No Nonsense Agile Leadership

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Howard Podeswa about agile business analysis. What do business analysts do? What's its value? Why are big requirements up front, a bad idea? And how do we do business analysis in an agile way? How do we do use cases and user story maps and how do we break them down into user stories? What's the relationship with the product owner? Business an...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with veteran developer, Jonathan Crossland about Ammerse, a value based decision making guide for products and teams. Ammerse is a mnemonic for agile, minimal, maintainable, environmental, reachable and solvable. Jonathan walks us through how to use these ideas to understand what we value now and what we should place more value on based on our con...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Rich Mironov about the problem with sales led development. It’s easy for B2B enterprise companies to fall into a sales lead development model where the majority of development work is customisation starving the core product of resources for innovation, new features, quality improvements and technical resilience. The end result is frustrated p...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Donna Spencer from Maker X about user experience design in empowered product teams. We discuss user research, information architecture, and visual design. And the problem with the way UX is often done in traditional teams and agile teams. We discuss the value of having a UX person embedded in a product team and the responsibility UX designers...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Al Shalloway about Amplio and the movement back to pattern libraries to improve knowledge work. As lean and agile have become commercialised they've become rigid, bureaucratic frameworks that disempower teams and prevent us from improving. Pattern libraries set us free. When we learn patterns like the concept of bottlenecks we are able to see...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Jim Benson, author of personal Kanban, about his new book, the collaboration equation. Jim describes how Kanban allows teams to focus and see bottlenecks so they can resolve them. He explains how organizations starve people of information, safety and purpose and describes how to build collaborative systems that give people the information the...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat about their experience with start ups and scale-ups venture capitalists and corporate innovation. We talk about manager's fear of innovation, innovation theatre, and some models that organisations could use to be far more innovative than they are now.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: |  Spotify  |  Apple Podcasts  |  Google P...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they discuss mission command with Eric Lopez, a management consultant, CEO and retired US Army Colonel who commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eric explains how mission command allows leaders to decentralize tactical decisions so that people on the ground can take initiative to achieve the mission in a volatile and uncertain environment. Mission comma...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Teresa Torres, a product coach, speaker, and author of continuous discovery habits. She explains how product managers, designers, and software engineers can use continuous discovery to ensure that they're building the right product and continuously improving it over time. In this interview, you'll learn to balance action with research so...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Dan Olson, author of the lean product development playbook. A practical guide to building products that customers love. Most new products fail on most new features are rarely used. Dan describes a practical six step process to improve your chances of building successful products.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | ...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Anabela Cesário VP of product ops at OutSystems, a low code development platform. Anabela  describes what product ops is and how her team mentors, coaches, supports and trains 25 product managers. From setting up the product board tool to training people in continuous discovery, providing standard data for product reporting and managing...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Jonathan Hall about implementing Continuous Delivery. CI/CD requires a level of test automation that seems impossible for most organisations. Jonathan describes a practical implementation path to CI/CD that everyone can do. Start by changing the role of QA to focus on pairing with developers to write good automated tests. Automate tests...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Jeff Gothelf about Lean UX and Sense and Respond. Lean UX explains how to do UX design and product development in a highly agile way. The core of Lean UX is the canvas, a facilitation tool for collaboratively collecting and testing product hypotheses. The key output is a prioritised backlog of discovery experiments. Sense and respond is...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Adam Thomas about Product Survival Metrics. Empower the product team to make decisions quickly in uncertain situations by negotiating clear boundaries for the product team. Negotiate boundaries with stakeholders early. Use data to track your progress. When your heading towards a boundary make decisions to stop, pivot or invest. Product d...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Christian Crumlish about the intersection between UX Design and Product Management. The risk of designing the wrong product is high. Customer research reduces that risk and uncertainty early. Product Development is a process of continuously learning, building and adapting. You can start anywhere in the cycle if you keep looping through i...

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 rep...

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....

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 determ...

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,...

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 Collabora...

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...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Simon Wardley about Wardley maps. Wardely maps are a discussion tool that surfaces assumptions about competitive landscapes. Starting with the customer, we draw the value chain of components that we need to meet their goal and then identify what stage each component is in the evolutionary lifecycle. Is a component a custom build, a produ...

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...

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 do...

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 democratisat...