As software product organisations grow, they can become the victims of their own sales success. Many high-priority customers and features put pressure on the engineering organisation to deliver, but even when using all the traditional ways to prioritise and optimise execution, you feel progress is slow and the overall "delightfulness" of your product is not what it should … [Read more...] about Are You Lost In All The High Priorities?
devops
A Practical Approach to Engineering Leadership
In my previous post on the new engineering leadership skills needed in a devops world, I called for a more systematic approach to developing leadership capabilities in engineering. But I gave no answers. In this post, I'll share my practical approach to developing leadership capabilities in an engineering organisation. When developing great software, there are some … [Read more...] about A Practical Approach to Engineering Leadership
Wanted: a New Set of Engineering Leadership Skills
A while ago I did a series on how key roles in the engineering organisation changes as a result of introducing devops practices. I covered the software architect, the program manager (at that time I was at Cisco and some of the projects were huge), and the product owner, but left out the engineering manager and the product manager as other priorities called. In this post, I … [Read more...] about Wanted: a New Set of Engineering Leadership Skills
The Program Manager in the Agile/DevOps Organisation
This is another post in my series on transitioning from waterfall to agile and devops processes. This post covers the program manager role, a rather unassuming role in some organisations, an important role in others, but nevertheless a role where the right person can potentially make a big impact. There are a few different types of program managers, so let me be clear on the … [Read more...] about The Program Manager in the Agile/DevOps Organisation
The Importance of the Backlog and the Product Owner
In a previous post, I wrote about the challenges and strains on roles and processes when a traditional waterfall (or even agile) organisation introduces devops. Most people focus on the tools needed and how you must establish a build pipeline and support for continuous deployment to production. However, the success of devops is in the practices of the people involved, not the … [Read more...] about The Importance of the Backlog and the Product Owner
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