Interview with The No Nonsense Agile Podcast.

So, I have been involved in software and digital product development for a little more than 20 years, I got my start here in the Silicon Valley area, during the last bit of the.com, boom. So my background of the mobile product trio of product design and development, I'm on the development side of the stool. So I did a bunch of web development in the.com, boom, I managed to sort of survive the crash.

Truly successful leaders are not motivated purely by financial gain. They are driven by a deeper sense of purpose. That purpose may be something technical, like the joy of mastery of a craft or skill. Or it may be something social, like the support of a particular social group. Or it may be a set of values such as justice, freedom, or compassion. But whatever it is, the pursuit of purpose has been a driving force behind the development of humanity since the dawn of civilization.

It is incumbent on leaders to not only define the terms they bandy about in their press releases and all-hands meetings, but also to take the time to ensure that everyone in the organization has a clear understanding of what they mean. Failing to do so risks creating a circumstance in which departments and silos transform into distinct cultural tribes with separate context-specific and drastically different definitions for the same words. In such a world, it is only inevitable that battle lines are drawn.

And every business person I know, whether an entrepreneur or corporate leader, has, at one point or another, complained to me about these stubborn diva engineers who, when asked to implement the tiniest new feature, throw up their hands, and say, “whoah! we’ll have to completely rewrite the system to accommodate your request! That’ll take months.”

"Great job! Now, I have a policy of paying contractors on a Net-120 day term. So, I'll send you a check in six months. If you need the money sooner, I'll be happy to deduct a convenience fee of 2-5% from the total for each month less than 120 days. Also, I am going to need to keep that rake and hedge trimmer, too. You used it on my property, so really it belongs to me now. Sound good?"

Most companies attempting to embark on an Agile or other digital transformation skip the critical step of having a clear leadership development path for their product, design, and engineering managers.

If you’re like most managers , you were promoted into management because you were a good individual contributor with some seniority, and you more or less figured out how to manage on the job. Unfortunately, you’re probably hindering their progress more than you’re helping. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a closer look at the problem.

“How long does it take to deploy your app from the time you first think of a feature to the moment it’s in front of a customer,” I asked? “In other words, what is the cycle time of your process?”

“Well, we can build anything very quickly. But deployment? You should talk to our DevOps team about that.”

Yeah, they’ve totally missed the point of DevOps.

Last week, I was standing in a conference room at a $20 billion company, facilitating a workshop on Agile. The group in attendance was made of the directors and line managers of each function in just one product line within this giant company. These dozen or so leaders, selected from UX, Engineering, and Product Management, represented a broader team of about 150 others who work on this product line. As a unit, they have recently embarked on a journey to become “Agile.”

When will the team be ready to ship?” There is probably no question we engineers hate more than that one. For as long as I have been building software, bumping up against 20 years now, I have observed engineers, engineering teams, and engineering managers squirming in their conference room chairs, frantically waving their hands, and saying just about any words they can think of — words like “dependencies” and “technical debt” and “build process” — to avoid directly answering that question.