Agile transformations can be very laborious and expensive in terms of time and money. What if I told you that you can short-circuit the process and perform your transformation in the blink of an eye? Did I get your attention? Keep reading. Agile transformations are simple, so I can think of only three reasons for
Continue reading
Summary of Henrik Kniberg’s session, about his thoughts On The Spotify Model, in the Leading Complexity program 2022
The Spotify Model. You have probably heard the term. But how did it come to life? How did it become a “thing”? What are the principles behind it? What happens when companies copy it? Should you copy it? To kick off this series of summaries of the Leading Complexity program, we focus on Henrik Kniberg’s
Continue reading
Sneak peek of the Holistic Product Discovery book: “Building the wrong product”
The following is an excerpt from the recently released book by Martin Christensen and me titled Holistic Product Discovery. It’s been a 3-year journey that started with a 20-page draft. Numerous iterations later, here we are. Thank you to the fantastic community of readers for your invaluable feedback. Let’s begin. A story about a product
Continue reading
Interview with Stephen Bungay about Leading Complexity
Watch the video on our LinkedIn page. Hello Stephen Bungay. How nice to have you in the Leading Complexity program. For those who don’t know you, who are you? When I started my business career in the early 1990s at the Boston Consulting Group, I spent close to 20 years there. End then I left
Continue reading
Interview with Henrik Kniberg about Leading Complexity
View the video at our LinkedIn post. Hello Henrik Kniberg. It’s very nice to have you in the Leading complexity program. For those that don’t know you, how would you introduce yourself? I’m a Swedish dude who is a coach and a software developer. I have worked at Spotify, Lego, and Mojang. I had a
Continue reading
This might just be the highest leverage Product Discovery activity that your team can do
“Where do we start?” is a recurring question that Martin Christensen and I receive when we run Product Discovery training. A fundamental challenge with Product Discovery is that there is no right way, no silver bullet, and no perfect process, which means that teams need to pick the right tool for the right situation. But
Continue reading
Interview with Dave Snowden about Leading Complexity
Watch the video (5 min) in our LinkedIn post.
– Hi Dave. Good to see you again. For those who don´t know you. Just briefly, who are you?
– Dave Snowden. I run the Cynefin center. And that focus on the application of Natural Science to social systems.
– So why should leaders care about complexity?
– Complexity just is. So complex adaptive systems are an integral part of the world, and they deal with systems where you can’t plan specific goals. It is what we sometimes call the unknowable, unknowables. So basically, a complex system is deeply entangled, it’s highly uncertain, it’s the reality of the world we live in, and then we have to learn to manage in it. But most of our management tools were not designed for it.
Interview with Mary Poppendieck about Leading Complexity
Watch the video in our LinkedIn post. For those who don’t know you, can you quickly introduce yourselves? Tom and I are authors of four books on software development and managing software development, bringing lean concepts into the whole process of managing software development. Before that, we had many many decades of experience actually writing
Continue reading
Interview with Bjarte Bogsnes about leading complexity
Watch the video in our LinkedIn post. Hello Bjarte. We are so happy to have you in our Leading Complexity program. For those who have not met you, can you tell us about who you are and your background? I’m a finance guy by education but have also worked in human resources. I work with
Continue reading
Interview with Johanna Rothman about leading complexity
See the video in our LinkedIn post. Welcome to the Leading Complexity program, Johanna. Please let the audience better know who you are. People know me as the pragmatic manager because that’s the name of my monthly newsletter and it’s also what I do. I really believe that management has a role to play –
Continue reading
Agile Contracting in Banking using Lean/Agile procurement
In this case story, Rivo shares how Lean/Agile procurement was used to procure a complex solution in banking, in the matter of weeks not years. psst: Interesting to learn how to put it to use? Join our class in May.
Continue reading
Agile Islands 2021 – Slides
Agile Islands had several interesting sessions this year again. For you who haven’t seen this conference, please do! This poses a (positive) challenge to me as speaker, “how the heck do I make my session interesting enough so people stay!” This year I was asked to do an introduction to Agile for people outside IT
Continue reading
The Navigator just updated – adding Pocathon Big Room event
If you are working with partners to develop innovative solutions, you should take a serious look at Agile contracts. Agile contracts enable you to work Effect driven (over ticking off requirements) using collaboration, and incremental release to reduce risk. There are now good solid case studies that demonstrate how this shortens time to value in
Continue reading
The Silver Bullet of Agile Software Development
What should a struggling software development team do in a world of seemingly infinite improvement options?
Continue reading
How to Achieve Zero or Negative Productivity
Do you feel like your organization’s development process delivers too little at too slow a pace? Your gut feeling is probably correct. In this post, I’ll describe three paradigms that result in near zero or even negative productivity.
Continue reading
How to Assess a System’s Quality in Two Hours
You can get a fair feeling for any software system’s quality by putting in just two hours. Here’s how.
Continue reading
How to create useful documentation – only write the table of content
This article is a follow-up to my post on lean documentation that I published some time ago. In summary, lean documentation is characterized by being easy to consume and simple to keep updated. The purpose of lean documentation is to help you, as the reader, find answers to your questions, not to hold the detailed answers
Continue reading The paradox of masterly management leadership style
To understand this article, first read Managing in Mayberry by Don Gray & Dan Starr: https://www.donaldegray.com/managing-in-mayberry-an-examination-of-three-distinct-leadership-styles/ In short, it is about three different styles of leadership, depending on their view of the problem. The situation is that, in heavy traffic, left-turners may cause a queue of cars that leads to a dangerous situation. Officer Barney’s micromanaging leadership
Continue reading
Slides from Agile Islands 2020 – “Agile outside IT”
Agile outside IT – presentation at Agile Islands 2020
Continue reading Podcast: The SimCorp journey – to and beyond SAFe
A couple of years ago, SimCorp made the leap into Agile using SAFe. In this podcast, we get inside stories to Why they started their journey into Agile The results they have gotten so far Why they now feel ready to make a new leap, inspired by a new Agile vision for the future Participants:
Continue reading The first Product Discovery meetup
This week Crisp hosted its first Product Discovery meetup. We had the privilege to listen to lightning talks by notable experts from the Stockholm Product community: Martin Christensen shared his holistic Product Discovery framework. Johanna Olander presented SVT Play’s outcome based roadmap. Viktor Cessan shared his thoughts on how Product Discovery can happen naturally if
Continue reading
Hacking Your Product Leader Career
Last Wednesday, we had the pleasure to host a webinar with Gibson Biddle, former VP Product at Netflix, titled “Hacking Your Product Leader Career”. During the talk Gibson shared stories from his career and tips on how to have a scientific approach to your career progression. Some key take-aways: Keep it simple. Understand your strengths
Continue reading
Is Your Work Meeting Productive?
If not, you’re in good company. I’ve written a short summary on how to run a productive meeting. It’s not new. It’s not unique. It’s not revolutionary. But sometimes one feels a calling. Thanks Jimmy for helping out with the closure part. Click below to download a printable version.
Continue reading Can my design be used for evil?
There has been a lot of talk about ethics in UX circles over the last couple of years. This is a good thing. However, most of it has not been actionable in everyday work. And, to be honest, most ethically problematic products weren’t designed to be unethical. I am quite sure the designers of smart thermostats, easier purchase flows, sharing economy apps and social networks didn’t expect that their work would be used for domestic abuse, unwanted purchases, worker exploitation and skewed world views. In my experience, UX designers are generally a group of people who believes in the good of their fellow humans which means most of the time they don’t even consider how their designs could be used in unintended ways that might be harmful or dangerous. But maybe we, as a group, should. Maybe we should try to imagine the worst ways our designs could possibly be used as a part of our design process so we can at least try to mitigate the risk of that happening.
Anti-Agile – skapa insikter kring förändringsbehov
Anti-Agile är en av mina favoritövningar att facilitera vid uppdrag hos kund. Använder man denna övningen internt inom en organisation så synliggör man ofta många dysfunktioner som finns inom organisationen; kulturellt, strukturellt och hur man arbetar. Övningen fungerar också väldigt bra som en murbräcka i att bryta tron att allt fungerar så bra som det är, och föreställningen att vi är så agila som vi möjligen kan bli. Det senare är många gånger en utmaning då en stark föreställning om sin egna förträfflighet är ett stort hinder att ta sig över som coach för att få kunder att öppna upp sig för coaching och vägledning i sin arbetssituation.
Doug Kirkpatrick, CFO who turned management innovator
Interview with Doug Kirkpatrick, startup team member of Morning Star and co-founder of the Morning Star Self-Management Institute. Famous for being built on their principles of self-management, which has led to that Morning Star is today the largest tomato processing in the world. Today Doug has left Morning Star to spread his experience as a speaker, author, and consultant.
In his book, Beyond Empowerment, Doug tells the story of how Morning Star became an example of true empowerment. He tells us how they went beyond traditional ways of delegating (empowering) and creating a self-managed and truly empowered company.
I found Morning Star to be an intriguing and fascinating story! I have been following the company for quite a while and recently had the fortune to meet with Doug. During one of our discussions, he shared the fascinating story and his experience as one of Morning Star’s original colleagues.
To learn how you can operate a large successful company in a very agile way based on self-management and a few simple but powerful organizational principles, then continue reading.
Continue reading
Output vs Outcome vs Impact
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.
Get Awesome Team Focus with this daily routine!
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
Continue reading
The top 3 biggest forecasting and planning errors
In my consulting and training engagements I get to see the impact where planned delivery dates are missed. It’s never because people just aren’t trying or working hard enough. This post gives you my top 3 real reasons traditional Agile planning and the dates produced by them fail.
Number One Reason: The Assumed Start Date is Missed
Sounds obvious right. To give an estimated delivery date you add the estimated duration to a starting date. Rarely do I see anyone track or adjust for the eventual start date for any initiative. Often the definition of “started” isn’t clear.
Continue reading
6 Tips towards Business Agility
Agile, and Agile methods, like Scrum and Kanban, have had tremendous success over the past few decades, but still, most organizations are not getting the value and expected outcomes from their Agile initiatives. A big reason is that people often confuse Agile methods, or applying the methods in one department, with agility, which means having the ability to adopt these methods and deliver value to both the business and customers. Having that organizational ability is the essence of Business Agility. You can also refer to it as scaling Agile to the whole organization.
As co-organizer of the yearly Agile People Sweden conference, we have recognized that this is a current challenge for most organizations today, and hence the Business Agility is the theme for this year´s conference.
I had the opportunity to be interviewed by Kari Kelly from Atypical Workplace LLC. It resulted in 6 tips for how your organization can create value through Business Agility.
Continue reading