Engineering Culture by InfoQ

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast, Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Melissa Perri, a UX and Product Management expert and founder of Produx Labs. Why listen to this podcast: - Put value first – it’s not about building more stuff but making sure we build the right thing for the right people - Product ownership is about optimising value for the organisation - Managers need to understand their role in product management - Identify outcomes and define pirate metrics for success - Empower teams to achieve the outcomes, not deliver features Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/melissa-perri 3m:45s Management should communicate the metrics and goals to the product owner and let them work with the delivery team(s) to figure out how to achieve them 4m:20s Product owners told to make decisions but not actually empowered to do so 4m:35s Focus on training the managers on what they need to do to effectively support product ownership and how to communicate clear boundaries and goals 5m:20s A product strategy is not a plan 5m:55s Common approach is for managers to define the features and roadmap instead of identifying and communicating the goals, and trust the teams to figure out the best way to achieve the goals Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/melissa-perri You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. http://bit.ly/2cMnjfW

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast, Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to David Hussman, founder and “The Dude” from DevJam and CardBoard It!, a tool for story mapping. Why listen to this podcast: - Put value first – it’s not about building more stuff but making sure we build the right thing for the right people - Dude’s Law: Value = Why / How - Identify the impact that a product needs to make on someone’s life - Constrain complexity using thin slicing and “minimum viable learning” - Have an intentional discovery-delivery cadence to speed up the learning cycles – design and delivery sprints tightly coupled - “Done” is not enough – value is only delivered when the item has been validated with real customers - Validation can happen in both discovery and delivery Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2eegjYf - 1m 41s Introducing “Dude’s Law”: Value = Why divided by How. - 3m 05s Think about the intent, not the process, when looking at product development. - 3m 17s Focus on Product over Process and finding the intent, identifying the impact that the product will have. - 3m 30s Large “transformations” are often never-ending and not very successful; successful products come from finding the thing that impacts someone – that makes someone’s life better. More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ. http://bit.ly/2eegjYf You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. http://bit.ly/2cMnjfW

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast, Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Phil Brock, Rebecca Parsons, Paul Hammond and Victor Hugo about the state of the Agile Alliance, new initiatives being worked on around the world and the future of agility in the workplace. Why listen to this podcast: - The Agile 2016 conference was the largest ever with nearly 2500 people attending - The Agile Alliance is spreading around the world with events and through affiliates - The Agile Alliance has responded to the criticism about the main conference having less technical content and ran a Technical Conference in 2016 with another scheduled for 2017, as well as having technically focused initiatives which are exploring new technical practices in response to the changing technical landscape - Member driven initiatives are receiving more focus and more funding to engage the agile community The Agile Alliance website has a large repository of content which is freely available to the global agile community, and more is constantly being produced Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2dDB01f - 4m 55s The Agile Alliance is spreading into parts of the world beyond North America with affiliates and with events in different countries. - 5m 05s Victor talks about the Agile Europe and Agile Brazil conferences. - 6m 09s The value of having an Affiliate in Brazil is about providing a structure and support for the large Agile Brazil conference as well as providing a vehicle to support the growth of a healthy agile community in Brazil - 7m 25s There are a variety of Initiatives which the Alliance supports. These are ways for the community to get involved and to propose ideas for areas they want to see the Alliance working in. There are three types of initiatives the Alliance supports More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ. http://bit.ly/2dDB01f You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. http://bit.ly/2cMnjfW

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast, Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Kent McDonald, Steve Adolph and Ryland Leyton about the state of business analysis and product management in agile product development. They were participants in a weekend workshop where the Agile Alliance and the International Institute of Business Analysis were collaborating to produce a revised version of the Agile Extension to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge. Why listen to this podcast: - Analysis skills are necessary for successful product development - We don’t question and challenge the rationale and strategic alignment of projects enough, which results in lots of waste from doing the wrong projects or building the wrong features in a project - The best return on investment that you can get is to stop wasting your money - Value is hard to define but crucial to identify; the definition of value will be different in every context - Agile methods provide for learning and rapid feedback, which enables us to optimize value and ensure strategic alignment in product development - User stories are conversation placeholders, not orders to be fulfilled Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: bit.ly/2e32o5X - 6m 20s Analysis skills reside in many different roles and doing analysis in agile development is far less prescriptive that has been the case. - 6m 44s You need to have a very comprehensive toolkit and have the ability to relate the tool needed to the context of the work being done. - 9m 13s Advanced organisations are changing when they utilise analysis skills to determine which initiatives should be worked on and how they align with organisation strategy; being able to review these decisions even after an initiative has started, stopping development work when it is no longer valuable. More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ. bit.ly/2e32o5X You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/2cMnjfW

This is the first in a new series of podcasts from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences - the Engineering Culture Podcast. In this podcast, Wes Reisz, chair of the QCon conferences in San Francisco, London and New York talks to Phil Haack, an Engineering Director at GitHub focused on software pushed mostly to the desktop. He’s shipping software like GitHub Desktop, GitHub Extensions for Visual Studio and the Atom text editor. Haack joined GitHub in 2011 and is a prominent member of the .Net community. At Microsoft Phil was core to shipping NewGit and ASP.NET, MVC.NET. Why listen to this podcast: - There is often too much focus on the nitty-gritty details of software development practices but as you scale out to larger projects and teams the challenges are not technological- they are sociological. - Research shows that teams which are more diverse are more effective. - Engineers shifting to management should consider it a discipline like any other technical field; it’s not something that you should “just wing”. - Building an effective team requires trust and that allows candid discussions and healthy debates without disrupting the relationships. One-on-ones can be an effective way to do that. - To be an effective coach for engineers, a manager needs to be seen as a strong technical leader. Someone without technical credibility is generally not received well. Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2L7Irg3 5m 10s The big problems we have are sociological, and frequently companies and engineers don’t pay enough attention to these problems because they try to focus on the technical practices instead; but the root cause is how people interact with each other and how they are working together. 5m 40s The talk covers some personal lessons learned and the research that backs those personal lessons. There is validated research that shows certain things make for more effective teams. More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2L7Irg3 You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Check the landing page on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2L7Irg3 Here is Phil Haack's talk on Social Coding for Effective Teams and Products recorded at QCon San Francisco 2016: https://bit.ly/2QPEU9D