No Nonsense Agile Leadership

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about Software Metrics with Tom Gilb. Tom Gilb inspired the authors of the Agile manifesto with his innovative incremental and scientific approach to Software Engineering. In this podcast we talk about Evo and Value Agile. Defining your scope with objectives and success metrics. How to measure anything. Why feature backlogs are a waste of tim...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about agile anti patterns with Todd Lankford. Patterns are common solutions to common problems. They may be good, bad or neutral. Agile anti patterns are solutions that make it harder for agile teams to achieve the goal. The top anti patterns are: unrealistic arbitrary deadlines, functional silos and managers who dont listen to or support the...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about Agile as a paradigm shift with Erik de Bos. Most organisations are slow moving bureaucracies defined by authoritarian hierarchies, rules and contracts. Agile is a completely new way of thinking and a new vocabulary which makes new concepts and information available. Agile is part of a broader social movement that's about workplace democ...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about effective agile product teams. Business people and technical people work together daily in one long-lasting customer-focused team. Roles vs Skills. The power of words. Do titles create hierarchy and functional silos within the team? T-shaped people. Should everyone be a developer? Are specialised rol eavyweight waterfall process.  And h...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Staffan Noteberg about Agile and Flow. Agile is about adapting to unexpected change. Coaches should be practitioners. Speed up your feedback loop. Set the goal and let the team get on with it. Monotasking. Set up the environment to reduce interruptions. Start small, get things working and scale out. The problem with SAFE. We need to focu...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Mary and Tom Poppendieck about Lean and Software Development. Organizations have queues because they don't care about the customer. The three rules of lean, customer focus, flow and highly efficient expert teams. Scale your organization like a micro services architecture. Its not about doing the work right its about doing the right work....

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Bruce Taylor about working with offshore teams in developing countries.  Why do people send their work offshore? Cost or talent? Is it cheaper to send work offshore or not? Outsourcing projects or augmenting the team. How to recruit the right people in a developing country. How does Agile work with people who have been brought up in a ve...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Kyle Griffin about uncertainty, complexity and change. Our requirements are probably wrong. So show people and build small bets. Our plan is likely to be wrong. So let's do things to mitigate our plan, being wrong. Our estimates are going to be wrong. So don't rely heavily on the estimates being right. Our code's going to be wrong. So de...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson for a conversation with Raj Nagappan on using Agile 2 to create awesome products. The early Agile movement was a rebellion against traditional command and control waterfall development that was failing everyone. Agile is a very important paradigm shift that has led to great improvements but it hasn't evolved as we have learnt more. Agile 2 is an evolution of A...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson for a powerful conversation with Scott Seivwright on becoming a better leader. Leading the Agile 20 Reflect conference. Building community, co-creating a vision and principles, skeletons vs exoskeletons, dealing with conflict, angry fathers and controlling managers, letting go and sharing responsibility, the responsibility process, Johari window, Transactional...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson for a debate with Michael Kusters about the pros and cons of SAFe. The Scaled “Agile” Framework for enterprises. SAFe is taking over because executives like its detailed 3-month program plans, detailed processes, hierarchical organization, and comprehensive rollout plans. SAFe has been great at sales and marketing, and it provides a great way for consultants t...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Dave Farley on Continuous Delivery. Working in a way so that our software is always in a releasable state.  Establishing fast, high quality feedback so that we can make decisions based on the reality of our customers needs and our systems state, rather than on guesses. The difference between CD, DevOps, Agile and XP. The business case fo...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Lisa Crispin on Holistic Testing. Build quality in. Continuous testing for continuous delivery. Building shared understanding of requirements. Shorten feedback loops. Moving from traditional testing to agile testing. Test automation. The test pyramid and agile testing quadrants. Business-facing tests with behavior-driven and acceptance t...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Esther Derby on Agile Coaching, Agile Leadership, Culture and Continuous Improvement. Making work more humane. Successful coaches understand the context and the content. Taking responsibility for personal growth and business outcomes. Good leadership adds a lot of value. Influencing senior managers. Underlying extractive structural patte...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Bas Vodde on LeSS. LeSS is true Scrum at Scale not just at the team level. LeSS applies the principles, purpose and elements of Scrum in a large-scale context, as simply as possible. Many scrum teams with one product, one product owner, one product backlog, one sprint, one sprint planning meeting, one sprint review and one retrospective....

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Jurgen Appelo on how to design an organisation to support self management, continuous innovation and human experience. Jurgens unFix model supports gradual change, dynamic teams, and recognises that managers play an important role. The model is inspired by innovative companies including Haier and Tesla, various agile scaling frameworks,...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Marty Cagan on Empowered Product Teams. Do discovery and delivery in one team. Discover problems worth solving, rapidly test prototypes and  develop the best ideas using an agile approach. Low and high fidelity user experience prototypes, feasibility prototypes and data prototypes. Good leaders build highly aligned loosely coupled team,...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Jason Yip about Spotify. The Spotify approach works for Spotify, but it might not work for you. Develop your product strategy first, and then design your organisation to support it using team topologies. To succeed, you need unity of purpose, trust in people and playful growth. When you have alignment, you can give people autonomy and tr...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with David Pereira about Product Leaders. Successful Product Leaders don't write requirements; they define the problem, set a goal and empower the team to get the job done.  Be curious about customers' problems but don't take their word on the solution. Constantly test your assumptions with prototypes. Get your ideas in front of a customer ea...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Alidad Hamidi about Systems Thinking. Systems Thinking is about understanding that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It is the interactions between things that drive the outcome. For example, cutting costs locally often increases costs globally. One person's solution is often another person's problem. To solve the real prob...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Steve Tendon about Tameflow and the theory of constraints. If you can find the constraint preventing the organisation from achieving its goal and address it, you can make extraordinary improvements in performance. But sadly most improvement efforts fail because they don't address the constraint in the system. We talk about how to underst...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Daniel Mezick about open leadership. What motivates people and how to get great results in a group. Organizations are social games with goals, rules and players with different resources and decision rights. Most organizations are totalitarian dictatorships with a heavy management tax. Open organizations are much more effective at harness...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Scott Middleton about his article Agile is dead. McKinsey killed it. The Agile PMO. Agile as a cost out tool. Slathering the Agile word onto everything to sell services. Do big consulting companies really understand Agile? What about people and interactions over processes and tools. What about delivering value to customers early and ofte...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Tobias Mayer about self organization and servant leadership. Everyone can be a leader. Take responsibility. Be generous and humble. Stop demotivating people. Create an environment for people to be brilliant. Create a vision, define boundaries and get out of the way.  Be a servant leader. Empowerment and anarchism. Servant leadership and...

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Maarten Dalmjin on Product Owners vs Product Managers. What are they, what's the difference between them and why does it matter? Why do we need a product manager if we have a product owner? Overwhelmed vs Absentee product owner. Supporting the Product Owner. Product discovery. The sprint bubble. The rift between product management and sc...