Troubleshooting Agile

Convincing a peer can feel like painfully pedalling up a mountain, but a dose of curiosity can take you through the pass and whizzing down the other side. Listen to this episode of Troubleshooting Agile to learn more about how to approach your conversations with curiosity - as well as the few occasions when you shouldn’t, with your hosts, Squirrel and Jeffrey. Links: - Test-Driven Development for...

Is your tech team always rushing, but never improving? They may have "hurry sickness.” Listen to this episode of Troubleshooting Agile to discover if being busy is actually crippling your productivity and what you can do to change it, with your hosts, Squirrel and Jeffrey. Links: - Hurry Sickness: https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/hurry-sickness - Near Enemy: https://www.theguardian....

Maybe the reason innovation isn't happening is that no one believes you'll really accept failure. But creating some chaos to emphasise risk is OK! Listen to this episode of Troubleshooting Agile to discover how you can make innovation and failure part of your company culture, with your hosts, Squirrel and Jeffrey. Links: - Peacetime CEO vs Wartime CEO: https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceo-war...

Software has become commoditised, but that doesn’t mean there’s a race to the bottom for efficiency. An accessible foundation means what you build on top can be much more ornate. Listen to this episode of Troubleshooting Agile to discover why Squirrel and Jeffrey hold firm in their views that software isn’t dead! Links - Squirrel's commoditization tweet: https://twitter.com/douglassquirrel/status/...

Commercial and technical debt are twins: when your product is mispriced, your engineering investment is out of whack too. Listen to this episode of Troubleshooting Agile to learn how you can build product plans that scale, with special guest Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt. Links: - Ulrik’s book The Pricing Roadmap: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pricing-Roadmap-Design-Models-Customers/dp/1544536305/ref=tmm_hrd_...

If you have one product per customer and aren't charging a princely sum, you're not pricing your customers right. Listen to this episode of Troubleshooting Agile to find out how you can take lessons in pricing a train ticket and apply them to your SAAS sales, with special guest Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt. Links: - Ulrik’s book The Pricing Roadmap: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pricing-Roadmap-Design-Models...

Vague instructions from the Board or CEO are the norm, and in fact mean great opportunity. Listen to this episode of Troubleshooting Agile to discover why there's no recipe that gets the right answers to executive problems, with Squirrel & Jeffrey! Links: - The Psychology of being a CEO: https://a16z.com/2011/03/31/whats-the-most-difficult-ceo-skill-managing-your-own-psychology/ - Cynefin: https:/...

You can be your own "devil's advocate" to boost the quality of what you produce. Listen to this episode of Troubleshooting Agile to learn how and why to be self-critical, with Squirrel and Jeffrey! Links: - Devil's Advocate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_advocate - Six Thinking Hats: https://www.debonogroup.com/services/core-programs/six-thinking-hats/ -------------------------------------...

Flickr started as an online game, but the company quickly learned that they had much greater value on tap as a photo site, and "unsold" their initial customers instead of sticking to their original idea. By being curious, you can learn what the market really needs, jettison the custom-built "products" that are holding you back, and keep the right customers delighted. Listen for more on the art and...

Are you building a house of cards? On this week’s episode, Squirrel talks about how to test the value of what you’re doing using mark to market - and how not to be Silicon Valley Bank! Listen to find out why you should aim to bring new software to the market every day and what methods of testing you can use to make sure that you’re always adding value to your organisation. Links: - Mark to Market:...

Are “Try-Hards” slowing down your team? On this week’s episode, Jeffrey describes a type of person that shows up in a lot of organisations - someone who isn’t competent, but sounds like they are! Listen to find out about how you can spot (or self-identify) a “Try-Hard” by discounting their visibility and focussing only on their expertise. Links: - Hobbies article: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/0...

Are you pushing alone or pushing together? On this week’s episode, we take a closer look at how to be helpfully demanding and how to identify removable discomfort, with a story about helping a product manager who's "pushing" for progress toward a quarterly goal. Listen to find out how to approach your conversations with more curiosity, so you can uncover better solutions. Links: - Brooks on essent...

Are assumptions killing your curiosity? On the podcast this week, Squirrel and Jeffrey discuss abduction - but not the alien kind!! Listen to learn about the methods of abductive reasoning and coherence busting, and find out how you can apply the principles of Wordle to improve your outcomes. Links: - Abductive reasoning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning - Affirming the conseque...

Are you wearing a Viking helmet, sun hat or graduate cap? On the podcast this week, Squirrel and Jeffrey are joined again by fellow podcast host duo Russell and Ken of the “I Need to F-ing Talk To You” podcast. In this episode, Russell and Ken detail the "hats" they use to identify the different patterns of human behavior that affect conversations, and how they use BEEF and COACH models to improve...

Can you speed up your learning with improv? On the podcast this week, Squirrel and Jeffrey are joined by fellow podcast host duo Russell and Ken of the “I Need to F-ing Talk To You” podcast. In this episode, Russell and Ken discuss their Forum Theatre for Business methods and Squirrel considers if they’ve been missing a trick by not incorporating real actors in their conversations. Links: - Websit...

Can it really be more effective to throw out the plan? This week on the podcast, Squirrel talks about his late-night escapades at improv classes and why he’d prefer to travel to Mars in a starship, not a rocket. Join Squirrel and Jeffrey to find out how you can use improvisation to benefit your business. Links: - Squirrel's Making It Up event: https://squirrelsquadron.com/events/2023/03-23-makingi...

Scrum. XP. Kanban. Squads. Pods. Feature teams. Trying to figure out the ideal tech team structure and process? Listen to this first! On this week’s episode, Squirrel and Jeffrey discuss why the "right" choice isn’t going to solve your problems, and what you should be focusing on instead. Links: - Squirrel’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/douglassquirrel/status/1636738222955872256 - Krakow keynote 1...

Jeffrey is fresh in from IT Revolution’s DevOps Forum in Portland, where one of his takeaways was the power of streamlining and doing the absolute minimum. Join us on this week’s episode where Jeffrey discusses what tech teams can learn from the calamitous collapse and subsequent rebuilding of a highway outside San Francisco in 2007, and Squirrel shares his “Independence Day method" to discover th...

Study Groups are a great way of developing new skills in the team and strengthening the learning culture in your organisation, but if not executed currently, their impact can be limited. Listen to this week’s episode to discover how to get company-wide benefits from your study group, and why you shouldn’t look at learning activities as “perks” for your team - even if they come with pizza! Links: -...

Is there a place for Stack Ranking? Squirrel and Jeffrey concur that Stack Racking can be problematic, but Jeffrey has some ideas about where this sub-par practice comes from, which underline the importance of difficult conversations about performance no matter how you create them (even with a stack rank) Links: - Vitality Curve (Stack Ranking):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve - Poppen...

Could Chat GPT improve our conversations? While pondering a difficult conversation with an unhappy client, Squirrel took to Chat GPT to see if he could recreate the dialogue. Listen to this week’s episode to discover his findings, and learn about how you could use prompt engineering and role playing with chatbot to get better results from your conversations. Links: - ChatGPT @ OpenAI: https://chat...

This week, Jeffrey is joined by guest Elisabeth Hendrickson, who shares her powerful dream that inspired a new theory of office politics. Elisabeth and Jeffrey discuss the behaviors that lead to toxicity, and how to utilise the core value of consent to evoke positive change. Recorded live at CITCON. Links: - Elisabeth’s company, Curious Duck: https://curiousduck.io - Elisabeth’s LinkedIn: https://...

In this week’s episode, Squirrel and Jeffrey discuss how you can use emotional outcomes in your conversations to build trust and evoke more positive responses from your customers, rather than relying solely on intellectual ones. Listen to see how you can incorporate lessons from “Emotional Rugby” in your sales and customer relations, as well as across your workplace practices. Links: - “Many of us...

After last week's episode on starting before you're ready, Squirrel and Jeffrey discuss some ways you can encourage this behaviour—while still providing a safety net for participants and the wider organisation. SHOW LINKS: - Toyota Kata: https://agileconversations.com/blog/we're-the-aliens-three-ways-to-seek-safety/ - How to be helpfully demanding: https://agileconversations.com/blog/how-to-be-hel...

Squirrel and Jeffrey note examples of teams who never get started because they're aiming to do a project "right", and contrast with those who get started without being ready. SHOW LINKS: - https://twitter.com/douglassquirrel/status/1593243886180216832 --- Our book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://agileconversations.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join o...