08. Pricing, Alignment, and Hard-wired Deadlines

Andy Hunt on Greater Than Code, David Sohmer on SPAMCast, Josh Seiden on Scrum Master Toolbox, Tim Herbig on The Product Experience, and Wyatt Jenkins on Product Love. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email [email protected]. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting April 1, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ANDY HUNT ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Andy Hunt with hosts Janelle Klein, Avdi Grimm, and Jessica Kerr. Andy talked about the origin of his book The Pragmatic Programmer and his workshops on iterative and incremental development where he has students play Battleship while making all their shots upfront. He talked about one of my favorite iteration strategies, the walking skeleton, which he introduced back in 2000 in the same book. He talked about the need people have to be given an estimate and how it comes from a cognitive bias to have closure. He also talked about why scaling Agile doesn’t work at a lot of places: people are ignoring the context that made Agile work for the pilot teams. He suggests that instead of trying to “lock it down”, you should “open it up.” iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/120-expect-the-unexpected-with-andy-hunt/id1163023878?i=1000431206698&mt=2 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/expect-the-unexpected DAVID SOHMER ON SPAMCAST The Software Process and Measurement Cast podcast featured David Sohmer with host Tom Cagley. David started by saying that a key ingredient for an agile or lean transformation is to first help the organization understand the “why” of the transformation because things are going to get worse before they get better by design and when that happens, it is good to have already discussed the “why” so that the focus can always be on how to fix the problems that come up rather than falling back to the old way of doing things. This deeply resonated with me because I have seen people fall back to the old ways of working even after half-heartedly trying and even actually succeeding with more agile ways of working because their expectations were so different from reality, especially about the amount of work they would have to put in to see results. David also talked about the shift away from individual contributors and toward self-organizing multi-skilled teams and how this can be controversial in organizations that have weak teams and strong individual contributor heroes. He says part of the trick is getting people who actually want to be T-shaped rather than specialists. He went on to talk about intermediary groups who are not on the business side or the technology side but want to be the handoff between the two and create the documentation and have control and power in the organization and are quite destructive to the relationship between technology and the business. He talked about the things he aimed for during the transformations he has done such as ensuring XP technical practices are part of the transformation and he listed the things he tried to avoid. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/spamcast-536-executives-view-agile-transformations/id213024387?i=1000430995898&mt=2 Website link: http://spamcast.libsyn.com/spamcast-536-an-executives-view-of-agile-transformations-an-interview-with-david-sohmer JOSH SEIDEN ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Josh Seiden with host Vasco Duarte. Josh talked about how, in the early days, there was a focus on producing beautiful deliverables: wireframes, research reports, personas and other work on paper that teams had to interpret and act on. He described Lean UX as way of working in the UX problem space with less focus on deliverables and more focus on results. Josh described the “lean” in Lean UX as coming from knowing that the work we do with technology is filled with uncertainty, so the best way forward in those environments is to test our assumptions continuously. The activities of Lean UX then become: declaring assumptions, writing hypotheses, and thinking about your work as tests and experiments to help you learn. The people doing the work of Lean UX, he says, are small, cross-functional, colocated, collaborative teams that minimize handoffs and get different points of view that build on each other’s ideas. Vasco asked Josh how he defines the minimum viable product. Josh prefers the Eric Ries definition in which it represents the least amount of work that one can do to learn what one needs to learn next. Vasco also asked Josh what he means when he uses the word experiment. Josh clarified the difference between an experiment in the product development sense from simply abdicating decision-making. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/bonus-josh-seiden-on-lean-ux-toolbox-for-product-owners/id963592988?i=1000431422661&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2019/03/podcast/bonus-josh-seiden-on-lean-ux-a-toolbox-for-product-owners-and-agile-teams/ TIM HERBIG ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE The Product Experience podcast featured Tim Herbig with hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver. They discussed Tim’s new book, Lateral Leadership, and what he means by the title. He describes it as how to lead and influence people without formal authority. From conversations Tim had with product people, not many of them are aware that they have a leadership responsibility, but the implicit expectation from the environments and the stakeholders is that they step into leadership responsibility. He talked about how he recommends product people attend developer community-of-practice meetings to listen, learn how to ask better questions, show that they care, and gain credibility. Randy asked about warning signs of ineffectiveness as a lateral leader. Tim said a big warning sign is when people become resigned to just ask for more granular specs to simply get their job done. He says that this would show an unhealthy hierarchy in the team. Another potential warning sign is whether your peers feel safe about opening up about what really makes them struggle at work in the environment you have created. Lily asked about what tools Tim uses to set the mission or goal for the team. He referenced Stephen Bungay’s mission briefing idea from The Art Of Action. Tim likes the mission briefing because it helps you develop a shared language together and it lets product teams and the people within them have the autonomy to succeed in their specific job by improving the clarity you create up front. Randy compared the Bungay Mission Briefing framework to Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Tree concept. Lily asked whether the mission briefing is defined by just the product manager and team or other stakeholders as well. Tim says that, in the early stages of an idea, he uses it to capture his own thoughts. He may then do another iteration with the team in which he holds back his input. Then he runs it by his boss and boss’s boss to ensure there is alignment and buy-in. Lily asked about what happens when you don’t get alignment. Tim started his answer by distinguishing between alignment and agreement. He then quoted Jeff Bezo’s statements on being able to disagree and commit. He sees reaching alignment as something that would allow you to get started with an idea that you can adjust along the way. He says alignment is much easier to obtain when you don’t feel the need to also get agreement before you start anything. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-influence-without-power-tim-herbig-on-product/id1447100407?i=1000431209799&mt=2 Website link: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2019/03/how-to-influence-without-power-tim-herbig-on-the-product-experience/ WYATT JENKINS ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Wyatt Jenkins with host Eric Boduch. After a discussion of Wyatt’s career journey from disc jockey to product manager at Shutterstock, Optimizely, and now Patreon, they got into a discussion about the why and how of market-testing your features and ideas. For Wyatt, such tests are about understanding customers better and de-risking product ideas before rolling them out. Some of Wyatt’s favorite kinds of tests are the price tests that were popular at Shutterstock. Eric related how pricing seems to be particularly challenging for product managers. They got into a discussion of pricing tests like the painted door test and what to do for the customers who signed up for a service at prices lower and higher than the final chosen price at the end of the test. Eric asked what Wyatt would recommend to a product manager wanting to learn about pricing. Wyatt recommended the book Monetizing Innovation and he recommended reading up on the stories of the companies that have had some of the most successful pricing changes and some of most disastrous ones. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/wyatt-jenkins-joins-product-love-to-discuss-pricing/id1343610309?i=1000431181574&mt=2 Website link: https://productcraft.com/podcast/product-love-podcast-wyatt-jenkins-svp-of-product-of-patreon/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing [email protected]. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website: https://www.thekguy.com/ Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus