Talking Product
John Young & Collin Lyons explore all things related to building digital products and leading digital transformations. In every episode we give you actions that you can put into practice immediately to reduce risk, create more effective and efficient product development capabilities, and build a culture of continuous learning.
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Episodes
Sunday Sep 24, 2023
Sunday Sep 24, 2023
In this episode, Collin and I continue to explore the relationship between making product, learning, and facilitating organisational change. We use Collin's book, Make Learn Change as the springboard for this discussion.
In this episode Collin and I unpack some of the key beliefs that underpin Waterfall and Agile. Often we see Waterfall and Agile being juxtaposed against each other as different “methodologies”. In this episode, I argue that you will be better served looking at them as differing belief systems about product development and product delivery - beliefs that have validity to those who hold them.
Our feeling is that if you can develop a more refined language for articulating these differing belief systems, you will be better positioned to diagnosis where your organization is getting stuck in its own journey to becoming a more effective and more efficient digital product development company. You will also be better positioned to help your team and your organization navigate this rather ambiguous journey that is often simply termed as a “mindset” shift.
As in Episode 1, we continue to argue for the benefits of trying to make a thin slice of value to get into your customers hand, so that you can learn and adapt, where needed. We also revisit how oragnizations can use the obstacles they hit when trying to deliver a thin slice of value as the core focus of a digital or Agile transformation.
Monday Jul 17, 2023
Monday Jul 17, 2023
In this first episode, Collin and I start to explore Collin's book Make Learn Change.
We discuss why a fair number of so-called “Agile transformations” simply don’t lead to meaningful improvements in a company’s ability to deliver high-value products faster to customers. We talk about the importance of creating tight feedback loops with customers and the need to bring out into the open the obstacles that are preventing teams from getting product into customers' hands fast.
Collin & I talk about the importance of creating tight feedback loops with customers and bringing out into the open the obstacles that are preventing your teams from getting product faster into customers' hands.