Tech Lead Journal
#144 - Better Value Sooner Safer Happier - Jonathan Smart & Simon Rohrer
Podcast summary created with Snipd AI
Quick takeaways
- Focus on delivering better value sooner for improved outcomes.
- Create a culture of psychological safety to encourage experimentation and continuous learning.
Deep dives
Focus on Better Products and Value Sooner
To achieve better outcomes in work, focus on delivering better value sooner rather than simply adopting agile methodologies. The main goal should be to prioritize quality, value, time to value, safety, and happiness over specific frameworks like Agile or DevOps.
Align Strategy with Execution Using OKRs
Align organizational goals through cascaded objectives and key results (OKRs) to ensure that every level of work is tied to the company's strategic intent. This alignment helps in translating high-level ambitions into actionable outcomes.
Implement Small Batch Work Processes
Implement smaller batch work processes to improve time to learning and enhance the ability to pivot based on feedback. By delivering smaller chunks of value and deploying them quickly, organizations can adapt and adjust their strategies more efficiently.
Promote Psychological Safety and Unlearning
Create an environment of psychological safety where employees feel empowered to experiment and fail without fear. Encourage unlearning and relearning to increase the pace of change, and nurture an emergent mindset among leaders to acknowledge the uncertainty and encourage continuous improvement.
“The goal is not Agile. The goal is not DevOps. The goal is not Cloud. The goal is value, time to value, safety, happiness, and quality."
Jonathan Smart and Simon Rohrer are the co-authors of “Sooner Safer Happier”. In this episode, Jon and Simon shared how we can deliver better outcomes in a more humane way of working, by delivering better value sooner, safer, and happier. They shared several principles, patterns, and anti-patterns described in the book, such as focusing on outcomes, the leadership as team number one, intelligent flow, creating alignment, and having the ability to unlearn and relearn.
Listen out for:
- Career Journey - [00:03:41]
- The Age of Digital - [00:06:29]
- Patterns & Anti-Patterns - [00:11:15]
- Better Value Sooner Safer Happier (BVSSH) - [00:13:18]
- Focus on Outcomes - [00:17:06]
- Empower the How - [00:19:28]
- Role of Leadership - [00:23:30]
- Leadership Team is Team #1 - [00:26:41]
- Intelligent Flow - [00:31:28]
- Stop Starting, Start Finishing - [00:34:43]
- Building Alignment - [00:36:48]
- Limited Velocity to Unlearn and Relearn - [00:40:10]
- 4 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:43:41]
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Jonathan Smart’s Bio
Jonathan Smart is co-founder and CEO of Sooner Safer Happier, a thought leader and a coach. He has been an agile and lean practitioner since the early 1990s and the lead author of the award winning and bestselling ‘Sooner Safer Happier: Patterns and Antipatterns for Business Agility’. He is also the founder of the Enterprise Agility Leaders Network, a member of the Programming Committee for the DevOps Enterprise Summit, a member of the Business Agility Institute Advisory Council, a guest speaker at London Business School, and speaks at numerous conferences a year.
Simon Rohrer’s Bio
Simon Rohrer has been a hands on practitioner across both software engineering and enterprise architecture for over twenty-six years, and has had a passion for agile software development since picking up the eXtreme Programming white book in 1999. He’s passionate about an eclectic and pragmatic approach to modern ways of working, incorporating lean, agile, systems thinking, DevOps and other principles and practices at the right pace and in a human context in enterprises, typically with a legacy of existing technology and a drive to do things better.
Follow Jonathan and Simon:
- Jonathan Smart’s LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/jonathansmart
- Simon Rohrer’s LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/simonrohrer
- Website – soonersaferhappier.com
- Slack – soonersaferhappier.com/community
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