Kategori: Team

Empowered (book review)

Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products by Marty Cagan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Very crisp overview of what patterns make modern technology driven product company and product organization great: empowered product teams driven by a real product vision and strategy and managed by dedicated managers that know how to formulate real and exciting problem, hold teams accountable and coach people to become their better selves: servant leadership. Targeted to Product leaders, whom I’m certain there are a lot out there that need to read, understand and practice this book. A must read I will revisit many times, just like Inspired.

– An empowered team does not equal a team that decides on a company direction, a focus for a quarter or a company bet to take. That is an executive decision that the team needs to trust as much as the executives need to trust the team to know how to solve the challenge or get to the goal.
– Empowering teams have full decisional power over the problem/opportunity they are assigned, not on identifying the opportunity itself.
– Alignment is not just pointing to a north star and handing out a compas, it requires real work with teams.
– Autonomy does not mean self reliance but ownership of solving a problem that matters together with others.
– Leadership means active engagement. I call I servant leadership, but that’s anything but standing aside and let whatever happen.



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What I did and learned at Spotify

I’m leaving the band, I’m going solo.
Thanks for these 6 years Spotify,
lots of fun, lots of hard work, so many lovely people,
so much done and so much learned.
Here’s some of the most important stuff I did,
and learned on this tour,
which I will bring with me on my new tour,
as a contractor, trainer and author.

Contractor, Trainer & Author at antman.se

I joined as an agile coach,
but ended up driving coaches out of the teams,
and managers into the teams: scrum master as manager,
the missing piece in the Spotify model (never but a dream anyway).

Fortsätt läsa ”What I did and learned at Spotify”

Tillsammans – så river programmerarna företagspyramiderna

I år hade jag äran att i anslutning till Agila Sverige (2015) släppa Riv pyramiderna igen som riktig bok med den mycket bättre titeln Tillsammans – så skapar du flyt och egenmakt med agile och lean (tack till Joakim Holm för att du övertalade mig att negativa titlar är dåliga).  Den hemliga undertiteln tycker jag dock är “så river programmerarna företagspyramiderna”. Läs mer på Crisps blog.

Tillsammans

Growing up with Agile – Minimum Viable Bureaucracy at Spotify

The Spotify ‘model’ was presented in 2012 and has stired a lot of interest in the agile community and the software industry in general. In May I was asked to talk about this a the Bay Area Agile Leadership Network meetup in San Francisco (where I at that time was working as an agile coach at the Spotify office): Since 2012 Spotify has continued to grow hectically. How has agile evolved at Spotify since then? Going back in time, and following the latest structural changes makes it clear that the model was never the primary mover: instead a number of core principles and ambitions has worked as constraints on how to grow the most suitable organization for the task, with small enough structure to help but not be in the way: you could call it Minimum Viable Bureaucracy.

You can find the slides at Crisp.se.

Better meetings with the Core Protocols

Good meetings is very much about achieving deep collaboration. But collaboration is often hard. We go into meetings with different modes, intentions, and expectations. How can we make meetings both more fun and energetic? Surprisingly enough: maybe by being more formalized. Core Protocols Stack helps shaping better meetings. Here’s a workshop you can use to introduce Core Protocols to a team.

You can read more about it in this Crisp.se blogpost and get access to the presentation here.

Fluent@agile – visualizing your way of working

Help your team improve by visualizing their way working with the fluent@agile game. With the game you can help a team find out where it is on its agile journey and help it find new ways of both fine tuning and make leaps in their daily agile practices.

Me and Christian Vikström made the game together at Spotify during the spring 2014 when we were coaching and helping team to improve their agile skill sets and processes. We found the model “Agile Fluency™” developed and described by Diana Larsen and James Shore very useful. It’s based on their long experience of helping team grow agile and the different stages both teams and organizations (most) often will go through.

You can read more about it in this Crisp.se blog and get access to the Workshop instructions and game pdf.

The Pirate Ship – Growing a great crew: a workshop facilitation guide

The Pirate Ship is a workshop format that will help you grow amazing teams. It is “speed boat” on steroids. I have now been using it for a number of years, and it’s proven to be a useful and productive format.

You can read more about the format in this Crisp.se blogpost, and get access to the slides here.

Tillsammans – handbok för agila chefer

Tillsammans - den agile chefens handbok

Programmerarna är i dag Stockholms största yrkeskår sägs det numera. Det är en extremt eftertraktad grupp människor eftersom det råder sådan skriande brist på duktiga programmerare. Det gör förstås att programmerarnas arbetsplatser blir lite speciella: om jag inte trivs här står massor av andra företag och skriker efter mig. Programmerarna har därmed en alldeles speciell makt i sitt arbetsliv.

Fortsätt läsa ”Tillsammans – handbok för agila chefer”

Samarbetets mysterier på Agila Sverige 2015

Samarbete är en svår konst. De flesta organisationer har grava underskott på samarbete. Ännu saknas på många sätt förståelse för vilka mekanismer som driver och uppmuntrar samarbete. På Agila Sverige 2015 pratade jag om samarbetets mystik och gjorde några nedslag i en längre workshop om detta. Läs och se mer på Crisp.se.