A customer recently asked how I defined an “empathy interview.” Because she needed to explain it to the leadership team around her, I needed to provide a better answer than my typical stammering about “understanding” and “being ready” and “connecting.” As all good engineers would do, my next effort ...

A week ago, Mark Richards shared a post introducing the community we’ve been shaping for the last few months. It’s been a really enjoyable collaboration getting to this point, and I can’t wait to explore and experience what it looks like next. As Mark introduced, we’ve reached a point where we’re re...

This is a really fun post to write. A couple of weeks ago I posted about my gap year and the reflections on what really drives me. This week I’m excited to put the new Leading Effective Agile Change program out to the world! I'm also a bit nervous, to be honest, and I’ll likely write more about that...

Well, what a year! Last October, I decided it was time to take an extended break for the first time in my career. I wasn't sure when I set out if it would be a sabbatical, a gap year, or permanent semi-retirement. Over the first few months, I decided a year was the right horizon. I committed to myse...

While working on my workshop for XP2023 in Amsterdam this morning I was trying to minimize my opinions on metrics and agility into a single sentence. While doing so, I briefly considered a tangential thought about "What would it look like to use the pirate metrics to measure agile transformation suc...

I find that people struggle to intuitively understand the difference between an operational value stream and a development value stream in SAFe. This blog post provides simple, clear distinctions to help people reason about their organization and the difference between the two. The concepts exist re...