Tag Archives: Product Owner

Episode 186: Managing the Unmanageable with Ron Lichty

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Craig fires some questions at Ron Lichty, co-author of “Managing the Unmanageable” and the “Study of Product Team Performance“:

  • Author of machine Language programming books “Programming the Apple IIGS in Assembly Language” and “Programming the 65816“
  • Managing the Finder team at Apple – hired for stellar C++ coding ability and customer empathy
  • Software development is a team sport – including QA, a dedicated product manager / product owner and designers
  • After Dark and Flying Toasters at Berkeley Systems
  • “Managing the Unmnageable” is 9 chapters and around 300 rules of thumb and nuggets of wisdom (the creamy centre), the tools used to manage software development teams plus the authors own insights
  • There were very few books (7 at the time) on managing software developers (unlike project management and agile)
  • Fred Brooks – “The Mythical Man-Month“
  • Situational Leadership – opens your eyes to delegating and supporting the people on your team
  • The most important rule – always be recruiting
  • The Study of Product Team Performance – effective onboarding correlates with the highest performance teams (yet 7% consider this to be a best practice)
  • Self organising teams are where every single member of the team is a leader from their expertise
  • A team created definition of done may be one of the most important practices in Agile
  • The frequency of standups correlates with the performance of the team
  • The Daily Standup was not intended to be a status meeting but rather a replanning meeting
  • Teams that have stories for their entire backlog are correlated with the highest level of team performance
  • Steve Bockman – “Practical Estimation” and “Predictability“
  • Pragmatic Institute framework – the skills of a Product Management
  • Ambiguities in the requirements typically popup in the middle of the programming, which is why it is so valuable to have a Product Owner nearby to address these
  • Software development is a team sport – what gates teams is collaboration and communication – we need to nurture and provide support for that to thrive
  • We have two ears and one mouth and we need to use them in that proportion
  • We can’t over communicate in software development

TheAgileRevolution-186 (49 minutes)

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Episode 176: The Lost Tapes – Kanban For One with Sandy Mamoli

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In this previously lost and unreleased podcast from 2012 (we found it on a SD card that was thought to be lost forever), Craig catches up with Sandy Mamoli at Agile 2012 in Dallas, Texas and chat about Personal Kanban and how everything is bigger in Texas. It’s amazing how much hasn’t changed in this time!

TheAgileRevolution-176 (14 minutes)

Episode 156: LAST 2018 Brisbane Vox Pop

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Craig and Tony are at LAST Brisbane 2018 in their home town of Brisbane and wander the lunch hall speaking with members from the local Agile community:

TheAgileRevolution-156 (36 minutes)

 

Episode 153: The Great Lean Debate – Live from LAST Brisbane 2018

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Stephanie BySouth is the MC of the Great Lean Debate, a fun session recorded live at LAST Brisbane 2018. Ryan McKergow, Shane Hastie, Renae Craven are the “Legendary Agile Sh*t-talkers” team and Craig Smith, Mel Khim and Karyl Crick are the “Getting Agile Sh*t Done” team.

The topics are:

  • Scaling frameworks
  • Estimates vs No-Estimates
  • You can be a Product Owner and a Scrum Master

TheAgileRevolution-153 (37 minutes)

Episode 111: M&Mailbag

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peanutmmCraig and Renee, sitting in a shoe-box sized hotel room in Sydney eating peanut M&Ms, decided to rustle through the mailbag and answer a bunch of outstanding questions.

Note: this episode is not sponsored or endorsed by M&Ms but we certainly enjoy their product!

Crossing The Chasm

  • more and more organisations seem to be crossing the chasm to Agile, but too many are still just doing and not being Agile
  • inimal viable product (MVP) is still the trend word, the next stage is Minimal Viable Experience and then Minimal Viable Robustness to Minimal Marketable Product and finally Continuously Evolving Product
  • Enterprise Transformation Meta Model
  • Agile is a true north concept, not sure that you will ever get there

Suggested reading list on where to start with Agile:

What certification should a new Scrum Master get:

Building your own scaled framework

  • Holacracy and Reinventing Organizations
  • need to answer questions around ensuring quality, growing capability, benefits realisation, etc…
  • at what level do the questions need to be answered
  • Minimal Viable Organisations
  • scale on the operational cadence of the problems of the organisation, not following a framework
  • how often do we check that our approach is meeting our needs

Visualising business analysis in a Scrum team

  • 3 Amigos approach
  • call it what it is if you’re sprint length is longer than it is
  • focus more on Kanban flow

Reading List

  • Renee is reading about climate change (and how that applies to Agile) including “This Changes Everything” by Naomi Klein
  • Craig is reading “CTRL-SHIFT” by  Jessie Shternshus and Mike Bonifer

TheAgileRevolution-111 (71 minutes)

Episode 79: Vomit Value with Jim Benson

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14491375311_22bf182a39_zAt Agile Australia 2014 in Melbourne, Jim Benson of Personal Kanban fame takes some time to talk with Craig, Renee, Tony and (a very silent) Kim Ballestrin and along the way they talk about:

  • early work implementing David J. Anderson’s Agile Management which resulted in Jim focussing on the person (Personal Kanban) and David focussing on the organisation (Kanban method) – two different viewpoints on the same solution set
  • XP, Scrum, Kanban method and Personal Kanban exemplify the people who created them
  • The Oath of Non Allegiance
  • Scrum vs Kanban
  • Why Limit WIP and Why Plans Fail books out now and working on an upcoming book about meetings
  • Individuals and interactions is redundant – relevant in 2001 to shake people out of complacency
  • Agile is anti-manager
  • Agile in knowledge work
  • WIP limits and avoiding “death flow”
  • Vomit Value – user stories with spurious and arbitrary value in a 2 week sprint
  • standardisation of humans and collaboration
  • Toyota change of culture – “what’s good for your life is good for Toyota”
  • Product Owners (#nopo) – should be the stewards of the value stream

TheAgileRevolution-79 (45 minutes)

 

Episode 72: Shipping at Facebook with Joel Pobar

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From YOW! 2013, Craig and Renee talk to Joel Pobar, currently working at Facebook as an Engineering Lead and JoelPobartalk about:

  • Joel’s journey to Facebook
  • Common Language Runtime (CLR)
  • Building and shipping fast
  • The value of a developers time and their critical paths
  • A day in the life of a Facebook manager
  • Who is the Product Owner in an infrastructural team?
  • A/B (experimentation) testing in New Zealand
  • Stabalisation and release process
  • Recruiting the right people
  • Pulling out the sharpies when pivoting on PHP
  • Striving for infrastructural efficiency and how to empower the team to this goal
  • Owning the stack from the bottom to the top and its impact on agility
  • Checkout HHVM, the Facebook Engineering Blog & Open Compute

You can contact Joel at facebook or on twitter at @joelpob.

The Agile Revolution- 72 (41 minutes)