Product Innovation, business agility and Project Leadership
Some of Claus' inspirational sources
Claus is driven by a thirst for new insights and continuous improvement being visible on his bookshelves and time spent on the wealth of on-line knowledge.
Christian Vandsø Andersen – Magic @ Work: Leadership, innovation, and personal mastery in unpredictable times. Inner secrets from being both a magician and vice president at the LEGO group
Christian Vandsø Andersen – Wonderful Digital Leadership: A different look at time, innovation and leadership in a digital world
Stephen Bungay – The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions, and Results
Ben Horowitz – The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, Gene Kim – Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
Steve Pereira, Andrew Davis – Flow Engineering: From Value Stream Mapping to Effective Action
Christopher Cowell, Nicholas Lotz, Chris Timberlake – Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines: Build efficient CI/CD pipelines to verify, secure, and deploy your code using real-life examples
Dave Farley – Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster
Dave Farley – Continuous Delivery Pipelines: How To Build Software Faster
Jez Humble (Author), David Farley (Author) – Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler))
Bent Flyvbjerg How Big Things Get Done – The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration
Reed Hastings No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
Elements of Amazon’s Day 1 Culture – quote: “Amazon’s *Day 1* mentality is a culture and an operating model that puts customers at the center of everything Amazon does. Putting *Day 1″* into practice relies on maintaining a long-term focus, obsessing over customers, and bold innovation.
Contrast this to a *Day 2* mentality: as a company grows over time, it needs to adjust its approach to effectively manage the organization as it scales. The danger is that as this happens, decision making can slow down, and the company can become less agile, moving further and further away from the customer as it rotates focus towards internal challenges rather than external customer-centric innovation.”
Sustaining a Day 1 Culture – quote: “If you create a culture that pushes itself to look for new ways to delight customers every single day, in all parts of your business, it will drive you to invent on their behalf.”
Silicon valley product group (svpg) is founded by Marty Cagan, the author of the two books “EMPOWERED” and “INSPIRED” above. This blog nicely extends the books.
The CSPO Pathology – quote: “The fastest growing pathology I see, especially outside the US, is people confusing a product owner (the role on an Agile delivery team) with a product manager“
Revenge of the PMO – quote: “A couple years ago I wrote about the root causes of product failure in product companies and I identified ten key attributes of Waterfall and project-mindset. I went through and compared this list with SAFe, and literally all ten problems exist in SAFe. Indeed, I would argue that all ten problems are inherent in that process.”
Product Ops Overview – quote: “From my own interactions with companies implementing or exploring Product Ops, I have found no fewer than six distinct definitions.
So the first and most obvious question is why so many different definitions?
My theory is that while the term emerged as a roughly parallel concept to DevOps, the original concept of DevOps refers primarily to tools and technology to empower engineers to accelerate their code into production, but I haven’t encountered anyone trying to do roughly analogous tooling for product managers (other than tool vendors of course).
I think that’s partly because there are already plenty of off-the-shelf solutions for the major tools like roadmap and OKR tools, but mainly because unlike engineering, for most things PM’s do, it’s simply not a function of the tools, so the original meaning of DevOps doesn’t really apply so well to product management.
That said, the concept of empowering product managers to do good work, much like we empower engineers, resonates very easily.”
Steve Denning writes primarily about Leadership Strategy. Here an example where he touches upon Agile ..
Understanding Fake Agile – quote: “There is also Agile in the sense of the various Agile brands promoted by consultants and trainers, of which there are hundreds. These are multiple variants of the same underlying idea of Agile. Yet often there is an insistence on using particular terms and specific named processes, which are defined in this way for the commercial purpose of distinguishing their offering from competing consultants and trainers.
A particularly unfortunate form of *branded Agile* concerns scaling frameworks. A worrying variant is the Scaled Agile Framework or SAFe. Essentially this is codified bureaucracy, in which the customer is almost totally absent. It is now pervasive in large firms because it gives the management a mandate to call themselves agile and keep doing what they have always done.”
Why Finding The Real Meaning Of Agile Is Hard – quote: “The answers you get to the question as to what *Agile* means will depend on who you ask. For many, Agile (or business agility or organizational agility, or whatever you want to call it), has come to mean a paradigm shift in management, a fundamental rethinking about how work gets done in the 21st century.
As Thomas Kuhn explained when he introduced the concept of a paradigm shift, it’s normal to encounter a great deal of confusion as to what is going on while the paradigm shift is happening. If you go around talking to random people asking what “agile” means, you will inevitably get very different answers, particularly if you are talking to people who are stuck in the old paradigm, or who are having problems implementing the new paradigm.”
The Mindset That Kills Product Thinking – quote: “You can deliver what you said you would every sprint, and it may not matter if the work doesn’t result in the outcomes your organization predicted. Doing agile by the book may result in you being a great service provider, but not a successful product creator.”
Dual Track Development is not Duel Track – quote: “Development work focuses on predictability and quality. Discovery work focuses on fast learning and validation. Discovery and development are visualized in two tracks because it’s two kinds of work, and two kinds of thinking.”