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  • How to Accelerate Your Staff+ Career through Open Source Engagement

    It takes many factors for an engineer to land a Staff+ position. In this article, you’ll find how contributing and engaging to open-source can help you sharpen critical Staff+ skills like writing communication, while helping increase your visibility and the odds of landing in such a position.

  • Why You Might Need an Island of Agility

    Organizational change doesn’t happen overnight, but that doesn’t mean improving agility is impossible. Regardless of the agile approach, by creating an island of agility, we can set a course to agility while the rest of the organization catches up. The key to success is avoiding an island too small to have an impact, having a plan to grow the island, and adding islands to keep momentum.

  • Pipedrive Agile Framework: How a Unicorn Company Customized Agile Processes to Scale

    Pipedrive would not have become a unicorn company by using a standard off-the-shelf agile framework. Instead, the company created its own framework. It makes a distinction between Mission Teams versus Launchpads and relies heavily on dynamic reteaming. In Pipedrive's Agile Framework, the product managers pitch new ideas and software engineers volunteer to lead their Mission Teams.

  • Why the Dual Operating Model Impedes Enterprise Agility

    Most organizations adopt a dual approach to agility, with some parts of the organization working in an agile way that delivers value in increments, measures the response and adapts accordingly, while the “traditional” organization continues to work as it always has in a relatively top-down way. In this article, This approach must eventually be left behind after an Agile transition.

  • How to Run Your Product Department Like a Coach

    Having found what I thought was my calling as an agile coach, I took the tough decision to move sideways into Product Management in the hopes of using what I’d learned to one day run my own department. I believed that coming from coaching would allow me to see things others could not and create something special. Time will tell if I have succeeded. This is the story of where I am so far.

  • Adaptability by Agreement: Valuing Outcomes over Imposed Solutions

    In the pursuit of agile at scale, the landscape is dominated by process-driven approaches which are broken. This article explores a solution-driven rollout approach, one that puts authentic agreement on outcomes before solutions. The principles on which it is based are also effective as leadership strategies, where frameworks are resources to draw upon as people find fitting solutions.

  • Connecting Goals to Daily Teamwork

    While we all believe that goal setting is important, it’s work that often doesn’t feel quite urgent enough to be included in our daily routine. It is critical to team success for managers to implement a regular cadence that connects daily work more directly to high-level goals, removing administrative roadblocks while helping teammates focus on what matters most.

  • Reducing Cognitive Load in Agile DevOps Teams Using Team Topologies

    In this article we will be sharing our experience from 12 months of adopting certain management and organisational insights from the book Team Topologies. It explores how we identified areas of responsibility and assigned those into mostly customer-facing domains which could be given to our teams. It shows how an inverse Conway manoeuvre can be used to improve the architecture.

  • Making Agile Work in Asynchronous and Hybrid Environments

    Making Agile work in the age of hybrid and remote teams requires extra effort to stay aligned and collaborative. This article explores how development teams can stay agile, even when face-to-face collaboration isn’t an option, by using visual collaboration to build context and alignment, and adopting new practices for engaging meetings.

  • Chaos Engineering and Observability with Visual Metaphors

    This article introduces a new actor for visualising chaos engineering and observability: metaphors. It provides the conceptual foundations of chaos engineering and observability, presents a state of art of visualisation techniques available in the market and shows how treemaps, gauge charts, geocentric and city metaphors can enrich the spectrum of the visual strategies to observe the chaos.

  • Improving Your Estimation Skills by Playing a Planning Game

    Underestimation is still the rule, rather than the exception. One bias especially relevant to the estimation process is the planning fallacy. This article explores the planning fallacy and how we are vulnerable to it. It explains how you can reduce your vulnerability to this fallacy through playing a planning game that has been specifically devised to help mitigate it.

  • Dynamic Value Stream Mapping to Help Increase Developer Productivity

    We explore the value stream optimization technique that has proven useful across a number of industries yet is still emerging in the software field. Explore a number of dynamic value stream map practical cases, and see the industry differences in value stream usage between Lean and Agile.

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