10. Silo-busting, Progress-making Authenticity

Melissa Perri on Deliver It, Jenny Tarwater, Laura Powers, Linda Podder, and Cheryl Hammond on Agile Uprising, Michael Sippey on Product Love, Ryan Jacoby on Scrum Master Toolbox, and Phil Abernathy on Engineering Culture by InfoQ.

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 April 29, 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.

MELISSA PERRI ON DELIVER IT CAST

The Deliver It Cast podcast featured Melissa Perri with host Cory Bryan. They discussed Melissa’s book Escaping The Build Trap and what motivated her to spend three years writing it. Melissa says she wrote it because she found herself answering the same questions about product management over and over again.

They talked about what the build trap is (project-oriented, no product managers, spinning up teams for CEOs that prioritize work, never talking to customers, and getting rewarded for shipping features) and how demoralizing it can be.

They talked about Stephen Bungay’s The Art Of Action and his notion of the knowledge gap, the alignment gap, and the effects gap, and Melissa told a story of how she applied these concepts for a client by introducing ways to address these gaps by learning how to communicate strategic intent.

Melissa says she always hears from her clients that their CEOs and leaders care about points and velocity but she says that this is only because they have don’t know how else to measure success. When you give them goals that they can relate to, they no longer need to latch onto points and velocity.

I particularly liked what Melissa said about getting leaders to work together as a team by getting rid of individual goals.

iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep85-escaping-the-build-trap-with-melissa-perri/id966084649?i=1000434062102

Website link: http://deliveritcast.com/ep85-escaping-the-build-trap-with-melissa-perri

JENNY TARWATER, LAURA POWERS, LINDA PODDER, AND CHERYL HAMMOND ON AGILE UPRISING

The Agile Uprising podcast featured Jenny Tarwater, Laura Powers, Linda Podder, and Cheryl Hammond with host Chris Murman. They talked about the Women In Agile community and events and what they have learned so far. Cheryl said that they have learned that there is interest among all genders to learn about Women In Agile and get involved in the pre-conferences. Laura learned that it was giving her an opportunity to pay it forward to the next generation. Linda described being a recipient of what Laura has been paying forward and Jenny talked about meeting people through these events who helped her both professionally and personally. She also described how the huge number of attendees of the main conference that Women In Agile is attached to makes her feel lost and how the pre-conference helps her ease into the conference community.

They talked about the Launching New Voices program and how it provides a stage and mentoring on how to give a talk to create a more diverse body of speakers. Linda was a protégé in the 2017 program and she described how it taught her not only how to present her topic but also taught her the psychology behind it so that she could help her audience internalize her message.

Laura described being a mentor in the program and I loved what she said about authenticity.

iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/women-in-agile-2019/id1163230424?i=1000434352507

Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/women-in-agile-2019

MICHAEL SIPPEY ON PRODUCT LOVE

The Product Love podcast featured Michael Sippey with host Eric Boduch. Michael Sippey became VP of product at Medium after spending some time running product for LiveJournal at SixApart and at Twitter. He was also one of the first bloggers. They talked about how many of these early blogging technologies developed into today’s modern social media platforms and how Michael wishes he could have thought more about the downsides of the technologies and planned for them. This led to a discussion of scenario planning and the the natural tendency towards optimism that product people have.

They talked about the history of Twitter and some of the reasoning behind the restrictions Twitter introduced in their API in 2012 and some of the improvements Medium is making now to prevent amplification of low quality content. Then they got into a discussion of hypotheses and hypothesis testing as being fundamental to product management. Michael encourages his product managers to have hypotheses that are bold enough that the users are going to notice and that will drive enough change that it is worth the development time to pursue it.

iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/michael-sippey-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-hypotheses/id1343610309?i=1000434598454

Website link: https://soundcloud.com/productcraft/michael-sippey-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-hypotheses

RYAN JACOBY ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX

The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Ryan Jacoby with host Vasco Duarte. Vasco started by by asking Ryan about his book, Making Progress - The 7 Responsibilities of an Innovation Leader. Ryan described the seven responsibilities as: 1) define progress, 2) set an innovation agenda, 3) create and support teams that build, 4) cultivate the ingredients of successful innovation (customer insights, well-defined problem statements, strategic questions, and ways of communicating evidence of what works and what doesn’t), 5) give great feedback, 6) inspire progress, and 7) reward progress.

Vasco asked about how Scrum Masters can contribute to innovation. Ryan suggests picking some of the techniques they discussed, applying them to your team, and then sharing them widely. He then referenced Teresa Amabile’s work on finding out what makes people happy and work. He says that by helping your team make progress, you will be improving morale and people’s job satisfaction.

iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/bonus-ryan-jacoby-on-7-responsibilities-innovation/id963592988?i=1000434879127

Website link: http://scrummastertoolbox.libsyn.com/bonus-ryan-jacoby-on-the-7-responsibilities-of-an-innovation-leader

PHIL ABERNATHY ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ

The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Phil Abernathy with host Shane Hastie. Phil talked about how happier employees make for happier customers. For producing happier employees, he starts with purpose, autonomy, and mastery as popularized by Dan Pink and he adds fairness. He distinguishes between fairness and equality. He says employees don’t expect equality — there are different levels of capability, maturity, experience, and salary but this is not seen as unfair. They then talked about org structures, going back to Conway’s law and how it relates to complexity.

Phil talked about the KPI-driven organizations today that take anything that is not working and put a vice president in charge of it. This leads to things like having a head of “digital.” He asks, “What’s the difference between the IT department and this new digital department?” Nobody can explain it. He says that this obfuscation of accountability and responsibility is at the heart of complex structures and that instead we should copy the great companies. They all have small, simple, loosely-coupled teams delivering a service to a direct customer group, internal or external.

Phil says people confuse empowerment and self-direction with no management and no direction. He says there needs to be a hierarchy, but it should be flat, with spans of control over ten. He has a metric he calls the bureaucracy mass index, which is the ratio of enablers such as managers to total employees. A healthy BMI is typically around 10% and in some companies he sees BMIs as high as 45%. He says healthier BMIs lead to happier customers and happier companies.

Regarding the structure of the work itself, Phil says too many companies he works with are overloaded. The reason for the lack of prioritization is a lack of strategic clarity: there’s a digital strategy, an innovation strategy, IT transformation strategy and no one can figure out the real strategy. A simple strategy that can be explained in three to five bullet points does not exist. He then got into a description of OKRs and how they are developed collaboratively. The companies who get these right, he says, don’t have a prioritization problem.

Last, he adds leadership style because structuring the organization and structuring the work is not enough. A good leadership style, he says, is based on an agreed set of values like trust, respect, transparency, courage, and experimentation. Every organization says they have these values but they don’t all practice them. He says it comes down to holding people accountable. He references Patrick Lencioni’s work on having trust at the foundation and he connected this to accountability and results. He says that the courage of senior leadership to call people out for breaking the values is the deciding factor. He then related this all to Carol Dweck’s book Mindset.

This interview is only twenty minutes long, but Phil doesn’t waste a single word.

iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/phil-abernathy-on-employee-happiness-bureaucracy-mass/id1161431874?i=1000435046419

Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/phil-abernathy-on-employee-happiness-and-the-bureaucracy-mass-index

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