PITA 043
TOPIC 1 How do you approach options where the pain/gain is not distributed evenly across the org?
Get the team with the most benefit/least pain to help out - lend a hand with the team(s) that experience more pain/less gain
Acknowledge it - be honest about it
Make it part of the overall incentive structure - ensure they are rewarded for their pain, if the org as a whole benefits
Interrogate & ensure that there is enough benefit to offset the pain
Communicate what the reasons & benefits are (cost-cutting may be the assumption but not the reality)
Attend to Folk’s Needs (the antimatter principle)
TOPIC 2 What do you do when everyone is scared of the CTO because he's the only one who understands the code?
It’s not a unique situation
Get more tech people in that he (it’s a he!) respects and make it a bottom-up approach
Does he want to be a CTO? And does he know what the job is - and what role he wants to do?
Look at role functions, not job titles
Scenario planning - what do we do if…? (if CTO is no longer available, etc)
Work to build a relationship with him by solving a problem/removing a pain; use that to have the deeper conversation outside the direct work context
NVC (Implicit) step zero: Empathise
Love NVC, but soooo hard to do well live in conversation. (I find I have to pause for many seconds to frame any thought)
TOPIC 3 Product Aikido - non violent product development
Product Aikido | FlowchainSensei (free book)
Fundamental principle of Aikido - avoid harm, defuse situations (mirroring, empathising, etc)
War Fighting Manual of US Marine Corp - how they prep and fight. Doctrinal, not command & control. Pushing down decisions to the people in the thick of it.
Translating that to product development - self-organising teams
Leads up to organisational psychotherapy - examining shared assumptions & beliefs
TOPIC 4 Ideas for better integrating design/UR/UX/BA work into team boards to help product prioritisation and visibility
Ensure that everyone is represented
Avoid a separate board for non-tech stuff
Avoid being TOO specific - no tickets to setup a meeting or create a ticket, etc
But having a central place for Devs, Designers & More to have conversations is a good thing
Make sure that you’re writing really good tickets
For UX/UR/etc - make the tickets about the Questions to be answered or Decisions to be made, rather than the specific tasks to achieve that
Make the board wider - Discovery steps to the left of the dev, Evaluative to the right…
…but this also has the potential to create domain bottlenecks
But the visibility allows you to have conversations about it if it creeps in
And surfaces it as Retros for resolution
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iancarrolluk is great at this