• This week I participated in Product Mindset training - and I was happy to hear that Product Managers (who were leading the training) are actively exploring how to apply experimentation principles in their client engagements. One of the most important idea - treat future improvements (epics, features, user stories, etc.) as hypotheses, and design experiments to test their actual impact. You can find more pointers towards such ideas here - Effort, Impact and Experimentation in Testing.

  • However, ideas and implementation are two different things. Some time ago I witnessed an attempt to implement OKRs framework in the organization. It ended as a chaos and failure due to the tool and context mismatch. In my subjective opinion, recent article about OKRs in Software Engineering (from Abi Noda) summarizes challenges (as well as successful team characteristics) pretty well. As you may guess, not only tooling (framework), but providing clarity (“leading by example”), stability/consistency and support (resolving data issues, providing data capabilities) are very important. Clarity, consistency and support - here it is.

  • Talking about clarity - there is not a lot to recommend from this year’s TestCon Europe conference, but Lina Zubytė and her talk “How Minimalism Helps Build High-Quality Products” is totally worth watching (and re-watching).

  • Talking about consistency - another talk from TestCon to recommend is “Better, Faster, Stronger - Delivering High-Quality Products” (from Finn Lorbeer). Even before this year’s conference I remembered Finn from several years ago, when I was impressed by his talk about CI/CD principles, “forward-only” mindset, feature toggles, and so on. Back then, it sounded ambitious, brave and inspiring. And this year it sounded similarly inspiring, yet… interestingly familiar. So, later on I found that talk from “several years ago” - “Better, Faster, Stronger - Delivering High Quality Products”. 4 years apart the message have not changed much. But should it? Why, if it is still relevant? In my opinion, both those talks are still great today.

  • Talking about support - Finn’s consistency reminded me one of Leadership paradoxes - Paradox of Change, and its resolution - “Success <…> comes from persistently staying with only a few messages and tasks, no matter how boring that may be for the leader personally.” In my eyes, understanding and revisiting those leadership paradoxes may help fighting the imposter syndrome and the question “am I (doing) enough?” - as those two are no strangers in leadership roles as well.

  • I like to say that “the opposite of a chaos is an organization.” Therefore, 3 antidotes of chaos - clarity, consistency and support - are essential leading towards more (or better) organization and leaving the chaos behind.