16. Victims Of Our Own Inertia

Stephane Kasriel on Unlearn, Melissa Perri on Build by Drift, Will Larson on Software Engineering Daily, April Dunford on Product Love, and Claudio Perrone on Agile Atelier.

I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email [email protected].

This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting July 22, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.

STEPHANE KASRIEL ON UNLEARN

The Unlearn podcast featured Stephane Kasriel with host Barry O’Reilly. Barry asked Stephane about what unlearning he has had to do as CEO of Upwork. Stephane said that when Upwork started, they developed software in a waterfall process. Development cycles were long and it was frustrating for people. When the product failed in the field, the level of investment was high and everybody would be pointing fingers at everybody else.

When they switched to an Agile model, there was a lot of unlearning to be done. They stopped trying to specify everything up front and instead tried to build minimum viable products, get feedback from customers, and iterate quickly.

When they went looking for Agile trainers in 2012, it was hard to find anyone willing and able to train Upwork’s remote teams. Many trainers at the time told them that being Agile meant being colocated. Today, there are many companies doing distributed Agile development and some best practices have been built up and shared.

I liked what Stephane had to say about company values. He said that what you don’t want as a value is one in which you are a good person if you have it and you are a bad person if you don’t. You want instead to have values that say, “This company is not for everybody. If you don’t believe in these values, there are plenty of companies that more closely match your values and you should go there. But if you want to be here and you want to be successful, you should be excited about this company’s values.”

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ceo-school-and-the-future-of-work-with-stephane-kasriel/id1460270044?i=1000443495925

MELISSA PERRI ON BUILD BY DRIFT

The Build by Drift podcast featured Melissa Perri with host Maggie Crowley. Maggie started out by asking Melissa how she defined the build trap she references in her book Escaping The Build Trap (https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Build-Trap-Effective-Management/dp/149197379X/). Melissa says that the build trap is a situation an organization finds itself in when it gets too concerned with how many features it is shipping and not concerned enough with the value for the customer and the business that those features are producing. She says that these businesses fail to retrospect on the impact that the features they shipped had on customers and the business.

Maggie asked how companies get into the build trap in the first place. Startups, Melissa says, don’t typically have this problem, but as they scale and get more money, the distance to customers increases, they talk to customers less, and have more runway. They tend to go into an execution mode where they just keep asking themselves, “What’s the next thing we can build?” and forget to go back to their customers and make sure that what they build for them is producing value for them.

Maggie described the challenges Drift faces in having teams that locally optimize for particular features and Melissa says this comes back to how the company thinks about strategy. Small companies don’t need a strategic framework but, as you scale, you want all the new teams you are creating to move in the same direction and a strategic framework can help with this.

Maggie asked what Melissa prescribes when she consults with a company that is stuck in the build trap. Melissa instead gave an answer on how she assesses a company before making a prescription. She first looks for how the company sets strategy and how it deploys it. Second, she looks to see if the company has the right people in the right roles. She also looks at whether the company has the right processes to learn from customers and incorporate feedback. Next, she looks at product operations, such as a cadence for revisiting decisions and the right data infrastructure to support decisions. Last, she looks at culture and how people are incentivized.

Maggie asked what Melissa would change first if the company had problems in all of those areas. Melissa says that she starts by making sure the company has good product leaders and product managers who can learn from those leaders. Many companies had product leaders who didn’t start in product management themselves and can’t train or help the product managers. As Maggie points out in this podcast, this echoes what Marty Cagan said when she had him as a guest in an earlier episode. I referenced that Build by Drift episode in the 14th episode of this podcast, named Safety Is Not A Priority.

Melissa says she spends a lot of time translating what the teams are working on into something that executives can get behind because executives don’t care about the list of features that the teams are shipping; they care about what those features are going to do. Melissa says that storytelling in these situations is about relating your story to the goals people care about.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/whats-the-build-trap-what-does-it-mean-for-product-managers/id1445050691?i=1000443704053

Website link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/fbfcff04

WILL LARSON ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY

The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured Will Larson with host Jeff Meyerson. Jeff started by asking whether Will thinks Google, where they once had a very flat management hierarchy, could work with no managers today. Will said that today’s hyper-scaling companies are so fast-growing that you need people to help manage that growth while dealing with tools and systems that are constantly becoming out of date.

Jeff asked about the psychological ramifications of working in an environment of rapid growth. Will said that the best part of rapid growth is every week you raise your head and look around and see some really smart, talented person who is sitting next to you and wasn’t there the week before and can help. During change, he says, you have to stay open. Don’t try to control the change but you can help to facilitate it. You should be aware of your needs and take action to ensure those needs are being met so you can be the person you want to be for longer, rather than peaking in your first months in a role.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/elegant-puzzle-with-will-larson/id1019576853?i=1000441481446

Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/06/14/elegant-puzzle-with-will-larson/

APRIL DUNFORD ON PRODUCT LOVE

The Product Love podcast featured April Dunford with host Eric Boduch. April talked about product positioning. She says that many treat the product positioning exercise as a Mad Libs-style template to be filled in. The actual thinking of how to position your product is often ignored.

She says that the first thing you have to do is get a handle on what the real competitive alternatives to your product are in the minds of your customers. For many startups, their real competitor is Excel, or hiring an intern, or doing it manually. Next, she says, is to look at what you have feature-wise that the competitive alternatives do not. This is usually a giant list of things. As you go down this list, you ask yourself what value for customers each feature enables. She says that an interesting thing happens at this point: the value tends to theme out. There are usually two or three big buckets that three quarters of your features fall into. Those buckets get you to your differentiated value. That, she says, is your secret sauce.

She uses the analogy of building a fishing net specifically for tuna. You have a choice. You can travel to the part of the ocean where you will find tuna and see if your net works or you can go to the part of the ocean where there are all kinds of fish, throw the net in, and see what you pull up. People at startups often think that a certain segment of the market is going to love their product, but they might be surprised to learn that there is a segment that they didn’t even think of that is actually dying for their product. You don’t want to get the positioning so tight that you exclude those people. You want to keep it loose, cast the net wide, and see what happens.

April says she doesn’t believe in product-market fit. She says that nobody has given her a good answer to the question, “How do you know you got product-market fit?” You may have a product that people like, but if you don’t know why, you don’t know if it’s at risk of going away or tapping out its market. She asks, “If I can’t measure when I have product-market fit, why am I even trying to get product-market fit?”

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/april-dunford-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product/id1343610309?i=1000441988263

Website link: https://soundcloud.com/productcraft/april-dunford-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product-positioning

CLAUDIO PERRONE ON AGILE ATELIER

The Agile Atelier podcast featured Claudio Perrone with host Rahul Bhattacharya. Claudio talked about his Popcorn Flow model. He says that Popcorn Flow is based on a pragmatic anti-fragile philosophy and starts from the idea that inertia is our enemy and provides a set of principles and steps to fight inertia in organizations. I saw Claudio give a presentation on Popcorn Flow at the Agile Testing Days 2017 conference, so I was excited to find him being interviewed on a podcast.

Popcorn Flow applies ideas from The Lean Startup to organizational change. As an entrepreneur, Claudio realized that in entrepreneurship you are dealing with an environment of extreme uncertainty and, as an Agile coach, he saw the same kind of environment of uncertainty in how people react to change. Lean Startup deals with environments of extreme uncertainty by running frequent experiments. Popcorn Flow applies the same approach of frequent experimentation to organizational change.

Popcorn Flow is most known for its decision cycle of seven steps from which the POPCORN acronym is derived:

• Problems & Observations
• Options
• Possible experiments
• Committed
• Ongoing
• Review
• Next

These steps are visualized like a Scrum board or Kanban board. Claudio gave an example of running through the seven steps for the problem of poor quality code:

• Problem: poor quality code
• Options: pair programming, test-driven development
• Possible experiments: pair program for three days and see if the code is better and see if we want to continue with the practice
• Committed: put a review date on the calendar for evaluating the results of the experiment
• Ongoing: Track the experiment as it proceeds
• Review: The experiment is not finished until you review it. Compare the reality against the expectation and discuss what you learned and what are you going to do next.
• Next: The review may indicate that you do not know enough yet, so you may choose to persist, launch a new experiment based on what you learned, or revisit the problem.

I liked what Claudio had to say about Agile: “I felt it was about being humble. If we knew the perfect way of developing software, we would use the perfect way. It is because we don’t know that we start with what we have and we continuously inspect and adapt.”

Claudio also talked about some of the principles of Popcorn Flow:

1. If change is hard, make it continuous: borrowing ideas from continuous integration and delivery, replace big change programs with small incremental change and do it all the time.
2. Small bets, big payoff (the venture capitalist principle): when you run a lot of experiments, it doesn’t matter that you failed. What matters is how much does it cost to fail and how much do you gain when you win.
3. It is not ‘fail fast - fail often’, it is ‘learn fast - learn often’: without feedback, your experiments are not small bets and you are not experimenting; you are committing to what should instead be an option.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-9-experimentation-popcorn-flow-claudio-perrone/id1459098259?i=1000443480071

Website link: https://rahul-bhattacharya.com/2019/07/02/episode-9-experimentation-and-popcorn-flow-with-claudio-perrone/

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Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus