Talking Product

In this episode of Talking Product, Collin and I discuss a tension we increasingly see inside organisations: digital capability is becoming an enterprise survival issue rather than a technology optimisation issue. Unlike some of our previous episodes, this is less a discussion about a single topic and more a conversation between two practitioners trying to reconcile lived experience with organisat...

In this episode, Collin and I continue building our list of questions to help increase the chances of your AI investments delivering a return. We focus in particular on the role non-technical C-level leaders should play in this effort. We use Chip Huyen’s AI Engineering as a practical framework, exploring how it gives digital leaders and non-technical senior managers a structured way to engage mor...

A significant number of AI initiatives are consuming budget and executive attention, while failing to reach production or deliver measurable value. Episode 12 of Talking Product helps you pressure-test your organisation's AI spend today.  In this episode, Collin and I use a Financial Times article as a springboard for a conversation about the state of AI initiatives in large organisations. The art...

In this episode, Collin shares a case about a leadership team building a hardware and software product. We dig into this case because it highlights familiar product dynamics—great, passionate people, working to tight deadlines, but stuck in semi-siloed patterns and not really operating as one team. Each group pushes its own goals but isn’t fully aligned on the end game. And when the product leader...

In Episode 10, Collin and I dive into a question I was asked during an interview: “We do an offsite with our leadership team, and it’s a great couple of days… but once we’re back in the day-to-day, it all sort of disappears. As a coach, how do you help with that?”   The question has lingered with me for quite some time, and I thought it would be an interesting topic to unpack with Collin. In this...

What if you could measure what really matters to your customer?  In our latest episode of Talking Product, Collin and I chat with Alex Hidalgo—author of the O’Reilly book Implementing Service Level Objectives . Alex shares how Service Level Objectives (SLOs) can help teams zero in on customer priorities and bring people across the organisation together to define what really matters. SLOs are power...

In this session Collin & I use Volkswagen’s struggle to build Electric Vehicle (EV) software as a way to explore two themes: the importance of getting a digital transformation right, and the opportunity presented to competitors when large players simply cannot deliver good quality digital products. We use two articles from the Financial Times as a springboard for our conversation. The first ar...

In this last episode of our three part series, Collin and I continue to role-play an imaginary data-heavy product development project. In our last episode, Collin was granted some authority to get more involved in the project in an effort to reduce the risk that Collin felt was inherent in the delivery team’s approach. The delivery teams is a consulting firm that has been brought in by another gro...

In this episode, Collin and I continue to explore a digital product development project. Our project is heavily dependent on data and is to be delivered by an outside consulting firm. Our consulting firm says that they are are using Agile practices and principles to deliver the project, but as we learned in part 1, this team is in fact using a much more sequential “black-box” approach to  delivery...

In this session, Collin & I explore a made-up data heavy project. It is based on projects that Collin and I have experienced previously in our careers. It is very typical of many digital projects.  In this session, Collin and I are interested in exploring is the interplay between ways of working, power dynamics and the pressure to conform to the thinking of the group, within the context of a r...

We use the term "mindset shift" a lot in the digital transformation space. But what does that term actually mean? How do you facilitate the shifting of a mindset? In this session, Collin and I explore this idea of a mindset shift. We talk about why we feel it is such an important topic to examine if you hope to lead a succesful digital transformation. We put forward three “environmental conditions...

In this episode, Collin and I work at unpacking this rather ambiguous idea of a “mindset shift”, which is so often used in digital transformations. We explore how the types of questions people in leadership roles ask can help create a learning environment. Collin proposes that the types of questions people in leadership roles ask can impose a veneer of certainty onto product development, where in...

In this episode, Collin and I continue to explore the relationship between making product, learning, and facilitating organisational change. We use Collin's book, Make Learn Change as the springboard for this discussion.  In this episode Collin and I unpack some of the key beliefs that underpin Waterfall and Agile. Often we see Waterfall and Agile being juxtaposed against each other as different “...

In this first episode, Collin and I start to explore Collin's book Make Learn Change . We discuss why a fair number of so-called “Agile transformations” simply don’t lead to meaningful improvements in a company’s ability to deliver high-value products faster to customers. We talk about the importance of creating tight feedback loops with customers and the need to bring out into the open the obstac...