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, spoke to Alexandre Freire Kawakami, a Director at Industrial Logic about his talk Enabling Awesome Engineering Teams, the ideas behind Modern Agile and the importance of feedback loops and real usage data for product development.
Key Takeaways
- Overview of his talk on enabling awesome engineering teams
- The contradiction between values-driven and process-driven change
- Modern Agile is designed to help people and organisations get over the process obsession
- Working software is not enough – achieving better outcomes for customers is what’s important
- By having analytics and usage data available we can learn what works and what doesn’t and make better decisions
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Show Notes
0m:50s - Introductions
1m:10s - Overview of talk – Enabling Awesome Engineering Teams
1m:45s - The danger of just copying what other organisations do without understanding the values behind the practices and how they fit in with your culture
3m:00s - The contradiction between values driven and process driven change
3m:45s - Blindly looking at process as a means to achieve productivity inevitably fails
4m:20s - Process should support culture
4m:30s - Getting to continuous delivery and stopping short of continuous deployment is an example of a values-based decision
5m:25s - What’s happening with modern agile?
5m:40s - Modern Agile is designed to help people and organisations get over the process obsession
6m:15s - Modern agile is about a community sharing ideas and stories about working towards four principles:
- Deliver value continuously
- Make people awesome
- Experiment and learn rapidly
- Make safety a prerequisite
6m:40s - Some techniques which can help achieve these values, depending on the culture fit
7m:25s - The benefits of single piece flow
8m:10s - The importance of safety to make experimentation and learning possible
9m:40s - It’s about building a community- not selling ideas
9m:55s - Some practices which can be taught
10m:22s - Not all organisations want to change at the same rate and to the same extent, and that’s OK
11m:00s - Applying these ideas outside of technology
11m:35s - 3000 people can’t be a team – that’s just too big
11m:50s - What makes a team: cross functional, shared goals, collective ownership
12m:55s - Working software is not enough – achieving better outcomes for customers is what’s important
14m:50s - Alignment means leaders need to provide clarity about outcomes and convey these to the teams
1m:44s - Listen to the people in your teams and learn
15m:55s - Psychological safety is important to being able to admit we don’t know and need to learn new things
16m:52s - Feedback loops and continuous learning to achieve better outcomes
17m:10s - Some of the problems with the Product Owner role:
- Too much responsibility for one person
- Spread too thin and not able to focus on one product
- Decision making without feedback
17m:50s - It’s easy to instrument your runtime environment and build analytics into products today- just do it
18m:00s - The data is not just for Ops – feed it back through the whole development team
18m:05s - By having the data available we can learn what works and what doesn’t, and make better decisions
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