gloucestershire called the Design Thinking Squad.   Ula: 32:43 Okay. Do you have a URL for that? Is it on Meetup? Raymond: 32:47 It's on meetup as well as, a group called Design Thinking Squad Gloucestershire. We did a Design Thinking Crash Course which is only about  2-3 hours. If I get a demand for it, I will arrange something. Ula: 32:59 So, anyone who's interested who probably is listening to this episode that wants to get in touch with you, the best would be your LinkedIn (profile). Okay. Wow, the time does fly when you're having fun. I've enjoyed the conversation. Raymond. Thank you so, so much for making the time. Raymond: 33:17 You are welcome. Ula: 33:18 Do you have any last word for the audience, before we wrap up? Raymond: 44:45 Yeah, I've enjoyed this conversation. Thank you as well for making this happen. I know it's been busy for me to really get the time around it but finally we made it work. We have been very adaptive and true to the nature of agile. I'd say to the listeners out there, keep your dreams alive. And… there's always a way around everything. Keep in touch. And, as I always say, the future belongs to those who learn faster. Ula: 33:54 Thanks a lot Raymond. Raymond: 33:56 Thank you so much.

Today we are joined by Jeff Gothelf.  Jeff helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. Through the use of concepts like Design Thinking, Lean UX and agile software development he brings a new approach to running organisations and the departments within them, most recently focusing on Human Resources and how they can be more agile as well as support agility in the organisation.  Today, Jeff will explain to us how businesses could improve their employees performance with simple but meaningful changes and how he has successfully helped implement them.See more at Sense & Respond (senseandrespond.co) and see Jeff's latest book here: (1) Post | Feed | LinkedInHosted by Dominic Bowen, The International Risk Podcast is a weekly podcast for senior executives and board members, Chief Security Officers, Risk and Compliance Officers, and advisors in various risk-related fields.  In this podcast series we  speak with Risk and Compliance Directors from fortune 500 companies, from Chief Security Officers in war and conflict zones around the world, as well as security advisors for the United Nations, Red Cross, and large for-profit companies.  Risk management must be an integral part of all organizational processes and inform decision making.  In these interviews we speak with renowned international experts on how they have addressed uncertainty and risk assumptions, and how they have created systematic and structured processes in some of the most insecure countries in the world.Our host Dominic Bowen is a leading risk professional. A member of the Swedish Risk Management Association, Dominic has been establishing successful operations in some of the world's most challenging environments. Dominic has extensive international experience having established the highest quality operational systems and structures in Yemen, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iraq, Timor-Leste, Thailand, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Afghanistan, Philippines, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Haiti, Liberia, and Nepal.  Dominic is extremely well-versed in risk controls, resilience, governance, and compliance requirements, and has a Masters Degree from Macquarie University in Australia.Episode is LivePublished: Feb. 28, 2021 @ 9PM EditUnpublishAdd a TranscriptGet episode better indexed by search engines.Add Chapter MarkersListeners can tap through & see what's coming up.Create a Visual SoundbiteBest way to share to social media for engagement.Share Episode OnFacebookTwitterLinkedInMore Options

As an avid reader of the Harvard Business Review, Dave came across an article that influences what he has been explaining his entire career through speaking and writing: Storytelling can make or break your leadership.That is the title of Jeff Gothelf's article in which he shares five characteristics he found most effective stories to possess.In this episode, Dave shares his insight on Jeff Gothelf's article from his perspective as a leader and storytelling expert.Jeff Gothelf works as a coach and keynote speaker to help organizations build better products and executives build better cultures. You can begin to learn more by reading his award-winning book, Lean UX.

Jeff Gothelf helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the author of the book Forever Employable and co-author of the award-winning book Lean UX. 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.   We wanted to connect with Jeff as we were intrigued by his new book, Forever Employable and how it intersected with our thinking around careers. In our conversation, we talk about how he got into design, products and innovation, why he wrote Forever Employable, what are practical steps to building your own platform, how the Ikigai framework is applicable to teams, and how he sees the future of career and employment.Links from the episode: ·       Jeff's website·       Jeff's book Forever Employable·       Jeff's Linkedin profileThanks for listening!Visit our homepage at https://disrupt-your-career.comIf you like the podcast, please take a moment to rate it and leave a review in Apple Podcast

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Jeff Gothelf. Jeff is the co-writer of the award-winning book Lean UX, author of Sense & Respond and Forever Employable.In this episode;1-) Resolving the uncertainty.2-) Protecting the willingness of the team.3-) Leveraging the risks.4-) Politics inside teams.Founder's FAQ is a book for founders and you can pre-order through the website. You can also reach us through @foundersfaq on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

Jeff Gothelf is the author of Sense and Respond and LeanUX. He is a thought leader in the UX space and working on his next book Forever Employable. Find all the show notes and links at https://www.theagilewire.com

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.

This is the second half of our conversation with Jeff Gothelf, co-author of both Lean UX and Sense & Respond, in which we discuss: what it means for organizations to gather and respond to feedback in realtime, why that even matters, how employees will have to work differently to support that model, and how it […] The post 195: Sense & Respond — Part Two appeared first on The CX Cast ® by Forrester.

In this two-part series with Jeff Gothelf, co-author of both Lean UX and Sense & Respond, we discuss: what it means for organizations to gather and respond to feedback in realtime, why that even matters, how employees will have to work differently to support that model, and how it all fails if managers don't take […] The post 194: Sense & Respond — Part One appeared first on The CX Cast ® by Forrester.