Team Agility Quotes

In high-performing organizations, everyone within the team shares a common goal—quality, availability, and security aren’t the responsibility of individual departments, but are a part of everyone’s job, every day.

We practice mastering ourselves in the moment so that we can better open ourselves to being a servant leader and to harness our emotions and choose what to do with our reactions.

Over-seriousness is a warning sign for mediocrity and bureaucratic thinking. People who are seriously committed to mastery and high performance are secure enough to lighten up. —Michael J. Gelb

That which a team does not want to discuss, it most needs to discuss.

Celebrate Successes, but Don't Declare Victory

What this team did not realize was that having dirty tests is equivalent to, if not worse than, having no tests.

Team performance is directly proportional to team stability. Focus on building and maintaining a stable team. Stability reduces friction and increases credibility and confidence.

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

One of the Scrum rules is that work cannot be pushed onto a team; the Product Owner offers items for the iteration, and the team pulls as many as they decide they can do at a sustainable pace with good quality.

The Future of work is all about CREAM. More Consciousness, Relationships, Empathy, AdaptAgility, and Meaning. We must be building a more human-centered context for stakeholders, as opposed to JUST MORE profits for shareholders".

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.

It’s often the case that teams working in agile processes do not actually go back to improve the user interface of the software. But, as the saying goes, “it’s not iterative if you only do it once.” Teams need to make a commitment to continuous improvement, and that means not simply refactoring code and addressing technical debt but also reworking and improving user interfaces. Teams must embrace the concept of UX debt and make a commitment to continuous improvement of the user experience.

We choose and wear our clothes every morning. Attitude is the same. Positivity is an attitude – we can choose to wear it every morning

Intrinsically we humans want to be happy, and happiness derives from having purpose, pursuit towards interesting and challenging ‘something’ that is greater than oneself.

A retrospective’s huge potential for learning should not be off-limits to any team member.

Stubbornness pays! We tend to think that it doesn’t, we might be hesitant to be stubborn – however only the stubborn succeed.

To be full of love and enthusiasm for your work is a prerequisite for collaboration, a professional obligation;

If you have a problem and to solve it you need someone else to change, you don’t understand your problem yet

At the core of healthy team relationships is trust and respect.

A ScrumMaster’s role on the team is compared to a sheepdog. They guide the team toward the goal by enforcing boundaries, chasing off predators, and giving the occasional bark.

It appears evident that, for the average team, insisting on writing tests first, before functional coding, improves quality.

Where is the integrity in telling the team they “must have all this done by this date” when you haven’t asked the team if it is even possible?

every Scrum team needs a ScrumMaster.

First, how could I protect my team from the incessant demands of the business and achieve what the Agile community now refers to as a “sustainable pace”?

Beginners think that there is no documentation in agile, which is not true. It’s about choosing the types of documentation that are useful.

A team can employ agile practices, but it won't achieve the potential benefit of agile development without embracing agile values and principles.

In high-performance teams, "the leaders managed the principles, and the principles managed the team.

In an agile project the team takes care of the tasks and the project leader takes care of the team.

The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem. —Theodore Rubin

Lean UX is a transparent process that not only reveals what designers do but encourages participation from everyone on the team.

Our goal is not to create a deliverable or a feature: it’s to positively affect customer behavior or change in the world — to create an outcome.

The team was flowing. Work in progress was under control. Features were used by customers. It was like watching a unicorn drive a Tesla through a burndown chart.

If everyone is speaking the same language, then it becomes easier to create a team where everyone is of the same mind.

High Performance Teams and Execution Speed, has no value, if you are going in the wrong direction!

If you focus on the strength of the team, you will begin to find work as a positive challenge.

A good manager focuses on managing impediments, process, team’s health, protects the boundaries of self-organizing teams, promotes a healthy culture, and helps eliminate waste.

Good agile project managers and teams don’t focus on mistakes — or on who did them, or on how many times they were done.

Iterative development, when accompanied with reasonable end-of-iteration reviews—product, technical, process, team—is also self-correcting.

APM focuses on team management, from building self-organizing teams to developing a servant leadership style. It is both more difficult, and ultimately more rewarding than managing tasks.

Agility, resilience, readiness, observation, learning, courage, vigilance, curiosity, and team spirit - these are the most critical traits needed to fight the change tornado called evolution.

A job interview is a two-way communication to probe for cultural and team fit. No matter which side of the table you sit, you should be asking questions that are important to you without fear.

stress can be a real monster you have to vanquish from your team. And one of the main ways to do this is by ensuring that you plan your project in a very sustainable way, from the very beginning.

Frame your problem statements into actionable tasks and goals that lead to a solution. Problem statements incite procrastination and resistance whereas solution statements inspire hope and motivation.

Situational leadership articulates that effective leaders are the ones able to change their behavior according to the situation at hand. It identifies leadership styles relevant to specific situations.

Summary of Scrum vs Kanban Similarities: - Both are Lean and Agile - Both use pull scheduling - Both limit WIP - Both use transperency to drive process improvement - Both focus on delivering releasable software and often - Both are based on self-organizing teams - Both require breaking the work into pieces. - In both, the release plan is continuously optimized based on empirical data (velocity/lead time)

A maxim in the theater tells us this: On time is already late (Devin 2009). That is, if we arrive at work on time with our bodies only, having not groomed our minds to collaborate, we are simply late. Unprepared.

The more I recognized these tactical styles, the more I saw the ideal as a balance. Despite the contradiction, a recon [team leader] had to be part wolf and part rabbit--selectively bold or cautious--but few men can agilely switch back and forth.

Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos—some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership.

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.

So, why do we do development work in these short cycles? To learn. Experience is the best teacher, and the scrum cycle is designed to provide you with multiple opportunities to receive feedback—from customers, from the team, from the market—and to learn from it.

Nothing has a more profound and long-term degrading effect upon a development project than bad code. Bad schedules can be redone, bad requirements can be redefined. Bad team dynamics can be repaired. But bad code rots and ferments, becoming an inexorable weight that drags the team down.

Broadly speaking, to acheive DevOps outcomes, we need to reduce the effects of functional orientation ("optimizing for cost") and enable market orientation ("optimizing for speed") so we can have many small teams working safely and independently, quickly delivering value to the customer

First, how could I protect my team from the incessant demands of the business and achieve what the Agile community now refers to as a “sustainable pace”? And second, how could I successfully scale adoption of an Agile approach across an enterprise and overcome the inevitable resistance to change?

For an agile project, the ensemble includes core team members, customers, suppliers, executives, and other participants who interact with each other in various ways. It is these interactions, and the tacit and explicit information exchanges that occur within them, that project management practices need to facilitate.

I noticed a bumper sticker that said, simply, "gravity works." yes it does. Rock climbers know this and plan for it. So do agile coaches. I use this metaphor to illustrate that, in our physical environment, somethings are simply taken as a given. Constant. Always present. Undeniable. So, too, in our work environment.

Only experience can refine a leader's art. High-uncertainty projects are full of anxiety, change, and ambiguity that the team must deal with. It takes a different style of project management, a different pattern of team operation, and a different type of project leader. I've labeled this type of management leadership-collaboration.

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.

In a self-organized team, individuals take accountability for managing their own workload, shift work among themselves based on need and best fit, and take responsibility for team effectiveness. Team members have considerable leeway in how they deliver results, they are self-disciplined in their accountability for those results, and they work within a flexible framework.

high performance starts with organizations whose leadership focuses on building an environment where people from different backgrounds and with different identities, experiences, and perspectives can feel psychologically safe working together, and where teams are given the necessary resources, capacity, and encouragement to experiment and learn together in a safe and systematic way.

Executives, project leaders, and development teams must embrace a different view of the new product development world, one that not only recognizes change in the business world, but also understands the power of driving down iteration costs to enable experimentation and emergent processes. Understanding these differences and how they affect product development is key to understanding APM.

After identifying the adaptable and networked nature of Al Qaeda, the general and his team explored why traditional organizations aren’t adaptable. One conclusion they reached was that agility and adaptability are normally limited to small teams. They explored the traits that make small teams adaptable, such as trust, common purpose, shared awareness, and the empowerment of individual members to act.

The capability of self-organizing teams lies in collaboration. When two engineers scratch out a design on a whiteboard, they are collaborating. When team members meet to brainstorm a design, they are collaborating. When team leaders meet to decide whether a product is ready to ship, they are collaborating. The result of any collaboration can be categorized as a tangible deliverable, a decision, or shared knowledge.

DevOps benefits all of us in the technology value stream, whether we are Dev, Ops, QA, Infosec, Product Owners, or customers. It brings joy back to developing great products, with fewer death marches. It enables humane work conditions with fewer weekends worked and fewer missed holidays with our loved ones. It enables teams to work together to survive, learn, thrive, delight our customers, and help our organization succeed.

Driving exploration is critical, but knowing when to stop is also. Product development is exploring with a purpose, delivering value within a set of constraints. Frequent, timeboxed iterations compel the development and product teams and executives to make difficult tradeoff decisions early and often during the project. Feature delivery contributes to realistic evaluations because product managers can look at tangible, verifiable results.

The R6 Resilience Change Management Framework is a cyclical framework that consists of six iterative puzzle pieces: 1. Review the Macro/Micro Changes: This iteration emphasizes the importance of scanning (mostly) the external environment to identify emerging trends, disruptions, and opportunities. By understanding the broader context in which the organization operates, leaders can anticipate future challenges and proactively adapt their strategies. There should never be a time in the organizations existence where it stops reviewing the macro changes. There are times, though, when micro changes (internal) are where the focus needs to be. 2. Reassess the Business’ Capabilities in the Context of Macro Changes: This iteration is fundamentally about “who are we, and how can we really add value?” It also involves a critical evaluation of the organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in light of the identified macro changes. This reassessment helps to identify areas where the organization needs to adapt or transform its capabilities to remain competitive. This iteration is largely inward-looking, focused on the organization. But it tempered with the idea that “how do our capabilities allow us to add value to our customers lives (existing or new).” 3. Redefine Target Market(s) Based on Reassessment of Capabilities: This iteration focuses on aligning the organization's target markets with the evolving needs and preferences of customers, the changing competitive landscape, and the new reality of the businesses capabilities. This may involve identifying new customer segments, developing personalized offerings, creating seamless omnichannel experiences, or approaching the same target market in new ways (offering them new kinds of value, or the same kind of value in new ways). 4. Redirect Capabilities Toward Redefined Target Market: This iteration involves realigning the organization's resources, processes, and strategies to effectively serve the redefined target markets. This may require investments in new technologies, optimization of supply chains, or the development of innovative products and services. 5. Restructure the Organization: This iteration focuses on adapting the organization's structure, culture, and talent to support the desired changes. This may involve creating agile teams, fostering a culture of innovation, or empowering employees to make decisions through new policies. 6. Repeat in Perpetuity – or – Render Paradigm Shift [R6-RPS]: This iteration underscores the importance of continuous monitoring, evaluation, and adaptation. The R6 framework is not a one-time process in response to a change event, but an iterative cycle that enables organizations to remain agile and resilient in the face of ongoing change. Additionally, there are times when before repeating the cycle, a business may want/need to render an external paradigm shift by introducing a product or service or way of doing things that fundamentally changes the market – fundamentally changes the value exchange between customers, employees and organizations.

a good set of questions to determine whether a project leader—or even an individual contributor—has an agile mindset might be, "In what specific ways and with what practices do you focus on value first and constraints last?" "In what specific ways and with what practices do you manage teams rather than tasks?" "In what specific ways and with what practices do you adapt to change rather than conform to plans?" Try these out in your organization to get a feel for your agile maturity.

Outcomes indicators include product vision, business objectives, and capabilities (high-level product functionality), not detail requirements. These outcome characteristics define a releasable product and quality objectives define a reliable and adaptable (works today, easy to enhance) product. These are the critical value traits, then teams need to strive to meet constraints—scope, schedule, and cost—but as secondary in importance to the value components. In many, if not most, agile projects schedule becomes the most critical constraint and is timeboxed (fixed) and scope varies.

Authoritarian managers use power, often in the form of fear, to get people to do something their way. Leaders depend for the most part on influence rather than power, and influence derives from respect rather than fear. Respect, in turn, is based on qualities such as integrity, ability, fairness, truthfulness—in short, on character. Leaders are part of the team, and although they are given organizational authority, their real authority isn't delegated top-down but earned bottom-up. From the outside, a managed team and a led team can look the same, but from the inside they feel very different.

DevOps requires potentially new cultural and management norms and changes in our technical practices and architecture. This requires a coalition that spans business leadership, Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, Information Security, and even Marketing, where many technology initiatives originate. When all these teams work together, we can create a safe system of work, enabling small teams to quickly and independently develop and validate code that can be safely deployed to customers. This results in maximizing developer productivity, organizational learning, high employee satisfaction, and the ability to win in the marketplace.

Improve performance through process improvements introduced with minimal resistance. Deliver with high quality. Deliver a predictable lead time by controlling the quantity of work-in-progress. Give team members a better life through an improved work/life balance. Provide slack in the system by balancing demand against throughput. Provide a simple prioritization mechanism that delays commitment and keeps options open. Provide a transparent scheme for seeing improvement opportunities, thereby enabling change to a more collaborative culture that encourages continuous improvement. Strive for a process that enables predictable results, business agility, good governance, and the development of what the Software Engineering Institute calls a high-maturity organization.

we had to unlearn a great deal of what we thought we knew about how war—and the world—worked. We had to tear down familiar organizational structures and rebuild them along completely different lines, swapping our sturdy architecture for organic fluidity, because it was the only way to confront a rising tide of complex threats. Specifically, we restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call “shared consciousness”) and decentralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”). We dissolved the barriers—the walls of our silos and the floors of our hierarchies—that had once made us efficient. We looked at the behaviors of our smallest units and found ways to extend them to an organization of thousands, spread across three continents. We became what we called “a team of teams”: a large command that captured at scale the traits of agility normally limited to small teams.

SEVEN CHANGE MASTERY SHIFTS • Change Mastery Shift 1: From Problem Focus to Opportunity Focus. Effective leaders tend to perceive and to innovate on the opportunities inherent in change. • Change Mastery Shift 2: From Short-Term Focus to Long-Term Focus. Effective leaders don’t lose sight of their long-term vision in the midst of change. • Change Mastery Shift 3: From Circumstance Focus to Purpose Focus. Effective leaders maintain a clear sense of purpose, value, and meaning to rise above immediate circumstances. • Change Mastery Shift 4: From Control Focus to Agility Focus. Effective leaders understand that control is a management principle that yields a certain degree of results. However, agility, flexibility, and innovation are leadership principles that sustain results over the long haul. • Change Mastery Shift 5: From Self-Focus to Service. Effective leaders buffer their teams and organizations from the stress of change by managing, neutralizing, and/or transcending their own stress. • Change Mastery Shift 6: From Expertise Focus to Listening Focus. Effective leaders stay open and practice authentic listening to stay connected with others and to consider multiple, innovative solutions. • Change Mastery Shift 7: From Doubt Focus to Trust Focus. Effective leaders are more secure in themselves; they possess a sense that they can handle whatever may come their way; their self-awareness and self-trust are bigger than the circumstances of change.

Over the span of a year or two, teams that were moving very fast at the beginning of a project can find themselves moving at a snail’s pace. Every change they make to the code breaks two or three other parts of the code. As productivity decreases, management does the only thing they can; they add more staff to the project to increase productivity. But that new staff is not versed in the design of the system. Furthermore, they, and everyone else on the team, are under horrific pressure to increase productivity. So they all make more and more messes, driving productivity further toward zero. Eventually the team rebels. They inform management that they cannot continue to develop in this odious code base. Management does not want to expend resources on a whole new redesign of the project, but they cannot deny that productivity is terrible. Eventually, they bend to the demands of the developers and authorize the grand redesign in the sky. A new tiger team is selected. Everyone wants to be on this team because it’s a green-field project. They get to start over and create something wonderful. But only the best and brightest are chosen for the tiger team. Everyone else must continue to maintain the current system. Now the two teams are in a race. The tiger team must build a new system that does everything that the old system does. Management will not replace the old system until the new system can do everything that the old system does. This race can go on for a very long time. I’ve seen it take 10 years. And by the time it’s done, the original members of the tiger team are long gone, and the current members are demanding that the new system be redesigned because it’s such a mess.

Bram stared into a pair of wide, dark eyes. Eyes that reflected a surprising glimmer of intelligence. This might be the rare female a man could reason with. “Now, then,” he said. “We can do this the easy way, or we can make things difficult.” With a soft snort, she turned her head. It was as if he’d ceased to exist. Bram shifted his weight to his good leg, feeling the stab to his pride. He was a lieutenant colonel in the British army, and at over six feet tall, he was said to cut an imposing figure. Typically, a pointed glance from his quarter would quell the slightest hint of disobedience. He was not accustomed to being ignored. “Listen sharp now.” He gave her ear a rough tweak and sank his voice to a low threat. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll do as I say.” Though she spoke not a word, her reply was clear: You can kiss my great woolly arse. Confounded sheep. “Ah, the English countryside. So charming. So…fragrant.” Colin approached, stripped of his London-best topcoat, wading hip-deep through the river of wool. Blotting the sheen of perspiration from his brow with his sleeve, he asked, “I don’t suppose this means we can simply turn back?” Ahead of them, a boy pushing a handcart had overturned his cargo, strewing corn all over the road. It was an open buffet, and every ram and ewe in Sussex appeared to have answered the invitation. A vast throng of sheep bustled and bleated around the unfortunate youth, gorging themselves on the spilled grain-and completely obstructing Bram’s wagons. “Can we walk the teams in reverse?” Colin asked. “Perhaps we can go around, find another road.” Bram gestured at the surrounding landscape. “There is no other road.” They stood in the middle of the rutted dirt lane, which occupied a kind of narrow, winding valley. A steep bank of gorse rose up on one side, and on the other, some dozen yards of heath separated the road from dramatic bluffs. And below those-far below those-lay the sparkling turquoise sea. If the air was seasonably dry and clear, and Bram squinted hard at that thin indigo line of the horizon, he might even glimpse the northern coast of France. So close. He’d get there. Not today, but soon. He had a task to accomplish here, and the sooner he completed it, the sooner he could rejoin his regiment. He wasn’t stopping for anything. Except sheep. Blast it. It would seem they were stopping for sheep. A rough voice said, “I’ll take care of them.” Thorne joined their group. Bram flicked his gaze to the side and spied his hulking mountain of a corporal shouldering a flintlock rifle. “We can’t simply shoot them, Thorne.” Obedient as ever, Thorne lowered his gun. “Then I’ve a cutlass. Just sharpened the blade last night.” “We can’t butcher them, either.” Thorne shrugged. “I’m hungry.” Yes, that was Thorne-straightforward, practical. Ruthless. “We’re all hungry.” Bram’s stomach rumbled in support of the statement. “But clearing the way is our aim at the moment, and a dead sheep’s harder to move than a live one. We’ll just have to nudge them along.” Thorne lowered the hammer of his rifle, disarming it, then flipped the weapon with an agile motion and rammed the butt end against a woolly flank. “Move on, you bleeding beast.

Ellen Braun, an accomplished agile manager, noticed that different behaviors emerge over time as telltale signs of a team’s emotional maturity, a key component in their ability to adjust as things happen to them and to get to the tipping point when “an individual’s self interest shifts to alignment with the behaviors that support team achievement” (Braun 2010). It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. —James Thurber Team Dynamics Survey Ellen created a list of survey questions she first used as personal reflection while she observed teams in action. Using these questions the same way, as a pathway to reflection, an agile coach can gain insight into potential team problems or areas for emotional growth. Using them with the team will be more insightful, perhaps as material for a retrospective where the team has the time and space to chew on the ideas that come up. While the team sprints, though, mull them over on your own, and notice what they tell you about team dynamics (Braun 2010). • How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable? • To what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view? • If you bring an item into a team discussion that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view, how often does the team reach a consensus that takes into consideration all points of view and feels workable to you? • Can you identify an instance in the past two work days when you felt a sense of warmth or inclusion within the context of your team? • Can you identify an instance in the past two days when you felt a sense of disdain or exclusion within the context of your team? • How much does the team make you feel accountable for your work? Mulling over these questions solo or posing them to the team will likely generate a lot of raw material to consider. When you step back from the many answers, perhaps one or two themes jump out at you, signaling the “big things” to address.

agile is the most disciplined and quality-driven set of development practices the industry has invented to date.

the user story as the primary artifact for identifying system behaviors that deliver value to the customer. We implied that engaging a user in a dialogue about how they use the system, and what benefit they derive, is a straightforward process.

One of the biggest challenges implementing agile is the reward system. For example, individual salary scales and rewards can be decoupled from the function and substituted by group valuation rewards linked to the capacity of both the employee and/or the team. Or, it is possible to make a distinction between the fixed salary and flexible performance bonus, detached from the annual budget and not considered a personnel expense. The reward system is always the last to change, but it is crucial to include this subject in the initial conversations with the different stakeholders around agile projects.

The difficulty is that culture is unwritten and unstated. For the Agile team to use culture as a guide to what is valued by the business, it must excavate, deduce, hypothesize, and test. One thing that it cannot do is to try to rip out the existing culture and replace it with a “more Agile” one. Corporate culture is not an impediment to Agile adoption; it is a valuable clue to defining the success of Agile adoption.

The team is working along at a certain productivity. Then new staff is added. Productivity plummets for a few weeks as the new people suck the life out of the old people. Then, hopefully, the new people start to get smart enough to actually contribute.

Saddam Tajammal is a seasoned scrum team leader and IT professional who is Agile Scrum Certifed.

Some manager mandates that more new work be started before current work has finished. - Resources that are actually doing the work are constantly pulled in multiple different directions and are not allowed to focus on any one thing. - There is a dependency on some external team or vendor.

If you think of a Scrum team as a military unit in battle (and you can), then you should think of the writer for that team as an embedded journalist.

Scrum Master The scrum master acts as a coach, guiding the team to ever-higher levels of cohesiveness, self-organization, and performance. While a team’s deliverable is the product, a scrum master’s deliverable is a high-performing, self-organizing team. The scrum master is the team’s good shepherd, its champion, guardian, facilitator, and scrum expert.  The scrum master helps the team learn and apply scrum and related agile practices to the team’s best advantage. The scrum master is constantly available to the team to help them remove any impediments or road-blocks that are keeping them from doing their work. The scrum master is not—we repeat, not—the team’s boss. This is a peer position on the team, set apart by knowledge and responsibilities not rank.

Leaders set the example through coaching, empowering, and engaging individuals and teams to reach their highest potential.

When I started exploring what flag I should plant back in 2009, there was a confluence of events in the works. The business world was increasingly using a methodology called Agile as its preferred product-development process while, at the same time, digital design was becoming increasingly important. Technology was rapidly evolving, and design was becoming a key differentiating factor for success—this was just a couple of years after the introduction of the iPhone. Companies were struggling to figure out how to integrate these two trends successfully, which created an opportunity for me—no one had solved this problem. This is where I decided to plant my flag—because I had the expertise, the opportunity, a real problem to solve that many people were dealing with, and the credibility to speak to it. I decided to work on solving this challenge and to bring everyone willing along with me on my journey. My teams and I started experimenting, trying different ways of working. We often failed, but as we were going through our ups and downs, I was sharing—publicly writing and giving talks about—what we were trying to do. Turned out I wasn’t the only one struggling with this issue. The more I wrote and the more I presented, the more widely I became known out in the world as someone who was not only working to solve this issue, but who was a source of ideas, honesty, and inspiration. So, when I left TheLadders, I had already planted my flag. I had found the thing I wanted to be known for and the work I was passionate about. A quick word of warning… Success on this path is a double-edged sword and you should approach this process with eyes open. The flag you plant today may very well be with you for the rest of your life—especially if you build widespread credibility on the topic. It’s going to follow you wherever you go and define you. No matter what else I do out in the world, I will forever be Jeff Gothelf—the Lean UX guy.

In traditional performance management models, working teams present to leadership in performative, high-stakes monthly or quarterly reviews. By keeping these reviews on such an infrequent cadence, both sides can lose sight of what the real purpose of the review is: to support and sustain the work, and to ensure that everyone is moving together toward the desired results. Such an approach is ill-suited to the ecosystem economy. When you have agile tribes, chapters, and squads working on dynamic, cross-sectoral value propositions, you need to push your performance management process toward a much more frequent operating cadence.

In the agile model, and especially in the context of the servant leadership mindset, it is not uncommon to have weekly or even more frequent check-ins—not in a punitive or adversarial way, but simply to find whatever roadblocks are standing in the team's way and to ensure that everyone has what they need to move forward.

In an ecosystem context, however, you need to focus only on the objectives and key results (OKRs) that are at the core of each agile chapter, tribe, or squad's work. As you do so, remember to always ask yourself: What objective did we give the teams, and what key results are we expecting them to drive?

After considering what gets covered, you will need to turn your attention to who is involved in the performance management cycle. Traditional performance management models are typically formal and hierarchical—and often involve only the senior management or leadership team. When you're setting up performance management for the ecosystem economy, you need a less hierarchical, more project-oriented, more results-oriented model. You need to involve not just senior management, but also people from all levels within your agile model (e.g., tribes, chapters, and squads). Involving more of the team not only creates a more streamlined and efficient process, but also facilitates an unfiltered flow of information. Management gets an opportunity to hear an unfiltered report straight from the team members who will be best equipped to give it. And the team members get an opportunity to receive feedback and instruction straight from management, without anything getting lost in translation as the information passed through two or three levels of hierarchy and bureaucracy.

The team quickly realized that the kanban board wasn’t helping as much as they thought. They could see the work on the board, and at first that had been exciting. But the work wasn’t moving.

A team is a group of people focused on a common goal, in which each individual adjusts their actions, habits, and work preferences in order to achieve the group’s common goal. The team’s effectiveness depends on the members’ capacity to work together. It is directly related to the group’s ability to make the best use of the individuals’ skills.

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A dispersed team has each of its members in separate locations. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 saw a massive increase of dispersed teams due to many developers transitioning to working from home, where they could be physically isolated from one another. Distributed teams have the advantage of co-location for each team. With proper inter-team management, such teams can overcome most challenges described in the next section. Dispersed teams, on the other hand, have a much more significant challenge. The daily communication within the team is constrained by members’ physical separation and the tools they use. Very often, such teams lose the cohesion necessary for a good team and simply become a “group of individuals” with far less engagement and productivity.

We can list more than 20 dimensions we’ve found in successful leaders: the ability to create a vision, thinking strategically, building influential internal and external networks, courage to make tough decisions, and so on. Successful leadership is multidimensional for sure. But most of the traits of successful leaders can be distilled down to two elements. They know how to: bring multiple teams together make great decisions And these two elements have a lot to do with whether organizations are agile.

In their 2012 paper, “A Taxonomy of Dependencies in Agile Software Development,” Diane Strode and Sid Huff propose three different categories of dependency: knowledge, task, and resource dependencies.14 Such a taxonomy can help pinpoint dependencies between teams and the potential constraints to the flow of work ahead of time.

Archetype Other descriptions Achievement Performance, accountability, focus, speed, delivery, meritocracy, discipline, transparency, rigour Customer-Centric External focus, service, responsiveness, reliability, listening One-Team Collaboration, globalisation, internal customer, teamwork, without boundaries Innovative Learning, entrepreneurial, agility, creativity, challenging status quo, continuous improvement, pursuit of excellence People-First Empowerment, delegation, development, safety, care, respect, balance, diversity, relationships, fun Greater-Good Social responsibility, environment, citizenship, meaning, community, making a difference, sustainability

That’s why many Agile products start as feature poor. Chances are, features aren’t as important as getting an idea in front of customers quickly. So deadlines trump features, with quality as an underlying assumption. Build less, but with confidence, is the path of many early product teams. If you’re right about the core, you can always iterate and build more features later.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, uses a “two-pizza” rule for any team within the company. That is, the team should be able to be fed with no more than two pizzas.

Groups, teams and organisations are operating systems. Individuals don't exist as disconnected modules from others, from situations, from contexts... Build up perspective no only in yourself and your now, specially also to connections to others.