Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they as they chat with Gabrielle Benefield, the inventor of the Mobius loop, an outcome focused delivery framework. Gabrielle shares her journey in agile product development from Silicon valley to Yahoo. And the importance of focusing on outcomes of outputs and improving decision speed. We discuss why organisations don't focus on outcomes, the problem with contracts and scaling an outcome based approach. And finally, we talk about how you can use an exper...
Dec 07, 2023•58 min•Ep. 91
Join Murray Robinson as he chats with Maarten Dalmijn about Sprint Goals. We discuss how sprint goals should act as a primary mission for a sprint, around which everyone's tasks should revolve, rather than focusing on individual deliverables. We talk about challenges to implementing this approach, the importance of measuring outcomes over output, and the need for competency and trust in the team. This conversation highlights the importance open dialogue with stakeholders, and the necessity of ad...
Nov 17, 2023•56 min•Ep. 90
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Joe Justice about how Tesla and Space X have developed a new operating model based on self-organising teams that continuously discover, deliver, and improve to achieve a thousand year goal. It's like the most radical combination of open space agility, OKR's, Continuous Discovery, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Improvement, you can think of. Whatever you think of Elon Musk, these companies are way ahead of most other companies and accele...
Sep 22, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 89
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Stephen Bungay about the art of action. What can managers learn about leading in uncertain conditions from military history and modern NATO tactics? Military history shows that predictive plans and standard operating procedures work well when we are doing the same thing a thousand times, but fail badly when there's uncertainty, friction or competition, as there always is in software product development. Stephen explains how the military use...
Sep 01, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 87
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Jose Corella about how leadership principles from the US air force can be applied in civilian organizations. Discover how effective leaders empower teams to think critically and take initiative to achieve the goal. Learn about mission command red team thinking, servant leadership and the power of leadership training. Tune in for practical insights to enhance your leadership skills. Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spot...
Aug 17, 2023•47 min•Ep. 86
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Jennifer Pahlka about her new book, Recoding America. Why government is failing in the digital age and how we can do better. In this episode, we discuss why governments at all levels produce poor quality online services, like healthcare.gov in the US, that cost of fortune and a very difficult to use. Jennifer explains that government is hamstrung by a rigid, hierarchical, risk avoidant waterfall culture, where everyone involved adds rules a...
Jul 21, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 85
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Jeff Patton about product thinking and user story mapping. Jeff emphasises that product thinking focuses on outcomes, not output. He explains that product market fit requires a deep understanding of customers and users problems and a balance of customer desirability, business value and technical feasibility. We discuss how to build a user story map and develop a release plan that reduces your risk and delivers as much value as possible with...
Jul 09, 2023•45 min•Ep. 84
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Ryan Lysne a product director at Amazon in charge of the Amazon app, the content creator economy and worldwide events. We ask whether Amazon is agile and discuss the structure of Amazon product teams. Then we talk about the 10 step product management cycle that Amazon product teams use. We talk about how they discover what customers want. How they pitch for funding, the technical development process and their focus on experimentation and an...
Jun 23, 2023•43 min•Ep. 83
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Peter Lam, a management consultant specialising in fixing agile transformations. We delve into the value of consulting playbooks. The debate around centralised agile approaches and the disconnect between executives and workers. We examine why organisations often revert to bureaucracy after substantial change and the barriers functional silos post to agility. We discuss the Victorian government's flawed COVID response and how executives can ...
Jun 12, 2023•48 min•Ep. 82
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they discuss agile project management with certified scrum trainer, Jem Jelly (Jem D'jalel). We ask whether agile project management is possible or if it contradicts the principles of agile. We debate whether projects are inherently predictive, siloed, and staged or whether they can be adaptive fluid and cross-functional. And we discuss whether project managers are inevitably authoritarian assholes or if they can be adaptive servant leaders. Murrays expla...
May 26, 2023•57 min•Ep. 81
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Jim Highsmith, one of the authors of the agile manifesto. We discuss the history of software development from the wild west to structured methods. The agile movement and the courageous leaders who implemented it . We talk about what agile is. The agile mindset. The problems agile solves and why it took off. We talk about what's missing from the agile manifesto and what was harder for the industry to understand than people thought. We discus...
May 13, 2023•52 min•Ep. 80
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Pawel Huryn about product management. What it is, and isn't? How to motivate teams and what makes a product succeed. We discuss the difference between product management, which focuses on discovery and project management, which focuses on delivery. And how to do both at the same time in one empowered product team. We talk about how you can become a product manager and the best product management tools to use. Join us as we uncover valuable ...
Apr 28, 2023•37 min•Ep. 79
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Stefan Wolpers about scrum anti-patterns. We discussed common Anti-patterns such as a scrum master assigning tasks to a disempowered team and the solution for them. And we discuss why these anti-patterns keep occurring. The problems with scrum master education and training and the big consulting companies who sell scrum as a project management process. Finally we delve into the core differences between scrum and the assumptions that bureauc...
Apr 13, 2023•48 min•Ep. 78
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Brendan Marsh about what it was like to work at Spotify. How Spotify's agile ways of working are just a way to achieve the speed to market and speed to learning that their leaders feel are its key competitive advantage against bigger and better funded companies . How the Spotify model really works and how it's changed over time. And how the model is all about empowered teams, constantly trying new ways of working and organizing themselves t...
Mar 30, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 77
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they discuss the fundamentals of product management with Roman Pichler, author of agile product management with scrum. What is a product manager? What is a product? What's the difference between a product and a project? What's the difference between a product owner and a product manager? How do you know what to build? How do you develop a product strategy? How do you develop a product roadmap and define sprint goals? Focusing on objectives, not lists of f...
Mar 16, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 76
In this episode, we discuss the sad state of the agile industry with Michael Kusters and Brett Maytom. We talk about how the agile brand has been destroyed by con artists, life coaches and big management consulting firms. People who provide poor quality advice to clients because they've never been part of a good agile team. We talk about why clients and managers hire people who don't know what they're doing and the damage that two day certifications and the safe framework have done. We discuss t...
Mar 09, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 75
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Howard Podeswa about agile business analysis. What do business analysts do? What's its value? Why are big requirements up front, a bad idea? And how do we do business analysis in an agile way? How do we do use cases and user story maps and how do we break them down into user stories? What's the relationship with the product owner? Business analysis is a critical skill that every development team needs to understand and prioritize their work...
Mar 03, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 74
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with veteran developer, Jonathan Crossland about Ammerse, a value based decision making guide for products and teams. Ammerse is a mnemonic for agile, minimal, maintainable, environmental, reachable and solvable. Jonathan walks us through how to use these ideas to understand what we value now and what we should place more value on based on our context. It will be easier to understand this podcast if you look at the diagrams on the ammerse.org we...
Feb 23, 2023•35 min•Ep. 73
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Rich Mironov about the problem with sales led development. It’s easy for B2B enterprise companies to fall into a sales lead development model where the majority of development work is customisation starving the core product of resources for innovation, new features, quality improvements and technical resilience. The end result is frustrated product development and engineering teams, uninspiring products, low profitability, slow growth and d...
Feb 16, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 72
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Donna Spencer from Maker X about user experience design in empowered product teams. We discuss user research, information architecture, and visual design. And the problem with the way UX is often done in traditional teams and agile teams. We discuss the value of having a UX person embedded in a product team and the responsibility UX designers have to educate other members of the team in UX. And finally, we talk about UX design models. The p...
Feb 09, 2023•56 min•Ep. 71
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Al Shalloway about Amplio and the movement back to pattern libraries to improve knowledge work. As lean and agile have become commercialised they've become rigid, bureaucratic frameworks that disempower teams and prevent us from improving. Pattern libraries set us free. When we learn patterns like the concept of bottlenecks we are able to see things in our world that we couldn't see before Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app...
Feb 02, 2023•43 min•Ep. 70
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Jim Benson, author of personal Kanban, about his new book, the collaboration equation. Jim describes how Kanban allows teams to focus and see bottlenecks so they can resolve them. He explains how organizations starve people of information, safety and purpose and describes how to build collaborative systems that give people the information they need to make better decisions which will in turn, make their companies much more effective, innova...
Jan 22, 2023•42 min•Ep. 69
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat about their experience with start ups and scale-ups venture capitalists and corporate innovation. We talk about manager's fear of innovation, innovation theatre, and some models that organisations could use to be far more innovative than they are now. Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | TuneIn | Audible | Podchaser | Contact Mu...
Jan 13, 2023•44 min•Ep. 68
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they discuss mission command with Eric Lopez, a management consultant, CEO and retired US Army Colonel who commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eric explains how mission command allows leaders to decentralize tactical decisions so that people on the ground can take initiative to achieve the mission in a volatile and uncertain environment. Mission command helps leaders become much more agile in a rapidly changing world. Listen to the podcast on your f...
Jan 08, 2023•57 min•Ep. 67
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Teresa Torres, a product coach, speaker, and author of continuous discovery habits. She explains how product managers, designers, and software engineers can use continuous discovery to ensure that they're building the right product and continuously improving it over time. In this interview, you'll learn to balance action with research so that you can get started without being blindsided by what you don't get right. If you want to disco...
Dec 31, 2022•59 min•Ep. 66
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Dan Olson, author of the lean product development playbook. A practical guide to building products that customers love. Most new products fail on most new features are rarely used. Dan describes a practical six step process to improve your chances of building successful products. Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | Tu...
Dec 17, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 65
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Anabela Cesário VP of product ops at OutSystems, a low code development platform. Anabela describes what product ops is and how her team mentors, coaches, supports and trains 25 product managers. From setting up the product board tool to training people in continuous discovery, providing standard data for product reporting and managing the company's strategic product planning and reporting process. Listen to the podcast on your favouri...
Dec 09, 2022•45 min•Ep. 64
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Jonathan Hall about implementing Continuous Delivery. CI/CD requires a level of test automation that seems impossible for most organisations. Jonathan describes a practical implementation path to CI/CD that everyone can do. Start by changing the role of QA to focus on pairing with developers to write good automated tests. Automate tests for all of your code changes, bug fixes and change regression testing. Automate your deployment and ...
Dec 01, 2022•50 min•Ep. 63
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Jeff Gothelf about Lean UX and Sense and Respond. Lean UX explains how to do UX design and product development in a highly agile way. The core of Lean UX is the canvas, a facilitation tool for collaboratively collecting and testing product hypotheses. The key output is a prioritised backlog of discovery experiments. Sense and respond is a management book that explains how to organise and support agile product teams and encourage agile ...
Nov 23, 2022•57 min•Ep. 62
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Adam Thomas about Product Survival Metrics. Empower the product team to make decisions quickly in uncertain situations by negotiating clear boundaries for the product team. Negotiate boundaries with stakeholders early. Use data to track your progress. When your heading towards a boundary make decisions to stop, pivot or invest. Product development is not a linear path. Agile product development is not a methodology that you buy it's a ...
Nov 17, 2022•24 min•Ep. 61
