Agile Transformation Quotes

We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them. We wanted to hatch out of clean, smooth, beautiful eggs, as they did, back when we were young and agile and innocent of cause and effect, we did not want the mess of being born, and so we crammed the birds into our gullets, feathers and all, but it was no use, we couldn’t sing, not effortlessly as they do, we can’t fly, not without smoke and metal, and as for the eggs we don’t stand a chance. We’re mired in gravity, we’re earthbound. We’re ankle-deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no.

The most effective way to transform your life, therefore, is not by quitting your job and moving to an ashram, but, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, by doing what you can, with what you have, where you are.

Vision without action is a daydream, but action without vision is a nightmare.

Great ideas don’t die in the market, they die in the shower. People are too scared to pursue them because they appear crazy.

There is an absolute need for organizations to innovate, grow, transform, and reinvent themselves faster than ever before.

Arming employees with the tools, know-how, and mindset needed to successfully innovate on a continual basis will be paramount to organizational survival.

Innovation is a learned organizational capability. You must train people how to innovate and navigate organizational barriers that kill off good ideas before they can be tested.

What if the Christian faith is supposed to exist in a variety of forms rather than just one imperial one? What if it is both more stable and more agile—more responsive to the Holy Spirit—when it exists in these many forms? And what if, instead of arguing about which form is correct and legitimate, we were to honor, appreciate, and validate one another and see ourselves as servants of one grander mission, apostles of one greater message, seekers on one ultimate quest?

Agile management is about working smarter rather than harder. It’s not about doing more work in less time: It’s about generating more value from less work.

small batches of work, small teams, short cycles, and quick feedback—in effect, “small everything.

Agile is more a “direction,” than an “end.” Transforming to Agile culture means the business knows the direction they want to go on.

Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart.

What you do matters; why you do it matters more.

In other words, firms don’t have to be “born Agile,” like Spotify. Even big, old firms can undertake an Agile transformation if they set their minds and hearts to it—and stick with it.

We found in surveys of Agile teams that some 80 percent to 90 percent of Agile teams perceive tension between the way the Agile team is run and the way the whole organization is run. In half of those cases, the tension was “serious.

The client gets to see the next iteration of the system every three weeks, instead of waiting five years for one “big bang” delivery.

If you are thinking about Agile as a set of tools and processes, you’re looking for the wrong thing. You can’t go to the store and “buy some Agile management.

Strong executive commitment is a success factor for implementing Scrum, and management can best demonstrate their support of the transformation through their actions.

An enterprise must transform by changing its culture, changing its bureaucracy, changing its organization, changing its technical architecture—and making them agile.

Potentially shippable is defined by a state of confidence or readiness, and shipping is a business decision.

There is really no bad software development process. There is only how you are doing it today and better.

Another way of looking at it might be to say that scrum doesn’t actually do anything; people do things.

Thriving in today’s marketplace frequently depends on making a transformation to become more agile.

By adopting an agile mindset and providing improved engagement, collaboration, transparency, and adaptability via Scrum's values, roles, events, and artifacts, the results were excellent.

Doing scrum” is as meaningless (and impossible) as creating an instance of an abstract class. Scrum is a framework for surfacing organizational dysfunction. It is not a process and it is not prescriptive.

The task of delighting customers is thus the job of everyone. It requires the efforts of everyone in the corporation—and beyond—to share insights and figure out ways to handle a challenge that is much more difficult than merely delivering a product or service.

One reason that it’s difficult to understand is that twentieth-century managers had learned to parrot phrases like “The customer is number one!” while continuing to run the organization as an internally focused, top-down bureaucracy interested in delivering value to shareholders.

Many firms fail to see that since generally all organizations have access to the same rapidly evolving technology, competitive advantage flows not from the technology itself but rather from the agility with which organizations understand and adapt the technology to meet customers’ real needs.

Scrum is about whole people, not about skills. Scrum is not I, but We. It is about sharing, learning, continuous improvement, vibrant interaction, passionate collaboration, and personal growth. Scrum is about tribes, it is about building community. Each tribal member needs a sense of belonging, a personal quest.

One of the kindest services a scrum master can do for his or her team and for the organization as a whole is to create transparency—to radiate information. Transparency allows us to see flaws, and when we see the flaws we can make the choice to do something about them. We can stop being victims of process and start being warriors of change.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way and wish I had access to the information in this book back then. Common traps were stepped in—like trying a top-down mandate to adopt Agile, thinking it was one size fits all, not focusing on measurement (or the right things to measure), leadership behavior not changing, and treating the transformation like a program instead of creating a learning organization (never done).

In the Agile organization, “customer focus” means something very different. In firms that have embraced Agile, everyone is passionately obsessed with delivering more value to customers. Everyone in the organization has a clear line of sight to the ultimate customer and can see how their work is adding value to that customer—or not. If their work isn’t adding value to any customer or user, then an immediate question arises as to why the work is being done at all.

Agile coach: The individual is an agile expert who provides guidance for new agile implementations as well as existing agile teams. The agile coach is experienced in employing agile techniques in different environments and has successfully run diverse agile projects. The individual builds and maintains relationships with everyone involved, coaches individuals, trains groups, and facilitates interactive workshops. The agile coach is typically from outside the organization, and the role may be temporary or permanent.

There's something else I wanted to say about Cézanne: that no one else before him demonstrated so clearly the extent to which painting is something that takes place among the colors, and how one has to leave them completely alone, so that they can come to terms among themselves. Their mutual intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, whoever arranges, whoever injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity. Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.

And so, when I tell stories today about digital transformation and organizational agility and customer centricity, I use a vocabulary that is very consistent and very refined. It is one of the tools I have available to tell my story effectively. I talk about assumptions. I talk about hypotheses. I talk about outcomes as a measure of customer success. I talk about outcomes as a measurable change in customer behavior. I talk about outcomes over outputs, experimentation, continuous learning, and ship, sense, and respond. The more you tell your story, the more you can refine your language into your trademark or brand—what you’re most known for. For example, baseball great Yogi Berra was famous for his Yogi-isms—sayings like “You can observe a lot by watching” and “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” It’s not just a hook or catchphrase, it helps tell the story as well. For Lean Startup, a best-selling book on corporate innovation written by Eric Ries, the words were “build,” “measure,” “learn.” Jeff Patton, a colleague of mine, uses the phrase “the differences that make a difference.” And he talks about bets as a way of testing confidence levels. He’ll ask, “What will you bet me that your idea is good? Will you bet me lunch? A day’s pay? Your 401(k)?” These words are not only their vocabulary. They are their brand. That’s one of the benefits of storytelling and telling those stories continuously. As you refine your language, the people who are beginning to pay attention to you start adopting that language, and then that becomes your thing.

There is no a priori reason that IT cannot lead the business’s digital transformation. The fact that organizations widely don’t believe this suggests that there is something wrong with the way we have been defining IT.

If you are going to use automated testing and Continuous Integration (CI) to dramatically improve your productivity, you need to treat your testing investments as being at least as important, or even more important, than your development investments, which is a big cultural change for most organizations. In

The leadership team would then spend most of their days walking the floor trying to understand where we were struggling and why. This is a new role for most executives and one we encourage executives to embrace if this process is going to be successful. We

If this feedback takes days or weeks to get to them, it is of limited value to the developers’ learning. If

every time you see a branch you should ask why it’s there and look for process changes that will address the same need without creating branches.

Good business outcomes are testable, valuable, independently achievable, and negotiable (TVIN). As

This book lays a lot of emphasis on having teams responsible for business outcomes (outcome-oriented teams) as opposed to being responsible for activities (activity-oriented teams). To

Designing for second-order success from the beginning runs the risk of compromising first-order success.

Once we have centralized our logs, we can transform them into metrics by

we also design our system of work so that we can multiply the effects of new knowledge, transforming local discoveries into global improvements. Regardless of where someone performs work, they do so with the cumulative and collective experience of everyone in the organization.

One of the inherent challenges with initiatives such as DevOps transformations is that they are inevitably in conflict with ongoing business operations. Part

Agility and transformation isn't restricted to private industry. Governments need to transform maintain relevance to the rapid pace of change.

Enterprise agility is the foundation for enterprise success in the age of cutting-edge technology enabled disruption.

People are generally proud of their culture,” he says. “So if you go into an organization and talk about changing the culture, it makes people wonder: ‘What is he talking about? What’s wrong with my culture?’ You don’t want people worrying about this. I never once used the word ‘culture’ at SRI in any of my discussions with the staff. What I talked about was what we needed to do. I had a couple of big themes. And I repeated those themes all the time. I never used the words, ‘culture change,’” he says.

When you have survived narcissistic abuse, the experience is a harrowing ordeal where your body, mind, and very essence felt violated. Some feel fragmented, forcibly separated from their own being, stripped of safety, security, and sanity. One day, survivors will reflect upon this harrowing pain as a pivotal moment that shaped their lives. The experience of trauma transforms individuals, equipping them with the honed skills of a detective and the agility of a ninja, acquired during their pursuit of understanding the abuse. With these remarkable abilities, they embark on a profound journey of healing.

You must envision and become one with your future self, the hero of your life that is going to lead you from here. The task in front of you is silent, simple, and monumental. It is a feat most do not ever get to the point of attempting. You must now learn agility, resilience, and self-understanding. You must change completely, never to be the same again.

Instead of a central finance function tracking if funds are utilized as per plan, we have outcome owners accountable for realizing value out of pre-approved funds tied to outcomes rather than plans.

having a development process that integrates stable code across the enterprise is one of the most effective ways of aligning the work across the teams,

When the frequency of the build and deployment process is fairly low, your organization is able to use brute force to work through these issues. When you increase the frequency, this is no longer possible.

Thus, a mindset of responsiveness considers time efficiency from the customer’s or requestor’s point of view rather than cost-efficiency from the service provider’s point of view.

Collaboration across teams tends to be discontinuous and discrete (e.g., via meetings).

There needs to be a process for moving people or whole teams across initiatives to ensure the right overall business priorities are being developed first.

Executives need to understand the basic challenges of their current architecture and work to improve it over time. The build process needs to support managing different artifacts in the system as independent entities. Additionally, a solid, maintainable test automation framework needs to be in place so developers can trust the ability to quickly localize defects in their code when it fails. Until these fundamentals are in place, you will have limited success effectively transforming your processes.

This is the worst-case scenario for automated testing: where developers start ignoring the results of the tests because they assume it is a test issue instead of a code issue.

Expect to create, architect, and maintain at least as much test code and automation scripts as you create production code. Soundly architected test code leads to soundly architected production code that is easy to understand and maintain.

Therefore, organizations need to decide whether their primary objective is to deliver long-term accurate plans to its executives or if it is to deliver business value to its customers.

intent. Additionally, if executives don’t design the planning process correctly, it can end up using a lot of the organization’s capacity without providing much value.

Working successfully with people is immensely challenging and tough. This is not touchy-feely, this is heartfelt emotionalism. This is not soft-skills, this is hardcore.

how teams come together to deliver value in large organizations is the first-order effect, while how individual teams work was a second-order effect.

Until these fundamentals are in place, you will have limited success effectively transforming your processes.

Handoffs are mostly a result of specialization. Organization design cannot reduce these handoffs, but it can make them faster and cheaper by making them occur inside a single team.

My lover’s alluring propensities took on a vivacity I had difficulty conceding. His passion magnified a thousand-fold within my consciousness as I closed my eyes to this wanton dexterity. I desired him, and he wanted me. Under this euphoric ecstasy, I relinquished my person to his coveted demands.               My Apollo, my Phoebus, who never failed to brighten my person and radiate my soul, had coiled me into his solicitous web of ardent devotion. My coverings fell away with every inhalation of his loving elixir. My lover had exposed my nakedness to the gazing eyes of the unseen voyeur and stalker. They alone were granted dispensation to witness the audacity between my lover and me.               Our fiery gazes never left or strayed from each other. Bewitched by his blueish-green eyes, my soul was bare to him. His oral stimulation had fostered me to arch my back in a balletic pose as his hands supported the small of my back. Watched through the submerged glass, we felt like Poseidon’s pleasure slaves, performing solely for his gratification. I was awed by our agility and reminded of a supple aquatic dance performance I had witnessed during my extensive travels. My former ballet training surged through me as I saw myself swirling and pirouetting across the room, and Andy’s thickness gyrated within the core of my being. The ecstasy and the agony of my dance pedagogy had transformed into the art of intercourse. The grace of movement and the beauty of love had merged into a seraphic epiphany – a unity of the Godhead within and without.               At the precise moment of our orgasmic exultations, I finally grasped my chaperone’s universal knowledge: that the divine and I are but one and the same. It was then I comprehended my guardian’s god-like comportment. Andy knew his birth-right, and he wore his divinity with pride and honour. All of that I saw in him as it came gushing to the forefront. He was indeed a Phoebus Apollo, a sun god beheld in a darkened chamber. There and then, I made a secret covenant to myself, like an apostle to the Son of God - I would follow in his footsteps.               My Valet’s sanctity swirled within me, flooding my kernel with beatific sows of celestial grace. Overjoyed by his tokens of affection, I too released my passion into his garnering gulf. Streams of my succulent splendour oozed from his enticing lips. It was only when we shared the final droplets of my luscious deposits that he liberated his engorgement from my sopping honeycomb. I supped at his dripping remains before sharing my fill with him, so we could both partake in this sexual liturgy of heavenly Eucharist.               We did not relinquish our performance after the lights and music had disappeared, but remained entwined in darkness, savouring the inseparable devotion that had once been the domain of Apollo and his beloved Hyacinth.

Organizational maturity is not just about technical excellence or process efficiency, but also about business effectiveness, agility, innovation intelligence, and people-centricity.

tools that blur boundaries between specialists are better than those that reinforce them.

An organizational norm that says, “We value practice over theory but we value theory-informed practice over ad-hoc practice” helps to restore some respect for theory. We

Change capability is one of the strategic capabilities which underpin successful execution and move the organization from efficiency to agility.

As with art, first impressions are not rigid or carved in stone. Rather they are agile and adaptable, depending on the inspiration, the artist, the observer, the medium, and the circumstance.

In large, traditional organizations, however, most of the time individual teams can’t independently deliver value to the customer because it requires integrating work across hundreds of developers and addressing all the inefficiencies of coordinating this work. These are issues that the individual teams can’t and won’t solve on their own. This is why the executives need to lead the transformation. They are uniquely positioned to lead the all-important cultural changes and muster the resources to make the necessary organization-wide technical changes.

how teams come together to deliver value in large organizations is the first-order effect, while how individual teams work was a second-order effect. Therefore,

after you have chosen an approach, you don’t need to worry about getting the advantages of that design because it will come naturally. Where you need to provide management focus is on addressing the disadvantages of your organizational choice.

Process is only a second-order effect. The unique people, their feelings and qualities, are more influential

Digital IT is all about speed, agility, and flexibility.

It is important to remember that although it is relatively easy to write code, it is very difficult to create a sustainable platform.

Always trust that engineers are doing the best they know how or can in the situation. People want to do a good job;

One of the most important roles for management is ensuring architectural integrity and sustainability when developing code. One

Cloud computing solution in London offers a way to extend existing capacity and capabilities. It assists organizations drive innovation and business transformation by increasing business agility, lowering costs, and reducing IT complexity.

A responsive IT means a lot of things for the digital transformation: Speed, innovation, agility, integration, modernization, intelligence, value creation, and maturity, etc

You have to be strong and agile to ride a bicycle in city traffic. You need excellent balance and vision. (Children and seniors, for example, have worse peripheral vision than fit adults, and more trouble judging the speed of approaching objects.17) Most of all, you must possess a high tolerance for risk.18 Even the blood of adventurous riders gets flooded with beta-endorphins – the euphoria-inducing chemical that has been found in bungee-jumpers and rollercoaster riders – not to mention a stew of cortisol and adrenaline, the stress hormones that are so useful in moments of fight and flight, but toxic if experienced over the long term. The biologist Robert Sapolsky once said that the way to understand the difference between good and bad stress is to remember that a rollercoaster ride lasts for three minutes rather than three days. A super-long roller-coaster would not only be a lot less fun but poisonous. I personally like rollercoasters, and I loved the challenge of riding in the Paris traffic. But what is thrilling to me – a slightly reckless, forty-something male – would be terrifying for my mother, or my brother or a child. So if we really care about freedom for everyone, we need to design for everyone – not just the brave. This means we have got to confront the shared-space movement, which has gradually found favour since the sharing concept known as the woonerf emerged on residential streets in the Dutch city of Delft in the 1970s. In the woonerf, walkers, cyclists and cars are all invited to mingle in the same space, as though they are sharing a living room. Street signs and marked kerbs are replaced with flowerpots and cobblestones and even trees, forcing users to pay more attention as they move. It’s a bit like the vehicular cyclist paradigm, except that in a woonerf, everyone is expected to share the road.fn8

You must release your old self into the fire of your vision and be willing to think in a way you have never even tried before. You must mourn the loss of your younger self, the person who has gotten you this far but who is no longer equipped to carry you onward. You must envision and become one with your future self, the hero of your life that is going to lead you from here. The task in front of you is silent, simple, and monumental. It is a feat most do not ever get to the point of attempting. You must now learn agility, resilience, and self-understanding. You must change completely, never to be the same again.

Unmanaged” deconstructs the discipline of management and makes the compelling case that knowledge workers perform much more effectively for “Humble Gardeners” than “Angry Ranchers.” With decades of experience working with hundreds of professional service firms, Jack Skeels presents a convincing case for how the chronically misunderstood agile framework can produce transformational results.

pursue continuous improvements

In a truly agile enterprise, bureaucracy and innovation become partners. They create a system where both elements improve and where people in each camp collaborate to generate superior results. We’ll show how to harmonize the two in this book.

I asked Carlson what he did in those early years to get people’s buy-in. Carlson says he included everyone but he worked mainly with the early adopters. “You never get a 100 percent,” he says. “We focused on the people who wanted to work this way. You can’t convert everyone on day one. That takes years.

Bewilderingly, among some enterprises, there is a recent trend of anointing a special team that is separate from development and operations: the “DevOps” team. The whole point of DevOps is to create unity and collaboration among different specialties, not more silos. We even see job ads for “DevOps engineers,” who apparently are a special breed different from normal engineers and system admins. What happened? We believe this is the result of a buzzword-bingo approach to management. Rather than cultivating “individuals and interactions,” we have organizations hoping to avoid rethinking how to operate and instead get by with a reconfiguration of the software factory. And the surprising thing is that many have achieved that dubious goal.

there is an optimal level of change for every business, and for every activity within a business. Ideally, an agile business system would operate at the golden mean between change deficiency—leading to a static business system that adapts too slowly to survive—and change excess, creating a chaotic business system that constantly risks spinning out of control.

You visit these big companies. You walk in the front door and it looks like the Taj Mahal. You are expecting wonders, but you start talking to people and you find that it’s just an ordinary place with dispirited staff. They aren’t pursuing big ideas and, even if they are, there’s no mechanism for developing them.” He adds, “I often walk out of these companies depressed about the waste of the human talent working there. These companies must become profoundly more productive if they are to survive in our competitive global economy.

Anyone contemplating it has to pass F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous test of a first-rate intelligence: “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

In the realm of spiritual philosophy, where the sacred and the mundane converge, where the mystical dances with the ordinary, there exists an enchanting archetype that beckons us to explore the depths of our souls—the Divine Rabbit. This ethereal creature, a symbol of fertility, rebirth, and spiritual illumination, invites us to embark on a profound journey of self-discovery and transcendence. The Divine Rabbit, with its gentle countenance and nimble grace, embodies the essence of the divine feminine, representing the nurturing and creative aspects of existence. It is a messenger of the cosmic forces, whispering ancient wisdom and guiding us towards the realization of our true nature. With each hop, it traverses the sacred landscapes of our consciousness, leaving in its wake the seeds of transformation and spiritual awakening. This mystical creature, adorned with the symbols of abundance and growth, teaches us the profound truth that spirituality is not confined to lofty realms or esoteric knowledge, but is deeply rooted in the tapestry of our everyday lives. The Divine Rabbit invites us to cultivate a sense of presence and mindfulness, to embrace the magic of the present moment, and to recognize that every breath we take is an opportunity for divine communion. In the Divine Rabbit, we find a profound reflection of our own spiritual journey. Like the rabbit, we too navigate the maze of existence, encountering both obstacles and opportunities along the way. The Divine Rabbit reminds us to approach these challenges with grace, agility, and an unwavering trust in the divine plan. It teaches us that even in the face of adversity, we possess the innate resilience to overcome, to rise above our limitations, and to embrace the boundless potential that resides within us. The Divine Rabbit also serves as a catalyst for profound transformation and rebirth. Just as the rabbit sheds its old fur to make way for new growth, we too are called to release the layers of conditioning, limiting beliefs, and attachments that no longer serve our highest good. The Divine Rabbit encourages us to step into the fullness of our authentic selves, to embrace our innate gifts and talents, and to allow the light of our divine essence to illuminate the world around us. Moreover, the Divine Rabbit invites us to honor the interconnectedness of all beings and the sacredness of every living creature. It teaches us to tread lightly upon the Earth, recognizing that our actions have far-reaching consequences. The Divine Rabbit reminds us of the importance of compassion, kindness, and love towards all beings, for in their eyes, we catch a glimpse of the divine spark that resides within us all. As we embark on our spiritual journey, let us heed the wisdom of the Divine Rabbit. Let us cultivate a sense of wonder and curiosity, allowing ourselves to be guided by the synchronicities and signs that pepper our path. Let us embrace the cycles of life and honor the sacredness of both beginnings and endings. And above all, let us remember that within the heart of the Divine Rabbit resides the eternal flame of our own divine essence, waiting to be kindled and expressed in all its radiant glory. May we follow the path of the Divine Rabbit, awakening to the depths of our being, embracing our divine nature, and embodying the transformative power of love, compassion, and spiritual illumination. In doing so, we dance in harmony with the rhythm of the universe, honoring the sacredness of life, and fulfilling our highest purpose.

In the domain of implementation, agile software development practices have transformed our expectations of what we can build and how quickly we can build it. Indeed, there is much discussion about the overlaps between agile and design thinking, and while I agree that they borrow from each other and are complementary, the distinctions between them continue to be a point of confusion and should be reiterated: Agile is focused entirely on rapid and effective implementation, while design thinking is intended to facilitate exploration and implementation.

To begin the Lean-Agile journey and instill new habits into the culture, everyone must adopt the values, mindset, and principles provided by SAFe, Lean thinking, and the Agile Manifesto. This new mindset creates the foundation needed for a successful Lean-Agile transformation.

Innovation tends to flourish in a complex habitat like the variegated ecosystem of a rainforest, where a diverse selection of birds, grasses, insects, and animals randomly rub up against one another and cross-pollinate, adapting to one another's spontaneous behaviors. The new world powered by information technology placed a premium on the transformative power of innovation. It seemed to promise individuals better access to knowledge, more power to influence others, and greater means for self-expression. It rewarded critical thinking, customization and agility in serving a market more than repetition and unity.

Organizations today generally face two main challenges in connection to digital transformation. First, they must put digital transformation/digitalization on their roadmap. Second, they must ensure that they possess the agility to deploy new technologies before they become obsolete.

In typical DevOps transformations, as we progress from deployment lead times measured in months or quarters to lead times measured in minutes, the constraint usually follows this progression: Environment creation: We cannot achieve deployments on-demand if we always have to wait weeks or months for production or test environments. The countermeasure is to create environments that are on demand and completely self-serviced, so that they are always available when we need them. Code deployment: We cannot achieve deployments on demand if each of our production code deployments take weeks or months to perform (i.e., each deployment requires 1,300 manual, error-prone steps, involving up to three hundred engineers). The countermeasure is to automate our deployments as much as possible, with the goal of being completely automated so they can be done self-service by any developer. Test setup and run: We cannot achieve deployments on demand if every code deployment requires two weeks to set up our test environments and data sets, and another four weeks to manually execute all our regression tests. The countermeasure is to automate our tests so we can execute deployments safely and to parallelize them so the test rate can keep up with our code development rate. Overly tight architecture: We cannot achieve deployments on demand if overly tight architecture means that every time we want to make a code change we have to send our engineers to scores of committee meetings in order to get permission to make our changes. Our countermeasure is to create more loosely-coupled architecture so that changes can be made safely and with more autonomy, increasing developer productivity.

When I trust you, I can use the story we agree on to predict your behavior and evaluate my possible actions, so that we can cooperate effectively. We are likely to come up with jointly designed plans that we can execute in tandem, and we can explain our common story to others so they can align with us too.

if our stories are fully aligned, you will never need to worry about me misunderstanding or undermining your efforts. With aligned stories, the founders will be able to involve developers in their prioritization discussions to keep goals realistic and achievable; the tech lead will discover that he doesn’t have all the answers and that team members can work with him to improve the structure and process more effectively; and the product manager will find that she can replace detailed specs with conversations with motivated developers.