Good talks/podcasts (Sept 2020 I)

 

These are the best podcast/talks I've seen/listen to recently:

• Agile as if you meant it (Maaret Pyhäjärvi) [Agile, Lean Product Management, Product, Product Strategy, Teams] (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) A good example of what Modern Agile looks like. Customer-focused team, with direct contact with the customer and without a proxy. Very interesting. It reminds me a lot of the way I used to work at [@AleaSolucionesS](https://twitter.com/AleaSolucionesS) and at TheMotion ([@HoneyBadgersDev](https://twitter.com/HoneyBadgersDev)).
• How to Write Acceptance Tests (Dave Farley) [Continuous Delivery, Technical Practices, testing] "How to write Acceptance Tests" describes the use of Automated Acceptance Tests, an important tool in evaluating our software. These tests are focussed on answering questions like "Does our software do what our users want and expect?". Software Development teams have been trying to achieve this insight for many years, with often poor results. Grounded in the ideas of TDD and BDD this Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) approach is based in the idea of creating a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for expressing test cases.
• Lean starts with kanban (Michael Balle) [Lean] This presentation shows how lean is a people-first, value-based strategy. It also shows how kanban is the starting-point tool to learn and understand lean's upside-down thinking.
• Product Management for Continuous Delivery (Elizabeth Ayer) [Continuous Delivery, Lean Product Management, Product] (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) This presentation explains how Continuous Delivery is very beneficial for excellent product management and growing a customer-focus team. CD enables closing the loop for each product increment, getting feedback, making decisions, and punting the focus on the impact generated (and not creating more and more features).
• Tidy First? (Kent Beck) [Agile, Design, Evolutionary Design, Technical Practices, XP] (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) Great talk about the human relationships generated during software development. Kent explains these relations and uses them to analyze the development flow, the need for small safe steps, and the tension generated between the people involved. For me, this talk is a must.
• How Stripe Invests in Technical Infrastructure (Will Larson) [Infrastructure, Platform, Platform as a product, Product] Will shares Stripe's approaches to prioritizing infrastructure as your company scales, justifying—and maybe even expanding—your company's spend on technical infrastructure, exploring the whole range of possible areas to invest into infrastructure, adapting your approach between periods of firefighting and periods of innovation, and balancing investment in supporting existing products and enabling new product development.
• The science of batch size (Donald G Reinerstsen) Don explains the impacts of reducing the batch size in the product development world (not only software). Dense but very interesting.
• Working without a Product Owner (Maaret Pyhäjärvi) [Lean Product Management, Product, Teams] Maaret talk about the experiment they did for three months working with a Product Owner or Product Manager. They experienced the development team delivering multitudes of value and innovate customer-oriented solutions in direct collaboration with customers. Team satisfaction and happiness bloomed. The experiment turned into a continuous way of working.

Reminder, All these talks are interesting even just listening to them, without seeing them.

Related: 

• Recommended Talk/Podcast Database

Resources for Product Management for Internal Platform

"The purpose of a platform team is to enable stream-aligned teams to deliver work with substantial autonomy. The stream-aligned team maintains full ownership of building, running, and fixing their application in production. The platform team provides internal services to reduce the cognitive load that would be required from stream-aligned teams to develop these underlying services."

Team Topologies

The last year I have been leading the Platform Team in a startup during the scale phase. First at Nextail and currently at Clarity.ai. Although it is the first time I focus exclusively on that team, the truth is that throughout my career, I have always got very involved in any initiative or organization focused on improving internal tools or provide a platform for the rest of the engineering team.

I have always liked these teams, for the transversal impact they have on the whole product organization and the capacity they have to enable the DevOps culture.

But I've always seen that they usually focus too much on technology and not so much in the customer, our colleagues.  Happily, it seems that these teams are starting to be treated as product teams and are beginning to use modern product management techniques.

There are still not many resources dedicated to how to treat the Platform as an internal product. So I have decided to compile in this post the most interesting resources I have found about it.
 

Interesting presentations

• How Stripe Invests in Technical Infrastructure
• Platforms at Twilio: Unlocking Developer Effectiveness
• Kubernetes is Not Your Platform, It's Just the Foundation
• Minimum Viable Product for Platforms
• Monoliths vs Microservices is Missing the Point - Start with Team Cognitive Load
  
• Construyendo infrastructuras evolutivas (Spanish)
• Una aproximación a la infraestructura evolutiva (Spanish)
• Production excellence:
• SRE Keynote: Cultivating Production Excellence

Projects

• https://backstage.io/
• https://clutch.sh/

Articles and blog posts

• Product for Internal Platforms
• Camille Fournier on Effectively Managing Internal Platform Teams 
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Platforms
• Technology radar: Applying product management to internal platforms
• Advocating for a Product Mindset within Platform Teams and How We Do It at HelloTech (Part 1)
• How to build a PaaS for 1500 engineers
• Why Do Organizations Need a Platform Team?
• The Engineering Manager’s Dilemma
• Building a Delivery Ecosystem: Part 1
• Building a Platform Team — Laying the Foundations
• Platform Engineering
• How to build a platform team now! the secrets to successful engineering 
• The Rise of Platform Engineering
• How We Improved Developer Productivity for Our DevOps Teams 
• How We Use Golden Paths to Solve Fragmentation in Our Software Ecosystem
  
• Production excellence:
• Sustainable Operations in Complex Systems with Production Excellence

Books

I didn't find any specific book about Product management techniques for Platform teams, but we can always adapt the techniques described in modern product management books.

• Team Topologies - by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
• INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
• Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

Other resources

• Training: TT08 - Principles and Practices for Modern Platforms
  
• DevOps concepts and learning path 
• https://github.com/teamtopologies (Team-API-template, Thin Platform template, Team Dependencies Tracking, ...)
  

I'd love to share resources with anyone who's interested in the subject. Any suggestions/resources/ideas are welcome.

Good talks/podcasts (Aug 2020 I)

 

These are the best podcast/talks I've seen/listen to recently:

• Six Decades of Software Engineering (Mary Poppendieck) [Agile, Devops, Engineering Culture, Lean Software Development] (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) Great talk with the evolution of our field from a lean perspective. Great insights about the engineering role, agile, the current painful division between business and development, how we can think about complex systems, the failure of having proxy roles as the product owner, etc... Great talk, lot of computer and development history, and great Q&A session. Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/devopslx/2020-dot-07-meetup-talk-may-poppendieck-six-decades-of-software-engineering
• 7 minutes, 26 seconds, and the Fundamental Theorem of Agile Software Development (J.B. Rainsberger) [Agile, Design, XP] (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) Short excellent talk (7:26') that distilled the essence of software development and agile development. Essential. A must.
• YOW! Singapore/Hong Kong 2017 The Best OO Language is a Functional One (Dave Thomas) [Design, Functional, OOP] Interesting talk about some OO concepts using elixir.
• 15 teams and 4 months to achieve Continuous Delivery (Thierry de Pauw) [Continuous Delivery, Engineering Culture, Lean, Lean Software Development, TOC] Interesting presentation about how to transform the engineering culture of a company to reach Continuous Delivery. He talked about Improvement Kata, Value Stream Mapping, and the Theory Of Constraints to choose which changes to apply first, and kickstart the organisational changes we needed to improve quality and drive down lead times.
• Mastering the Problem Space to Achieve Product-Market Fit (Dan Olsen) [Lean, Lean Product Management, Product, Product Discovery, Product Strategy] Good explanations about modern Product Management concepts (Product market fit, Problem Space vs Solutions Space, Lean product management, etc).
• GOTO 2020 • Modern Continuous Delivery (Ken Mugrage) [Continuous Delivery, Engineering Culture] (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) Great description of a Continuous Delivery process.
• What got you here won't get you there: How your team can become a high-performing team by embracing observability (Charity Majors) [Engineering Culture, Observability, Operations] (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) A ton of useful insights and ideas in this excellent Charity presentation. Great description of observability and its need in modern systems.
• Podcast with Deloitte - Building Great Software Takes Great Teams and Communication (Matthew Skelton) [Agile, Architecture, Devops, Engineering Culture, Management, Technology Strategy] The show covered the original DevOps Topologies patterns and how these have been used in industry, and then talked about what’s in the book Team Topologies: well-defined team types, what we mean by a modern platform, team interaction modes, clear responsibility boundaries, DevEx, and using difficulties in team interactions as ‘signals’ to the organization that something is missing or misplaced. We also talked about moving beyond the Spotify model - success in software delivery is not just about team structures but about how teams interact and what kind of relationships they create, sustain, and evolve.
• Software Modernisation (Sandro Mancuso) [Architecture, Architecture patterns, Technical leadership, Technology Strategy] In this talk, Sandro Mancuso, Software Craftsman and Co-Founder at Codurance will cover the key aspects of Software Modernisation initiatives and why they are neede

Reminder, All these talks are interesting even just listening to them, without seeing them.

Related: 

• Recommended Talk/Podcast Database

Good talks/podcasts (Jul 2020 II)

These are the best podcast/talks I've seen/listen to recently:

• Life as a Chief Architect (Gregor Hohpe) [Architecture, Inspirational, Technical leadership, Technology Strategy] Gregor Hohpe will share insights from his life as a Chief Architect.
• Creating Value and Flow in Product Development (John Cutler) [Agile, Engineering Culture, Lean, Lean Software Development, Product, Teams] (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) John Cutler, Product Evangelist at Amplitude explains why most of a product developers time is spent waiting and how limiting work in progress, the scope of work and handoffs can increase flow and value.
• The Work That Makes the Work Work (John Cutler) [Agile, Company Culture, Engineering Culture, Inspirational] A quick video about continuous improvement, and visualizing the work that makes the work work with Popcorn Flow c/o @agilesensei
• The subtle difference between a constraint and a bottleneck (Theory of Constraints) (Chris Hohmann) [Lean, TOC] (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) Excellent 3-minute video explains the subtle difference between a constraint and a bottleneck in the Theory of Constraints (and, therefore, where to put the focus.)

Reminder, All these talks are interesting even just listening to them, without seeing them.

Related: 

• Recommended Talk/Podcast Database

Good talks/podcasts (Jul 2020 I)

These are the best podcast/talks I've seen/listen to recently:

• Boundaries (Gary Bernhardt) [Architecture, Architecture patterns, Design, Evolutionary Design] (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) An exploration of the boundaries between pieces of code, including: isolated testing, behavior vs. data, mutation vs. immutability, how data shape affords parallelism, transforming interface dependencies into data dependencies, and what a system optimizing each of these for natural isolation might look like.
• Cross-functional Leadership for High-Performance Product Teams (Dan Olsen) [Engineering Culture, Inspirational, Lean, Product] Interesting intro about modern product management. Interesting to understand concepts as product market fit and the Product-Market Fit Pyramid.
• Habits, Practices & Strategy For Building Viral Products (Oji Udezue) [Inspirational, Product, Product Strategy] A discussion on the habits, practices and strategy for building products that are extremely viral and able to catch the attention of your target market, so you can grow your business faster.
• Ask for the unreasonable… and then get out of the way (Andrew Harcourt) [Engineering Culture, Inspirational, Teams, Technology Strategy] The talk describe some ways to map strategy to execution by setting “unreasonable” goals - and then working out how to get organisational constraints - and ourselves - out of the way.
• Life as a Chief Architect (Gregor Hohpe) [Architecture, Inspirational, Technical leadership, Technology Strategy] Gregor Hohpe will share insights from his life as a Chief Architect.

Reminder, All these talks are interesting even just listening to them, without seeing them.

Related: 

• Recommended Talk/Podcast Database

Continuous learning. What / How

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

“Working software is the primary measure of progress.”

But making software is complex and requires a good understanding of the customer's needs, the market (WHAT), and the reactions of the system we are developing (HOW). Let's remember that current software systems are complex systems, and that implies that they have emerging behaviors that we don't know when we create them.

“The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. ... This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules.” 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Therefore the bottleneck to create software that meets customer needs is continuous learning. But learning is useless if we bring the system down or piss off our customers.

In a software system each of the deployments/changes we make, allows us to learn and make decisions for the next steps. Therefore we are interested in shortening the learning and decision cycles as much as possible.

What is Agile delivery's strategy for doing so?

Agile Delivery's strategy is to deliver increments in small safe steps (3S), each of which must attempt to generate learning about the WHAT (user needs) or the HOW (technology/system).

Learning WHAT / User needs / Valuable software

If we have a lean product development process, we will try to validate and learn this aspect by generating as little software as possible. This implies generating hypotheses and trying to achieve validated learning using everything we have at our disposal: data analysis, prototypes with or without code, or software increments. For the latter, we will have to divide using Vertical Slicing in increments so small as possible.
Of course, to learn about user behavior, it is also essential that we instrument the product to learn continuously from the use that the customer makes of the system.

Learning HOW / Technology/System / Working software

Software is a complex system. This means that we can't foresee the final behavior when we develop each of its parts independently. That is why it is essential to make small safe changes (technical Slicing) that allow us to learn from the behavior of the system in production without affecting the user. Of course, in order to get these learnings, we need to decouple the deployments (putting into production a change) from the releases (activating a change for the end-user).

Summary

In summary, the sure way to achieve this continuous learning of the WHAT and HOW that agile delivery offers is the Continuous Delivery of Small Safe Steps (both purely technical increases and increases in value for the user).

It seems that the data confirm that this is the right approach for making digital products.

References:

Vertical Slicing

• https://agileforall.com/resources/how-to-split-a-user-story/
• https://medium.com/the-liberators/10-powerful-strategies-for-breaking-down-user-stories-in-scrum-with-cheatsheet-2cd9aae7d0eb
• https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/slicing-your-development-work-multi-layer-cake
• https://gojko.net/2012/01/23/splitting-user-stories-the-hamburger-method

Continuous Delivery

• https://continuousdelivery.com/
• https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/the-2019-accelerate-state-of-devops-elite-performance-productivity-and-scaling
• https://itrevolution.com/book/accelerate/