TL;DR: Projects ask teams do what is asked of them; Products ask teams to invent their work. This requires a different way of seeing the world, and not everyone can do it yet. Software is not an up-front investment that pays off over its use. Software is an ongoing concern, an intricate piece of a …
Read moreProject to Product asks more of our software, and more of us
In any large enough company, there are front-line workers, management, and executives. Executives set direction, management sets up the situation for the workers, and workers do the labor. Workers do the company business every day, providing capabilities to external or internal customers. Management gets them the tools and training they need, for today and for …
When explaining your favorite tool, ya wanna say “just install this!” “Simply change the configuration.” “Customizing it is easy.” Don’t! Steps that feel easy, simple, trivial to you are that way because of the experience you have in the tool. You understand how it works, you know what it’s like to install it, you understand …
In Projects to Products, Mik Kersten divides flow items in software products in four: features, defects, risks, and debt. If you only count features added and bugs fixed – changes visible externally – then you neglect the other outcome of our work: the next version of the team+software. I prefer to think of “technical debt” …
From The Grasshopper, by Bernard Suits: When you play a board game, or a game of baseball, you’re playing a closed game. There is a defined end, and a defined set of means to reach it. When you play pretend, or when you build a career in baseball, you’re playing an open game. The objective …
Generativity is about caring about what comes after you. In a social context, it’s when old people care about subsequent generations, instead of maximizing their own happiness for the last few years. In business, it’s when executives care about the health and outcomes of the whole executive team, instead of their own career after this …
again: Every action has two results: a set of side effects on the world, and the next version of ourselves. Sometimes in the creation of an artifact, the artifact itself is less important than the process of creating it. Wardley Maps are like that too – it’s about the thought that goes into creating them, …
Every action has two results: a set of side effects on the world, and the next version of ourselves. I learned this from Erlang, a purely functional yet stateful programming language. Erlang uses actor-based concurrency. The language is fully immutable, yet the programs are not: every time an actor receives a message, it can send …
(this is a transcription of the talk by the same name. Here is a video.) Collaboration is crucial in software teams – and not only among people. We need our software, our tools, and our automations to collaborate as well. But what does that mean? I have four prerequisites for you here, and then four precautions …
(This post continues from the Royal Yak, and concludes the series A Taxonomy of Yaks.) When we improve how we work, we make tasks faster. We make progress smoother. This is magnified when we improve how all our team members work, or our whole community. Now and then, though, an improvement turns into something more: …