Christophe Achouiantz

What actually empowers a team? Despite all the talk about empowered teams in tech, there’s often confusion about what real empowerment looks like.
At its core, an empowered product team is given significant customer or business problems to solve, rather than being handed features to build. But it’s not enough to simply assign problems – true empowerment requires the right environment to succeed.

Dive into the Product Model’s key insights (focus on outcomes), and core idea (the empowered engineer) to re-invent your teams to become Empowered Teams.

Dive into the essence of the Product Model, a transformative approach embraced by leading companies for consistent innovation at speed. Explore how this model, codified and championed by industry thought leaders, empowers teams, accelerates innovation, and reshapes organizational success in our dynamic, VUCA world.

Are we successful as a Team? Can we measure that? We look at 10+ areas of team success and how to measure them. Get inspired to choose the metric you need, right now, on your path to high-performing!

How to successfully drive initiatives, objectives or opportunities that require several squads (or teams) to succeed? How to do this in a way that respects the agile mindset without falling into the command-and-control trap? Today, this problem is more complex than it seems. We’ve designed and built our squads for self-organization and autonomy in the

Here is an attempt to establish a definition of Output, Outcome and Impacts! It is based on my interpretation of the work of Jeff Patton, Marty Cagan and Clayton Christensen, with some good input from Gojko Adzic, John Seddon and John Cutler.

Tired of the same old boring and ineffective daily meetings with your team? Try this new Awesome Team Focus daily routine! It will help your team use a swarming technique to laser-focus on the stuff that really matters and get it done. As a bonus it will help you start limiting Work In Process without

All kanban systems experience some “heart attacks” once in a while.    As a team, you can react in two ways: abandon your kanban system, or act smart. If you manage the situation well, you can learn from this experience and improve your kanban system to propel you all the way to high-performance.   Building

November in Sweden: Blä! The sky is impossibly low and grey, it’s pitch dark at 4 pm, freezing, and then everyone gets cold. Especially men: they get man-cold. There are also situations when your Kanban gets a man-cold (though it doesn’t need to be November for that): it’s not really dying, but it feels like

In Sweden, we love to ‘fika’. Fika requires you to take time to sit down and sip coffee (usually strong and black) with your colleagues to chitchat about this and that. Visiting different organizations, I tend to fika a lot and hear all these stories about how things are going. Today, I’ll like to share

I have the pleasure to be invited back to I’ve hosted a workshop about “how to train to Kanban” at the Lean Kanban France 2017.  The session was specially designed for you who is about to start training one or several teams, or who want to become better at training Kanban. It builds on the “Kanban

I recently did a deep dive into DevOps to create a DevOps Foundation training. I thought it would be an uneventful journey, but while doing some research to complement my own experience I uncovered something much bigger than what I was prepared for. As if there suddenly was this major unavoidable thing popping up in

Are you thinking to start using Kanban but are unsure how and where to start? Here are 10 tips to help you get going on your Kanban journey!   1. Start with a small “Team” An easy way to gain experience with Kanban is to introduce it to a team that already delivers a well-understood

Here are the slides I’ve been using to present “From Good-enough to Great” at the Lean Kanban France 2016 conference (LKFR16). In this presentation, I speak about some the patterns I have observed when coaching many Kanban team. Especially regarding how teams mature and how to help team better succeed. I introduce for the first

I will – finally – be speaking at Lean Kanban France 2016 this year. Being French, it should perhaps falls naturally to present at a French conference. Life as had other plans for me so far, but this year the stars are in the right position and it is happening. Though, I have to confess

Wow, just Wow!I am very honored to have won the Brickell Key Award 2016! Actually, very glad, surprised and humbled. The competition was impressive, if possible even more so than two years ago when I was first nominated. I want to thanks the Kanban community, David Anderson for his inspiration, Sandvik IT for their trust and

Here comes the slides from the Workshop I’ve held at the Lean Kanban North America 2016 conference in San Diego: From Good-Enough to Great from Christophe Achouiantz What the Workshop is about From good-enough to greatYou’ve had some success with you Kanban System: you’ve managed flow and quickly increased your capability. But now the energy

Lotta Olsson and I will present Sandvik IT’s Kanban journey at the Lean Kanban Nordic 2014 conference in Stockholm (a.k.a. “Stop Starting, Start Finishing” conference). Lotta is currently managing the Operational Excellence Support (OpX) unit within Sandvik IT. The OpX is the ‘home’ of Kanban, ITIL and other processes and tools designed to improve the

Being nominated to the Brickell Key Award 2014 has its advantages. One is to travel all the way to San Francisco to attend a ceremony during the Lean Kanban North America Conference. Another is to be interviewed like a rock-start. Here is the result of the interview. Thanks Lean Kanban University and Irina Dzhambazova for

Here comes the second article in the Kanban at Sandvik IT series on InfoQ. Based on the experience from Sandvik IT, I try to answer the question “How to engineer kanban systems to be sustainable and resilient despite the constant level of changes in today’s Enterprise?“. This article is somewhat more complex and deeper than

I have just got the amazing news that I am one of the 6 nominees for this year’s Brickell Key Award! I am really humbled by the fact that you guys out there voted for me. The Brickell Key Award has been awarded to people that I look up to in the Kanban community like,

I have finally found the time to write the story of Sandvik IT’s journey into Kanban-land. The articles is now available on InfoQ: Part I – How we got started Part II – What we learned This story has been told several times, with Johan Nordin (check our LKCE11 talk) or alone (check my  LKCE13

Here comes version 1.1 of “The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide”.The changes in this version are mostly corrections and clarifications. They reflect the way the Kick-start concept is currently evolving (for the better, of course) within Sandvik IT.Here are some noteworthy changes: The single biggest change is the renaming of the “Team Lead” into the “Flow Manager”

Here are the slides from my Session at Lean Kanban Central Europe 2013 (LKCE13).   The most unexpected question I got was from an elderly gentleman that said that he misunderstood the title of my talk, as he thought it had to do with lessons that I had learned working with people over 50 years

I tend to focus a lot on Kanban and Teams. The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide has 1098 occurrences of the term team, and I even write about Kanban teams. But, as David Anderson reminded me recently on Twitter, there is no concept of team in Kanban, and as such there are no “Kanban teams”! So why

Johan Nordin and I plan to attend the Lean Kanban Central Europe (LKCE) conference this year again. Due to a busy fall it will unfortunatly be our only chance to meet everyone from the community. Here is the abstract of the paper that we have submited to LKCE13, entitled “Lessons learned from coaching 50+ kanban

When introducing agile thinking I usually show the Norstrom Inovation Lab video as best agile example. Though, to make some of the points come across I also show a typical example of a failed traditional project. I have long searched for a short video illustrating a failed project and accidentally found this gem when watching the whole

Nowadays, when explaining the concept of Agile values and techniques I always start by showing a short and brilliant video from Norstrom Inovation Lab. The video shows how a team successfully delivers an iPad app withing a week. It all starts with an idea:  “Our customers often use their phones to take pictures of themselves when trying

Few coaches and many teams. How does that work? In the Kanban Kick-start Field Guide you mention that you have kick-started more than 50 teams. How do you keep track of the teams and their status? For our Kanban-coach team, each team really is a work item and, unsurprisingly, we try to see and understand