

Engineering Culture by InfoQ
InfoQ
Software engineers, architects and team leads have found inspiration to build better, high performing teams by listening to the weekly InfoQ Podcast. We have achieved that by interviewing some of the top CTOs, engineers and technology directors from companies like Uber, Netflix and more. Over 500,000 downloads in the last 3 years.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Oct 8, 2019 • 35min
Jeff DeLuca on FDD and Transforming Large Organisations to Product Thinking
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jeff DeLuca, founder of Feature Driven Development and an early agile development pioneer, on the background to FDD, Java modelling with colour and transforming large organisations to product thinking.
Why listen to this podcast:
• The first value statement of the Agile Manifesto (Individuals and interactions over processes and tools) is the key to agility, and yet agile is often equated with processes and tools today
• In the traditional, siloed environment, the structure that delivers value (the project) is transient and moving to a NoProjects/product structure results in better outcomes and higher value for the whole organisation
• Aligning KPIs and metrics with business outcomes across the whole cross functional team results in faster problem resolution and better products
• Changing just one part of the organisation can have very detrimental impacts on other parts and can be detrimental overall and needs to be approached with care
• Be wary of salespeople selling silver bullets – there is no easy answer and simple solution to the complex problems organisations face when brining in new ways of working
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2ASa1bq
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Sep 30, 2019 • 31min
Jeremy Kriegel on Design Innovation and Doc Norton on Tuckman was Wrong
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.
In this podcast, recorded at the Agile India 2019 conference, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, first spoke to Jeremy Kriegel about design innovation and then with Doc Norton about why Tuckman was wrong and how dynamic reteaming makes organisations more resilient.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Working to bring the design and agile communities together because there is a lot of synergy between and unfortunately there has been a lot of antagonism between practitioners in the two fields
• Agile done well compliments UX and design, however some of the agile anti-patterns have burned UX designers
• UX designers think holistically because customers experience products as complete things, they don’t experience them in pieces and if the product is built in pieces and those pieces don’t form a cohesive whole then the user experience is compromised
• When developers watch someone struggle with their product there’s a dramatic change in the way teams approach their work
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2nQUi9h
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Sep 23, 2019 • 26min
Judy Rees on Effective Remote Meetings
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Judy Rees about making remote meetings effective, clean language, the series of articles she is curating for InfoQ and the upcoming remote meeting that our listeners/readers are invited to participate in.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Remote meetings and the need for remote collaboration is not new
• Real, interactive, participative meetings and training conducted over video conference is now possible
• When you are in a remote meeting, each person who participates in the meeting brings a part of the meeting room with them
• Quality of conversations matters; if you want high-quality conversations then you need to allow time for human, social interactions
• By having participants turn on their cameras you make the video meeting more compelling than the distractions around the participants
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2mcbhlt
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Sep 9, 2019 • 17min
Deborah Hartmann Preuss on Creating Joyful Workplaces
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.
In this podcast, recorded at the Agile India 2019 conference, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Deb Preuss about life coaching, creating joyful workplaces, diversity and inclusion.

Sep 2, 2019 • 25min
Dave Thomas & Andy Hunt on the 20th Anniversary Edition of The Pragmatic Programmer
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to David Thomas and Andrew Hunt about the 20th Anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer.
Why listen to this podcast:
• The importance of curiosity and the mindset of “still figuring it out”
• When you optimize, standardize and make things the same you crush any hope of getting it right
• The real spirit of agility is about constantly monitoring what you are doing, constantly trying small changes and constantly getting feedback
• The 20th Anniversary Edition of The Pragmatic Programmer was updated to be relevant for today’s context
• Software developers are able to write the future – which comes with incredible responsibility
• Software developers have the responsibility to use their best efforts to explore how their software will be used and how they will mitigate the potential bad uses of the products they build
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2LqaZAD
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Aug 26, 2019 • 20min
Portia Tung on Coaching, Playful Leadership and the Importance of Play at Work
In this podcast recorded at QCon London 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Portua Tung from the School of Play about agile coaching, helping individuals and organisations adopt a playful leadership style and the importance of play in the workplace.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Being a coach is learning to become your whole person so you can enable others to live at their full potential
• The characteristics of playful leaders are they take calculated risks, they look after their people and are results focused
• True Play is fair play, safe play and being a good sport even in tough
• Playful leadership is a collection of tools and techniques that enable you to adopt a playful mindset, even when under pressure
• There is scientific evidence that laughter IS a great medicine
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/341jKcD
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Aug 20, 2019 • 24min
Randy Shoup on Creating High-Performance Cultures
In this podcast recorded at QCon London 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Randy Shoup, VP of Engineering at WeWork about what is needed to create a high-performance culture.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Theory X leaders believe that people are inherently lazy and need extrinsic motivation which results in micromanagement and disempowerment
• Theory Y says that people are intrinsically motivated and want to perform well, the role of management is to remove impediments and enable people to do their best
• Organisations with generative cultures based on trust and learning consistently perform better than bureaucratic cultures based on rules and standards
• The worst performers are characterised by pathological cultures based on fear and threat
• With a piece of software, it doesn’t matter how much effort we’ve put in to producing it, if we haven’t shipped it there is no value
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2KI6vWW
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Aug 12, 2019 • 20min
Sarah Wells on FT’s Transition to DevOps
In this podcast recorded at QCon London 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Sarah Wells, Technical Director for Operations and Reliability at the Financial Times about their adoption of DevOps.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Adopting DevOps is both a technology and a very significant culture change
• It’s a big change for most developers to be operating the software they build and if you haven’t done it before, it’s terrifying
• A safe culture means not looking for blame but focusing on how to fix and how to prevent things that do go wrong
• The need for a really good relationship between technical teams and product people in order to explain the benefits of investing in technology improvements vs new features
• Do everything you can to reduce the need for coordination with any external teams, because that slows you down
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2MbN8r2
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Aug 5, 2019 • 38min
A. Dobson on Balancing Risk and Psychological Safety and K. Kirk on Escaping Organisational Hell
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.
In this episode recorded at QCon London 2019 Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, first spoke to Andrea Dobson on balancing risk and psychological safety and Katherine Kirk on escaping organisational hell.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Where people work together we see behaviours that need coaching and that’s where organisational psychologists provide value
• Psychological safety is necessary in order to be able to mitigate risks
• Teams need to build habits that promote safety – ask more questions rather than blaming, and look for learning opportunities
• There is a lot to learn from Eastern philosophy about empowering people to solve their own problems rather than solving it for them
• One of the main reasons that organisation “transformations” don’t stick is due to the ingrained habits that haven’t been changed
• Frequently the issue is that the effort involved in changing habits wasn’t taken into account when the transition plan was established
• There are some common patterns which inhibit organisational change, these include: aversion, desire, restlessness (or busyness), dullness (exhaustion) and oscillating doubt
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2Kg2NTX
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Jul 11, 2019 • 29min
Tim Falls on Developer Relations, Open Source, Free Education and Ethics
In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Tim Falls of Digital Ocean about developer relations, the importance of embracing and providing open-source software, the need to offer free education in software development and the importance of ethics in education.
Why listen to this podcast:
• There is a need to take a more open and community-based approach to business
• Taking an open-source viewpoint means you can build products and give them away for free while still building a sustainable business
• If you’re solving a real problem for your customers, they will happily pay you for your solution
• Not only can this approach build a successful business; it is a more enjoyable way of going about things
• We need more and more people able to build software and providing free online education will enable the whole industry to grow
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2Y3zWKi
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
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Check the landing page on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2Y3zWKi