07. Incremental Bumps and Swiss Army Knife Approaches

Mary and Tom Poppendieck on The Modern Agile Show, Daniel Mezick on Agile Uprising, Jennifer Tu, Zee Spencer, Thayer Prime, and Matt Patterson on Tech Done Right, James Colgan on This Is Product Management, and Matt Kaplan on Build by Drift.

I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email [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 March 18, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.

MARY AND TOP POPPENDIECK ON THE MODERN AGILE SHOW

The Modern Agile Show podcast featured Mary and Tom Poppendieck with host Joshua Kerievsky. Recorded at the ScanAgile 2018 conference in Helsinki, Mary and Tom talked about their keynote on proxies and permissions. Inspired by Bret Victor’s statement that creators need an immediate connection to what they create, Tom and Mary presented on how the most effective teams are autonomous, asynchronous teams that are free of the proxies and permissions that separate creators from their creations. 

This led to a discussion of lean thinking and Mary pointed out that the interesting thing about lean is that fast and safe go together. She gave the example of a construction site where nothing slows things down more than the occurrence of an accident.

Mary talked about how Jeff Bezos is a good early example of someone who understood that if you want to get really, really big, you need to have autonomous agents acting independently and thinking for themselves.

iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/interview-with-mary-and-tom-poppendieck/id1326918248?i=1000407584120&mt=2

Website link: https://github.com/modernagile/podcast/blob/master/ModernAgileShow_26_Interview_with_Mary_and_Tom_Poppendieck.mp3

DANIEL MEZICK ON AGILE UPRISING

The Agile Uprising podcast featured Daniel Mezick with hosts Jay Hrcsko and Brad Stokes. Daniel told the story of how the OpenSpace Agility movement was born from ideas he brought to a Scrum Gathering in Paris in 2013 under the name Open Agile Adoption. 

He described Open Space as an invitational, all-hands meeting format in which there is an important issue, no one person has the answer, and there is an urgency to reach a decision. The Open Space format then creates the conditions for high performance through self-organization.

Brad brought up that he imagines that OpenSpace Agility can be terrifying to some leaders. Daniel noted that the fear is due to the fact that we have failed the executive leadership of the largest organizations. In the name of “meeting them where they’re at,” we’ve traded away our principles and values and haven’t taught them anything in exchange.

Daniel says, “Self-management scales. Not the framework.” This echoes Mary Poppendieck’s comments from the Modern Agile Show on how self-managing, autonomous, asynchronous agents are the only way to scale.

Using Scrum as an example, Daniel said that, for the Product Owner to be successful, everyone in the organization must respect his or her decisions. If you do that, he says, you will immediately get culture change because you’ve refactored the authority distribution schema.

iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/openspace-agility-with-daniel-mezick/id1163230424?i=1000430511928&mt=2

Website link: https://agileuprising.libsyn.com/podcast/openspace-agility-with-daniel-mezick

JENNIFER TU, ZEE SPENCER, THAYER PRIME, AND MATT PATTERSON ON TECH DONE RIGHT FROM TABLE XI

The Tech Done Right podcast featured Jennifer Tu, Zee Spencer, Thayer Prime, and Matt Patterson with host Noel Rappin.

Noel started by asking the guests what they thought the biggest mistake people make when trying to hire developers is. Thayer said, “One of the biggest mistakes anybody makes in hiring is hiring people they like and that they want to work with because they’re nice as opposed to hiring against a spec of what the worker is supposed to be doing.” This comment matches my own experience because this practice was rampant on previous teams of mine.

Jennifer asked Matt how his company attracts candidates and he described using their current employee’s networks. Thayer called this the number one diversity mistake that all companies make. 

Noel asked about what to do at the end of the process where you need to go from multiple opinions you need to turn into a single yes/no decision. Jennifer has everyone write down their impressions before they talk to anyone else and write down specifically what they observed to support the conclusion you come to. This is how I always do it, but I’m always surprised at how few teams practice this.

Noel asked about good and bad uses of interview time. I loved Jennifer’s example of what a bad use of time it is to say, “Tell me about yourself.” Sometimes I have candidates jump into providing this kind of information even though I hadn’t asked. Such people steer the interview into a well-prepared speech of all their best qualities that doesn’t give you a full picture of the candidate.

Thayer then made a comment about the tendency of interviewers to try to make the candidates sweat. I agree with Thayer that this is usually the exact opposite of what you want if you’re trying to make the interview as much like the actual job experience as possible.

iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-56-developer-hiring/id1195695341?i=1000430735771&mt=2

Website link: https://www.techdoneright.io/56

JAMES COLGAN ON THIS IS PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

The This Is Product Management podcast featured James Colgan with host Mike Fishbein. James is a product manager for Outlook Mobile, which has 100 million monthly active users. James talked about his strategy for user growth being to make a product that is trusted by IT and loved by users. This led to their measures of success, such as usage and love for the product, measured by things like app store rating.

James gave a great example of doing user research to create a product that is loved globally rather just in certain geographies. They did research in Asia and found drastic differences in the relationship between personal time and work time. They found North Americans and Europeans kept a strong delineation between work and personal time, but they found significant overlap between personal and work time among Asian customers.

The data-driven nature of the product decisions payed dividends in both choosing the right features to work on and avoiding the wrong ones. They got the idea that they wanted to improve the ease of composing emails, but after looking at their instrumentation, they found that the average session length was 22 seconds. So instead they focused on consumption of emails over composition.

iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/188-listening-to-users-at-scale-is-product-management/id975284403?i=1000430581654&mt=2

Website link: https://www.thisisproductmanagement.com/episodes/listening-to-users-at-scale/

MATT KAPLAN ON BUILD BY DRIFT

The Build by Drift podcast featured Matt Kaplan with host Maggie Crowley. Matt talked about how the book Creativity Inc. by Pixar founder Ed Catmull inspired him to see the similarities between creating products and telling stories. He says that every great story has a protagonist (the target user), starts with tension (the problem the product is trying to solve), has an end state (the vision for solving the user’s problem), has a core belief (the product differentiators), and consists of a sequence of events to get to that end state (the work we need to do to get the users from the tension to the end state).

Maggie asked what the benefits are of thinking about products in this way and he explained that product management is about solving problems and telling stories. Stories could be used to convince salespeople that you’re doing the right thing, to tell engineers about what they’re going to build, or to tell customers about what your team has built.

iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/build-19-how-great-products-are-like-great-stories/id1445050691?i=1000430866513&mt=2

Website link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swz0TnLwbrA&list=PL_sQbSaZtRqCn6JJSkjma79c8c4bLdaJH&index=4&t=0s

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