Organizing Your Organization Around Microservices

In 1968, programmer Melvin Conway stated: “organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” Basically, if you have three teams building a compiler, they’ll likely build a...

Managing People in a Creative Economy

I grew up in a blue collar town with a population of around 300 people. My parents had an acre-sized yard which meant cutting the grass with a push-mower, that wasn’t self-propelled, took a big chunk of my weekend time away. About 6 hours of it, if you include...

Management Goes First

Sometimes Agile is thought of as a way to fix teams. I like to call this spray-on transformation.  That is, management reads an article about how Agile helps teams go faster, while increasing quality for less cost, and then they decide they need to spray some of that...

Time to play big!

A year ago I was in a very different place with myself. […]