No Nonsense Leadership

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Willem-Jan Ageling about agile project management and leadership. A good leader focuses on the goal and the people and provides the support the team need to get there. Common anti-patterns are promising things the team can't deliver: disempowerment, micro-management, bureacratic processes, ignoring organisational blockers, watermelon reporting and pretending to be agile while reinforcing the bureaucracy. Agile is a big change. Leaders need agile training, mentoring and coaching; otherwise, they won't get it. And if they don't support agile, they will undermine it. Find the leaders who are frustrated with the bureaucracy and show them that an agile approach is a more reliable way of delivering valuable outcomes that help the organisation survive. Be outcome focused in your agile coaching. And remember that we are doing this to help the organisation thrive, not for its own sake.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | TuneIn | Audible | Podchaser |  Connect with Willem-Jan on LinkedIn or follow him at https://medium.com/serious-scrum or  https://www.seriousscrum.com/ Contact Murray via email or Shane on LinkedIn shagility.   The No Nonsense Podcast is sponsored by: Simply Magical Data

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Bryan Finster about Continuous Delivery and SAFe. Continuous delivery improves quality, productivity, value, and developers' lives. It reduces the cost of change so we can experiment and learn rapidly.  Focus on improving your process so that you can deploy working solutions every day. Ship one very small feature and see if it has value. Start with the minimum viable Continuous Delivery activities. Solving these activities is the improvement journey.  Never bypass the deployment pipeline. If the process doesn't work, fix the process.  Organise your teams around domain boundaries. Run CD Dojos. SAFE is bad because everything is tightly coupled, which means you're as fast as your slowest team. A 90-day plan is a bad plan.  We don't need a release train engineer when we have a CD pipeline.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | TuneIn | Audible | Podchaser |  Connect with Bryan on LinkedIn Contact Murray via email or Shane on LinkedIn shagility.   The No Nonsense Podcast is sponsored by: Simply Magical Data

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Scott Baldwin from Productboard. We need to shift our focus from features shipped to value created because most of the features we build arent used. We can harvest customer feedback from everybody that engages with customers to find the problems that need to be solved. Put those proposals into an ideas backlog and research them to determine value to the customer, value to the organisation, technical feasibility and cost before you build them. Develop high value features step by step, testing validity as we go. A product manager is like an orchestra conductor. Establish outcome based success metrics for your product. Bring engineers and designers into the process early and often. Present evidence to stakeholders. Prioritise based on objectives and success measures. You should talk to real customers every week.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | TuneIn | Audible | Podchaser |  Connect with Scott on LinkedIn Contact Murray via email or Shane on LinkedIn shagility.   The No Nonsense Podcast is sponsored by: Simply Magical Data

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Chris Butler about agile Product Management at Microsoft, Facebook and Google. Three core things, that product managers should do. Wrangle uncertainty, help stakeholders make good decisions and build alignment through communication with roadmaps, strategy documents, priorities and specifications. The difference between a Product Manager, Product Owner and Project Manager. Dealing with uncertainty. Map your assumptions and test them with qualitative research. Develop a strategy. Determine value. Decide what to do. Power dynamics. Hippos. Product Operations. Lean UX and Continuous Discovery. How to work with engineering teams. Product Management Patterns. Copying vs learning. Product Canvases.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | TuneIn | Audible | Podchaser |  Connect with Chris on LinkedIn Contact Murray via email or Shane on LinkedIn shagility.   The No Nonsense Podcast is sponsored by: Simply Magical Data

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Matthew Skelton about Team topologies. Siloed bureaucracies are too slow and inefficient in a fast moving agile world built on software. Use the Team Topologies patterns to redesign your organization for focused fast flow. Understanding Value Stream Aligned teams, Enabling Teams, Core Subsystem Teams and Platform teams. And the Collaboration, facilitation and Service interaction models. Cognitive load. Iteratively design your organization with the people doing the work.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | TuneIn | Audible | Podchaser |  Connect with Matthew on LinkedIn Contact Murray via email or Shane on LinkedIn shagility.   The No Nonsense Podcast is sponsored by: Simply Magical Data

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Sandy Mamoli about building great teams. Why do some teams perform well and others perform poorly. The importance of skill, trust, respect, collaboration common purpose, constructive feedback and  continuous improvement. How to deal with toxic experts and charming slackers in the team. The benefits of allowing people to choose their own teams. How to run a self selection event. Coaching managers to improve the system the team is working in. Allowing teams to select their own managers. The poor state of Agile and the problem with SAFE.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | TuneIn | Audible | Podchaser |  Connect with Sandy on LinkedIn Contact Murray via email or Shane on LinkedIn shagility.   The No Nonsense Podcast is sponsored by: Simply Magical Data

In this engaging discussion, Simon Wardley, a thought leader known for his innovative work on Wardley maps, shares insights into competitive landscapes. He explains how mapping customer needs can reveal inefficiencies and cost-saving opportunities. Simon also critiques the common pitfalls of ERP customizations and emphasizes the importance of standardized solutions. Additionally, he highlights how Wardley maps facilitate collaboration and effective decision-making, transforming organizational strategies in both public and private sectors.

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about assessing the agile capability of individuals, teams and partners. A lot of people and companies in the agile and software development space exaggerate their capability. Certifications and big brand names don't tell you much. What really matters is experience and a commitment to ongoing learning. Asking people to explain what they would do in real scenarios. You can tell whose an expert by asking them about the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches. Don't rely on big name professional services firms and consulting firms. Invest in improving your own teams capabilities. Use an apprenticeship and mentoring system. Encourage people and teams to learn and try new things.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | TuneIn | Audible | Podchaser |  Contact Murray via email or Shane in the Twitter-sphere  @shagility.   The No Nonsense Podcast is sponsored by: Simply Magical Data

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about Outcome-Driven Innovation with Tony Ulwick. Most products fail in the market because they don't meet customers' needs better than the alternatives. To succeed, we need to study the problem that customers are trying to solve, the process they use to solve it and the metrics they use to measure success. When we understand the job to be done and the outcomes to achieve, we can design a product that meets those outcomes significantly better than our competitors and be sure to win in the marketplace. Product Design, Innovation, Jobs to be done, Customer Research.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | TuneIn | Audible | Podchaser |  Connect with Tony on LinkedIn or  https://medium.com/@Ulwick And get Tony’s Jobs to be done Book for free at https://jobs-to-be-done-book.com/ Contact Murray via email or Shane in the Twitter-sphere  @shagility.   The No Nonsense Podcast is sponsored by: Simply Magical Data

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about UX design with Debbie Levitt. UX Design is research based information architecture and interaction design that requires deep expertise. Most agile teams are feature factories that build things that don't satisfy customers. Product Managers and Engineers don't have the skills and experience required to do good UX Design. The democratisation, decentralisation and prototype first approach advocated by Lean Startup, Lean UX and Marty Cagan is garbage. Design Thinking is light weight rubbish that doesn't work. Agile doesn't work for Design. UX Design should be done by UX experts in a functional team of at least five that works alongside product and engineering in a tri track agile approach. This interview is much longer than usual because Debbie asked us to do minimal editing to allow her to fully express her views.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | TuneIn | Audible | Podchaser |  Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn or https://deltacx.com/links/ Contact Murray via email or Shane in the Twitter-sphere  @shagility.   The No Nonsense Podcast is sponsored by: Simply Magical Data