PITA 060
How do you introduce new ways of working to a team you've just joined? They claim to use agile ways of working but it looks more like waterfall.
Christina Wodtke’s The Team that Managed Itself - the team contract
Retrospectives - identify the problems the team sees, and implement change around those things. But they have to be GOOD/USEFUL retros
Why are they doing things this way? (Chesterton’s fence )- Discover the underlying causes
Help them solve a problem that they can’t currently get over
Forget Agile vs Waterfall - no one really cares if they’re doing it ‘right’, they care if it works for them
DORA metrics for devs, SPACE framework (for delivery related topics)
Christoph’s Product Model Workshop
Have 1:1 coffees - run discovery on the team
What do you do when there's no actual strategy from management?
Teams often are missing situational awareness - how the organisation works (business model, understanding of customer needs, understanding of market, understanding of value chain).
Look at past decisions, and how the organisation makes decisions - there’s a difference between writing down an ambition and operationalising it
Do they think they have a strategy? Is the mis-alignment obvious?
Make one up - based one that the company is doing - and let people disagree with it
Where folk are spending money/people is often a useful clue to whether reality & fluffy statements are differing :-)
Can you measure if you’re making progress?
Don’t argue about whether it’s a strategy - work on making sure that people understand if progress is being made. And understand if the things being done line up towards supporting progress.
Strategy: As a recommended read (because everyone recommended this) Turn This Ship Around is pretty fun reading, even better audiobook
Is there really resistance to change? Or is it cliché?
Changing habits is hard
Motivation and Benefits are core to the topic - what’s in it for me (WIIFM)?
How the change is implemented is key.
“It was always like that, and that’s fine.”
A spectrum from Core Belief to easy to change.
Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns’ Fearless Change books are really nice — talking about patterns of change and where they do/don’t work.
Org Change vs. Individual Change
Muscle Memory/Inertia
What does the environment support/naturally lead to? / Way of least resistance.
Why is your way better than mine?
Should product managers design? How (if at all) have you seen team sizes change during this downturn?
Hard role splits are stupid. More fluid roles are coming up more often - like UX engineers, UX who also do visual design
Approaches to team design - Wardley map example, Team Topologies
In some cases, I’m seeing teams merged (bigger teams), which is causing different issues (coordination, alignment)
More of an internal agency for design
Hiring or acquiring specialist skill sets requires more justification/business case
The specialists were laid off or asked to take on more generalist roles, and the pipeline for hiring broke
Meta said they’ll use AI to replace junior/mid-level developers