InfoQ Homepage Innovation Content on InfoQ
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Staying Innovative on a Journey from Start-Up to Scale-Up
As ClearBank grew, it faced the challenge of maintaining its innovative culture while integrating more structured processes to manage its expanding operations and ensure regulatory compliance. Within boundaries of accountability and responsibility, teams were given space to evolve their own areas, innovate a little, experiment, and continuously improve, to remain innovative.
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Transforming Software Product Teams into Tech Investors
The key responsibility of an organisation lies in balancing user value with profitability. In a product organisation, software product teams invest their own time. According to Fabrice des Mazery, software developers are much more than stakeholders; they are the main investors as they are part of the product teams.
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Java in Education Initiative Aims to Empower the Next Generation of Developers
The Java in Education, launched by the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee, is making significant strides in promoting Java technology within educational institutions. This program seeks to bridge the gap between academia and industry, ensuring that Java remains a foundational skill for aspiring developers.
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How to Develop a Culture of Quality in Software Organizations
According to Erika Chestnut, software organizations can develop a culture of quality with a clear commitment from leadership, not only to endorse quality efforts in software teams, but also to actively champion them. This commitment and advocacy should manifest in data-driven decision-making that strikes a balance between innovation and quality, ensuring that we maintain the highest quality.
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The Upsides and Downsides of Open Source Adoption
Benefits of open source projects are supporting rapid innovation, the flexibility provided to customize and adapt tools, and transparency of the code which can enhance security efforts. The downsides are that security by obscurity doesn’t apply, open source is potentially prone to abuse, and when open source tools are not backed up by companies, it might result in a lower level of maintainability.
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Trust-Driven Development: Accelerate Delivery and Increase Creativity
By building trust you can break silos, foster collaboration, increase focus, and enable people to come up with creative solutions for products and for improving their processes. The DevOps movement was created to break the silos in the organisations; trust can be built by organising pair programming across various functions and various teams.
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How to Foster Startup-Like Innovation in Established Companies
Startup founders expect uncertainty and failure as part of their innovation process. Leaders in established companies need to make sure that people take on risks to build the next big thing. Adding small improvements to products in a constant manner will create a compounding effect over time, and will help you build the exact thing your users are looking for.
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How Organisational Culture and Psychological Safety Fosters Our Creativity
Organisations need to create the right conditions and culture for creativity to flourish so as to stay relevant, compete and thrive for the future. An addiction to burnout and fixation on productivity can stifle creativity. What’s needed is psychological safety, inclusion, experimentation, growth mindsets and allowing thinking time.
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Building an Intentional Organisation: a Holistic Approach
Building an intentional organisation requires a mindset that considers all organisational building blocks holistically. Leadership is key; actions that managers take have organisational consequences which need to be aligned to design an organisation that can achieve its purpose.
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How to Scale Pilots into a Global IT Organization
Scaling pilots into a global IT organization is doable, and if done right, it really works and can help to transform entire companies, said Clemens Utschig. At DevOpsCon Munich 2019 he presented how they go from starting with an idea to scaling it up into the global organization.
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How to Remain Agile While Scaling
Managing the complexity and scale of both the business and the software were key challenges as Yext started to grow, said Sean MacIsaac at Agile Business Day 2019. Yext addresses this by having product solutions that are broadly applicable and configurable by their customer team, and by hiding complexity with independently deployable services with clearly defined interfaces.
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How to be Creative and Remain Focused in the Digital Distraction Era
The way we use digital devices has a strong impact on our cognitive skills. The main skills impacted are creativity and focus; both are very much needed in future jobs and they are very much influenced by our digital habits, said Monica Bormetti. She spoke about focus and creativity in the digital distraction era at Agile Business Day 2019.
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Lessons Learned from Innovating at Google: Frame the Problem, Use Data, and Define the MVP
The truly great, innovative, useful ideas come mostly from two sources: your target users, and people working in the organization - not necessarily those with a "product manager" hat. Experimentation can help us to materialize ideas into actual products and technology. Framing the problem, using data, and defining the MVP can help us to increase the chance of success in innovation.
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The Importance of Leadership and Management in Hypergrowth
At QCon New York 2019, Patrick Kua shared lessons learned sowing the seeds and fertilising an environment to cultivate high performing teams in a startup fintech company. This article explores how to manage technical managers in a fast growing company.
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Autonomy and Accountability: Randy Shoup’s Advice for Moving Fast at Scale
Randy Shoup, VP of engineering at WeWork, presented "Moving Fast at Scale" at CraftCon 2019, and discussed how he has organized teams for speed at scale without sacrificing innovation, business value, quality or team autonomy.