Tag Archives: Agile

Brief Summary of Empowered

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Empowered, Ordinary People Extraordinary Products by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones is a must read for all Product Managers and Product Leaders. The book stresses on the need to build Empowered Products teams and talks of the importance of the role of technology and strong product leadership in building one. The book is divided into 10 parts – with a case study which sort of summarizes all the learnings

  1. Lessons from Top Tech companies
  2. Coaching
  3. Staffing
  4. Product Strategy
  5. Team Topology
  6. Product Strategy
  7. Team Objectives
  8. Case Study
  9. Business Collaboration
  10. Inspired, Empowered and Transformed

I would highly recommend this book for any one dealing with Product – Leaders, Managers, Team members. Here is a brief summary of the book –>

Brief Summary of EmpoweredDownload

Brief Summary of Escaping the Build Trap

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“Escaping the Build Trap – How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value” by Melissa Perri, is a wonderful book on Product management – a must read for Product managers. With lots of great examples, the book takes you through various concepts of Product management, the importance of Outcomes over Outputs, the need for organizations to be Product-led instead of being Sales-led how to make the Product manager effective, having a vision, strategy and initiatives for an organization and a focus on customer centricity.

The book ends with these 6 questions which help you to ensure that the company will support and encourage you to do everything you can do to succeed
* Who came up with the last feature or product idea you built?
* What was the last product you decided to kill?
* When was the last time you talked to your customers?
* What is your goal?
* What are you currently working on?
* What are your product managers like?

Here is a brief summary of the book –>

Brief Summary of Escaping the Build TrapDownload

Brief Summary of Sooner Safer Happier

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This is a brief summary of Sooner Safer Happier by Jonathan Smart.

Better Value Sooner Safer Happier (BVSSH) are outcomes and measures that apply across organizations where work is done to deliver value.
* Better is Quality – A better software product could mean fewer production incidents, faster mean time to recovery, improved static code analysis measures
* Value is in the eye of the beholder – It is unique and is articulated via quarterly business outcomes or OKRs. Value could be market share, revenue, units sold, P&L etc.
* Sooner is flow – the heart of Agile and Lean. It is about optimizing for fast and efficient flow of safe value with respect for people. Three key measures are Flow efficiency, Lead time and Throughput.
* Safer is continuous compliance or Governance, Risk and Compliance – which includes information security, data privacy, GDPR
* Happier is happier colleagues, customers, climate – about customer satisfaction and climatic responsibility.

Overall BVSSH contains two sets of outcomes – Better Safer Happier are the “How” outcomes and they measure the improvement in the system of work. Value is the “What”, the business outcome hypothesis. According to Jonathan Smart, Better Value Sooner Safer Happier balance each other. If Sooner is achieved by working people harder or cutting corners, the result will be a reduction in Better and Happier.

Overall a wonderful read with lots of good case studies illustrating these outcomes. Here is a brief summary of the book ->

Brief Summary of Sooner Safer HappierDownload

Brief Summary of “How to Lead in Product Management”

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I have been following books by Roman Pichler – having read his two earlier books Agile Product Management with Scrum and Strategize.  I feel his latest book “How to Lead in Product Management”  is more about coaching the Product Management – where he talks about the various challenges that the Product Leadership faces, and how to deal with them. And then goes into details into the Interations that the Product management needs to get into, the goals that he needs to set, the conversations he should have, managing conflicts, making effective decisions and self leadership.

I love the way he has weaved in a lot of aspects of coaching – active listening, empathy, mindfulness, non violent communication,  negotiation etc. into the book.

I found it an excellent read – here is a brief summary of the book –> Brief Summary of How to Lead in Product Management

 

Building Self Managed Teams

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We had the Scrum Day conference in Chennai on 16th February 2018 –> https://www.scrumglobalevent.com/conference/Scrum/scrum-day-chennai. The theme of the conference was “Building Self Organized Teams”. The conference had a good line up of speakers – Venkatesh Rajamani, Preeth Pandalay, Kamal Tejnani, Padmapriya Devarajan, SRV Subrahmanian, Arunkumar Kandhasamy and Sundaresan Sethuraman. The talks were followed by a round of group discussion.

My talk was on “Building Self Managed Teams”.

Here is a link the slide deck -> https://www.slideshare.net/rsrinath99/building-self-managed-teams
Here is a link to the video –> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs8NcweszSs

Brief Summary of Humble Leadership

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In their new book, “Humble Leadership – The Power of Relationships, Openness and Trust” , Edgar Schein and Peter Schein talk of new approaches to leadership which are based more on personal relationships rather than a transactional role relationships.

They talk of 4 levels of relationships that are generally accepted in society and that great leaders exhibit qualities of openness, trust, empathy to being emotionally intimate relationships.

* Level Minus 1
Total impersonal domination and coercion.

* Level 1
Transactional role and rule-based supervision, service and most forms of  professional helping relationships.
Interactions are routine and there are low levels of personal investment

* Level 2
Personal, cooperative, trusting relationships as in friendships and effective teams

* Level 3
Emotionally intimate
Total mutual commitments

This book is a great read for any one who intends to build quality relationships at work. Here is a link to a video where Edgar Schein talks more about Humble Leadership – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wJaNKIALLw

Here is a brief summary of the book –> Brief Summary of Humble Leadership

Brief Summary of “Enterprise Agility – Being Agile in a Changing world”

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This is a brief summary of “Enterprise Agility – Being Agile in a Changing World” by Sunil Mundra.  Pretty comprehensive book covering the need for Enterprise Agility and different aspects of Enterprise Agility –  Mindset and culture, Leadership, Organization structure, process, people, technology, governance and customer.  Enterprises are considered as a living system and Complex Adaptive Systems are dealt with at length.  This is a great book  to understand the different aspects of Enterprise Agility.

Here is a brief summary of the book  –> Brief Summary of Enterprise Agility

Brief Summary of “More Fearless Change – Strategies For Making Your Ideas Happen”

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Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising, in their new book “More Fearless Change”  have come out with an excellent sequel to their first book “Fearless Change” – a collection of tactics and strategies to make change happen in an organization.  As the authors say, this book is not a recipe for change but a collection of patterns which will provide ideas to  change the mindsets and behaviors of people involved in change in organizations .  Their first book had a set of 49 patterns and their second had 15 patterns.

Here is a brief summary of the 64 Change Patterns  –> Brief Summary of More Fearless Change

Brief Summary of The DevOps Handbook

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The DevOps Handbook is a truly comprehensive book on DevOps.  It covers the theory principles and practices to start off a DevOps initiative.  The book covers the whole gamut of DevOps from the cultural aspects, flow, feedback, continuous improvement, value streams, the foundations for the Deployment pipeline automated testing, Continuous Integration, , Continuous delivery and deployment, the popular tools and metrics collected, right up to integration security and compliance as part of regular work.   The case studies from Netflix, Target, Etsy, Google and others gives us a clear picture of how the concepts and principles are put into practise.

The book complements ‘The Phoenix project’ and “Lean Enterprise” in terms of content related to DevOps.

Here is a brief summary of the book  -> the-devops-handbook-summary