Talking Product

What if you could measure what really matters to your customer? 

In our latest episode of Talking Product, Collin and I chat with Alex Hidalgo—author of the O’Reilly book Implementing Service Level Objectives. Alex shares how Service Level Objectives (SLOs) can help teams zero in on customer priorities and bring people across the organisation together to define what really matters.

SLOs are...

In this session Collin & I use Volkswagen’s struggle to build Electric Vehicle (EV) software as a way to explore two themes:

1. the importance of getting a digital transformation right, and
2. the opportunity presented to competitors when large players simply cannot deliver good quality digital products.

We use two articles from the Financial Times as a springboard for our conversation. The first article, dated Jun 28, 2024 ...

In this last episode of our three part series, Collin and I continue to role-play an imaginary data-heavy product development project. In our last episode, Collin was granted some authority to get more involved in the project in an effort to reduce the risk that Collin felt was inherent in the delivery team’s approach. The delivery teams is a consulting firm that has been brought in by another group in the company. In this episode,...

In this episode, Collin and I continue to explore a digital product development project. Our project is heavily dependent on data and is to be delivered by an outside consulting firm. Our consulting firm says that they are are using Agile practices and principles to deliver the project, but as we learned in part 1, this team is in fact using a much more sequential “black-box” approach to  delivery.

For Collin and I, this is a real...

In this session, Collin & I explore a made-up data heavy project. It is based on projects that Collin and I have experienced previously in our careers. It is very typical of many digital projects. 

In this session, Collin and I are interested in exploring is the interplay between ways of working, power dynamics and the pressure to conform to the thinking of the group, within the context of a real-world delivery project. 

As Col...

We use the term "mindset shift" a lot in the digital transformation space. But what does that term actually mean? How do you facilitate the shifting of a mindset?

In this session, Collin and I explore this idea of a mindset shift. We talk about why we feel it is such an important topic to examine if you hope to lead a succesful digital transformation. We put forward three “environmental conditions” that we believe are needed to cre...

In this episode, Collin and I work at unpacking this rather ambiguous idea of a “mindset shift”, which is so often used in digital transformations.

We explore how the types of questions people in leadership roles ask can help create a learning environment. Collin proposes that the types of questions people in leadership roles ask can impose a veneer of certainty onto product development, where in actuality, certainty does not exist...

In this episode, Collin and I continue to explore the relationship between making product, learning, and facilitating organisational change. We use Collin's book, Make Learn Change as the springboard for this discussion. 

In this episode Collin and I unpack some of the key beliefs that underpin Waterfall and Agile. Often we see Waterfall and Agile being juxtaposed against each other as different “methodologies”. In this episode, I ...

In this first episode, Collin and I start to explore Collin's book Make Learn Change.

We discuss why a fair number of so-called “Agile transformations” simply don’t lead to meaningful improvements in a company’s ability to deliver high-value products faster to customers. We talk about the importance of creating tight feedback loops with customers and the need to bring out into the open the obstacles that are preventing teams from g...