Thoroughness unpacked in three dimensions like this by James Stanier is so good and gives a much better way to think and talk about issues of velocity:
Scope is what you’re building.
https://theengineeringmanager.substack.com/p/scope-hmm
Scalability is how well it will work as you grow.
Sustainability is how well it will work over time.
As somebody working in platform for the past years, I’ve become very familiar with the different dimensions of this debate around productivity and John here unpacks the topic in a way that’s really useful. I used the nails analogy just yesterday.
Even more than a nuanced understanding of why developer productivity is so challenging to improve, the last bit of the piece is even more on the money because it’s what drives decision making in most companies (tech companies are no exception):
“Can you imagine how hard it would be to walk into a meeting with investors, whoever, and say, ‘um, you thought you had a 30mpg car, and it is a 15mpg car?”
https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-304-losing-a-day-a-week-to-inefficiencies
The biggest tragedy of Agile is that planning your team to maximum capacity is not agile.
It’s understandable that organizations try to make their word legible and simplify things. In fact, it’s one of the reasons for the organizational boundary.
The problem is that monoprocess pretty much entirely does not work for any creative/agile endeavour. Things are valuable exactly because they are complicated and messy.
As a company scales, there are phase shifts which feel like they suck all the productivity out of an organization. The way to get through as described here is familiar: categorize and capture everything, reduce WIP and loop through your process.
A lot to like in this article (“They avoid scrum and SAFe like the plague.‌‌”) but I’ll settle for adopting the core thrust of it and just retiring the entire concept of a PO and never have to debate “What is the difference between a PM and a PO?” ever again.
Despite not being the biggest fan of Shape Up or of 37s, I still really enjoyed watching this video by Ryan Singer about Shaping.
It’s very well done and though I wouldn’t recommend anybody to follow this by the book, you would do well to take inspiration from it.
Love to see these updates from the German Digital Service. Not sure everybody knows that that organization exists now and what they’re busy with.
The work they’re doing is really good but what’s really staggering is how much of a gap they have to bridge here. These are basic buildings blocks of digital transformation that advanced societies tackled 10-20 years ago.
The Engineering Enablement podcast has been good to listen to—if a bit anodyne. The recent episode I listened to with Jeremiah Lee about Spotify’s massively popular but failed org structure was really fun and useful.
A relevant and nuanced complication of agile by Dorian Taylor seeing it as a trauma based response where the core practice has gotten stuck and is preventing the industry from solving more fundamental issues.