Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Jurgen Appelo about the crisis in the agile community. We explore how the agile job market has changed with diminishing roles for agile coaches and scrum masters. And we discuss what people can do now that the agile consulting and training gold rush is over. We talk about the poor quality of a…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with William Malek about the Haier operating model. Haier, a Chinese appliance giant, transitioned from a failing state-owned enterprise to a highly profitable publicly owned organisation with over 5,700 micro enterprises and $50 billion in revenue. We explain how Haier uses an internal marketplace…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Steve Spear, author of a High Velocity Edge, Wiring the Winning Organization and Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System. We discuss how good leaders create a system that makes it easy for people to do quality work when and where it's needed by continually asking, what's the problem a…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Gene Kim, leader of the Enterprise Technology Leadership Conference and author of the Phoenix and Unicorn Projects. Gene describes how DevOps research shows that excellent socio-technical leadership is critical to team success and failure. He explains how technical leaders can dramatically inc…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Arnold Stroobach about the Buurtzorg organization, which decentralized its management and administration to small cross-functional self-managed teams that deliver in-home medical care. Buurtzorg is the Netherlands largest provider of home care with 16,000 clinical staff in more than 1500 local…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Chris Jones from the Silicon Valley Product Group about the product operating model, emphasising the importance of cross-functional agile product teams. He shares insights on transitioning to a product model. The value of rapid experimentation, product leadership and common pitfalls. And he di…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Woody Zuill about mob programming. Woody explains the concept of mob programming where a cross-functional software development team focuses on completing one feature at a time. Woody describes how mobbing has increased the effectiveness of development teams he's worked with by 10 times while r…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Joel Tosi and Dion Stewart about Dojo's. Dojo's are a six week immersive learning experience where teams learn and practice new ways of working on real work with skilled coaches. We discuss the structure and implementation of Dojos, chartering, coaching dynamics, and frequent feedback loops. W…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they discuss product management with John Cutler, famous for his newsletter The Beautiful Mess. We dive into the purpose of product management as a driver of profitable growth. And we discuss how to use the north star framework to align your organisation around common goals. We examine how to use product roa…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they discuss UX research with Dr. Nick Fine. Nick explains what to expect from a UX researcher, how to do user research well, and the challenges that researchers have to overcome to obtain valid results. Whether you're a product manager, designer, or developer this episode is packed with actionable insights,…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they discuss the Vanguard method with Ibbi Hussain, one of the founding architects of this revolutionary approach to organisation change. Ibi describes how the Vanguard method uses systems thinking, service design, and occupational psychology to make profound improvements to call center performance. Join us …

Welcome to our 100th episode. In this episode, we talk about what we've learnt from our guests about agile, product development and leadership. We discuss what the podcast is about and why we started it. We unpack our critical take on fake agile and discuss agile leadership and product development. Join us as we take a deep dive into the insights, …

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Evan Leybourn from the Business Agility Institute about business agility. We discuss how to define and measure business agility, examples of agile organisations, and the struggle with traditional bureaucratic models. We delve into the different types of leadership, the nature of internal cultu…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Ron Westrum about how organisational culture drives innovation and disaster. We discuss generative, bureaucratic and pathological cultures, using real-world examples from NASA, Boeing and others. This episode highlights the importance of leadership integrity, openness, honesty, the free flow o…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Jack Skeels about agile for digital and marketing agencies. Jack advocates for reducing the managerial overhead in organisations to promote productivity and improve communication. We discuss common hurdles in agile implementations. The value of a manager as a sports coach. The importance of sc…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they discuss objectives and key results with Adrian Howard. Adrian explains how OKR's can be used as a strategic instrument for aligning goals within your organisation. We walk through common pitfalls and misconceptions emphasizing the importance of using OKR's focused on outcomes rather than outputs. We dis…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as discuss business agility and the heart of agile with Mike Leber. We talk about how the heart of agile liberates you from rigid process frameworks by focusing on collaboration, delivery reflection and improvement. We talk about how the agile industrial complex has turned agile into a heavyweight waterfall pro…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Jason Knight on the state of product management. Jason shares his insights and experiences on the responsibilities of a product manager, the evolving nature of the role. Differentiating buyer and user features the importance of testing and validating ideas. Supporting cross-functional teams an…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Michael Lloyd about dysfunction mapping. Whether you are new to the agile world or a seasoned professional, you'll find valuable insights as we delve into understanding team dynamics, honing the coaching process. And the essential principle of iterative hypothesis testing. Join us as we learne…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they as they chat with Bianca Grizhar about developing digital products in China. We discuss the cultural differences between Germany and China, and how Scrum improved team collaboration. We talk about the benefits of working directly with people offshore in cross functional, cross organisational teams. Whet…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they as they chat with Gabrielle Benefield, the inventor of the Mobius loop, an outcome focused delivery framework. Gabrielle shares her journey in agile product development from Silicon valley to Yahoo. And the importance of focusing on outcomes of outputs and improving decision speed. We discuss why organi…

Join Murray Robinson as he chats with Maarten Dalmijn about Sprint Goals. We discuss how sprint goals should act as a primary mission for a sprint, around which everyone's tasks should revolve, rather than focusing on individual deliverables. We talk about challenges to implementing this approach, the importance of measuring outcomes over output, a…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Joe Justice about how Tesla and Space X have developed a new operating model based on self-organising teams that continuously discover, deliver, and improve to achieve a thousand year goal. It's like the most radical combination of open space agility, OKR's, Continuous Discovery, Continuous De…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Ivar Jacobson about Essence; a standard to develop patterns and pattern libraries that is being used by Scrum, SAFE, Lean and Kanban organisations. We discuss object oriented software engineering, use cases, UML, RUP, Essence and AI assisted method coaching. Join us to hear from one of the fou…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Stephen Bungay about the art of action. What can managers learn about leading in uncertain conditions from military history and modern NATO tactics? Military history shows that predictive plans and standard operating procedures work well when we are doing the same thing a thousand times, but f…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Jose Corella about how leadership principles from the US air force can be applied in civilian organizations. Discover how effective leaders empower teams to think critically and take initiative to achieve the goal. Learn about mission command red team thinking, servant leadership and the power…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Jennifer Pahlka about her new book, Recoding America. Why government is failing in the digital age and how we can do better. In this episode, we discuss why governments at all levels produce poor quality online services, like healthcare.gov in the US, that cost of fortune and a very difficult …

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Jeff Patton about product thinking and user story mapping. Jeff emphasises that product thinking focuses on outcomes, not output. He explains that product market fit requires a deep understanding of customers and users problems and a balance of customer desirability, business value and technic…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Ryan Lysne a product director at Amazon in charge of the Amazon app, the content creator economy and worldwide events. We ask whether Amazon is agile and discuss the structure of Amazon product teams. Then we talk about the 10 step product management cycle that Amazon product teams use. We tal…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Peter Lam, a management consultant specialising in fixing agile transformations. We delve into the value of consulting playbooks. The debate around centralised agile approaches and the disconnect between executives and workers. We examine why organisations often revert to bureaucracy after sub…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they discuss agile project management with certified scrum trainer, Jem Jelly (Jem D'jalel). We ask whether agile project management is possible or if it contradicts the principles of agile. We debate whether projects are inherently predictive, siloed, and staged or whether they can be adaptive fluid and cro…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Jim Highsmith, one of the authors of the agile manifesto. We discuss the history of software development from the wild west to structured methods. The agile movement and the courageous leaders who implemented it . We talk about what agile is. The agile mindset. The problems agile solves and wh…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Pawel Huryn about product management. What it is, and isn't? How to motivate teams and what makes a product succeed. We discuss the difference between product management, which focuses on discovery and project management, which focuses on delivery. And how to do both at the same time in one em…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Stefan Wolpers about scrum anti-patterns. We discussed common Anti-patterns such as a scrum master assigning tasks to a disempowered team and the solution for them. And we discuss why these anti-patterns keep occurring. The problems with scrum master education and training and the big consulti…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Brendan Marsh about what it was like to work at Spotify. How Spotify's agile ways of working are just a way to achieve the speed to market and speed to learning that their leaders feel are its key competitive advantage against bigger and better funded companies . How the Spotify model really w…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they discuss the fundamentals of product management with Roman Pichler, author of agile product management with scrum. What is a product manager? What is a product? What's the difference between a product and a project? What's the difference between a product owner and a product manager? How do you know what…

 In this episode, we discuss the sad state of the agile industry with Michael Kusters and Brett Maytom. We talk about how the agile brand has been destroyed by con artists, life coaches and big management consulting firms. People who provide poor quality advice to clients because they've never been part of a good agile team. We talk about why clien…

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 th…

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 w…

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 te…

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 …

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 …

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 collabor…

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…

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…

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 intervie…

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 t…

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 …

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 develop…

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 backl…