Murray Robinson & Shane Gibson Podcasts

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they discuss the fundamentals of product management with Roman Pichler, author of agile product management with scrum. What is a product manager? What is a product? What's the difference between a product and a project? What's the difference between a product owner and a product manager? How do you know what…

 In this episode, we discuss the sad state of the agile industry with Michael Kusters and Brett Maytom. We talk about how the agile brand has been destroyed by con artists, life coaches and big management consulting firms. People who provide poor quality advice to clients because they've never been part of a good agile team. We talk about why clien…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Howard Podeswa about agile business analysis. What do business analysts do? What's its value? Why are big requirements up front, a bad idea? And how do we do business analysis in an agile way? How do we do use cases and user story maps and how do we break them down into user stories? What's th…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with veteran developer, Jonathan Crossland about Ammerse, a value based decision making guide for products and teams. Ammerse is a mnemonic for agile, minimal, maintainable, environmental, reachable and solvable. Jonathan walks us through how to use these ideas to understand what we value now and w…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Rich Mironov about the problem with sales led development. It’s easy for B2B enterprise companies to fall into a sales lead development model where the majority of development work is customisation starving the core product of resources for innovation, new features, quality improvements and te…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Donna Spencer from Maker X about user experience design in empowered product teams. We discuss user research, information architecture, and visual design. And the problem with the way UX is often done in traditional teams and agile teams. We discuss the value of having a UX person embedded in …

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Al Shalloway about Amplio and the movement back to pattern libraries to improve knowledge work. As lean and agile have become commercialised they've become rigid, bureaucratic frameworks that disempower teams and prevent us from improving. Pattern libraries set us free. When we learn patterns …

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they talk with Jim Benson, author of personal Kanban, about his new book, the collaboration equation. Jim describes how Kanban allows teams to focus and see bottlenecks so they can resolve them. He explains how organizations starve people of information, safety and purpose and describes how to build collabor…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat about their experience with start ups and scale-ups venture capitalists and corporate innovation. We talk about manager's fear of innovation, innovation theatre, and some models that organisations could use to be far more innovative than they are now. Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they discuss mission command with Eric Lopez, a management consultant, CEO and retired US Army Colonel who commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eric explains how mission command allows leaders to decentralize tactical decisions so that people on the ground can take initiative to achieve the mission in a…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Teresa Torres, a product coach, speaker, and author of continuous discovery habits. She explains how product managers, designers, and software engineers can use continuous discovery to ensure that they're building the right product and continuously improving it over time. In this intervie…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Dan Olson, author of the lean product development playbook. A practical guide to building products that customers love. Most new products fail on most new features are rarely used. Dan describes a practical six step process to improve your chances of building successful products. Listen t…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Anabela Cesário VP of product ops at OutSystems, a low code development platform. Anabela describes what product ops is and how her team mentors, coaches, supports and trains 25 product managers. From setting up the product board tool to training people in continuous discovery, providing …

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Jonathan Hall about implementing Continuous Delivery. CI/CD requires a level of test automation that seems impossible for most organisations. Jonathan describes a practical implementation path to CI/CD that everyone can do. Start by changing the role of QA to focus on pairing with develop…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Jeff Gothelf about Lean UX and Sense and Respond. Lean UX explains how to do UX design and product development in a highly agile way. The core of Lean UX is the canvas, a facilitation tool for collaboratively collecting and testing product hypotheses. The key output is a prioritised backl…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Adam Thomas about Product Survival Metrics. Empower the product team to make decisions quickly in uncertain situations by negotiating clear boundaries for the product team. Negotiate boundaries with stakeholders early. Use data to track your progress. When your heading towards a boundary …

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Christian Crumlish about the intersection between UX Design and Product Management. The risk of designing the wrong product is high. Customer research reduces that risk and uncertainty early. Product Development is a process of continuously learning, building and adapting. You can start a…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Willem-Jan Ageling about agile project management and leadership. A good leader focuses on the goal and the people and provides the support the team need to get there. Common anti-patterns are promising things the team can't deliver: disempowerment, micro-management, bureacratic processes…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Bryan Finster about Continuous Delivery and SAFe. Continuous delivery improves quality, productivity, value, and developers' lives. It reduces the cost of change so we can experiment and learn rapidly. Focus on improving your process so that you can deploy working solutions every day. Shi…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Scott Baldwin from Productboard. We need to shift our focus from features shipped to value created because most of the features we build arent used. We can harvest customer feedback from everybody that engages with customers to find the problems that need to be solved. Put those proposals…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Chris Butler about agile Product Management at Microsoft, Facebook and Google. Three core things, that product managers should do. Wrangle uncertainty, help stakeholders make good decisions and build alignment through communication with roadmaps, strategy documents, priorities and specifi…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Matthew Skelton about Team topologies. Siloed bureaucracies are too slow and inefficient in a fast moving agile world built on software. Use the Team Topologies patterns to redesign your organization for focused fast flow. Understanding Value Stream Aligned teams, Enabling Teams, Core Sub…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Sandy Mamoli about building great teams. Why do some teams perform well and others perform poorly. The importance of skill, trust, respect, collaboration common purpose, constructive feedback and continuous improvement. How to deal with toxic experts and charming slackers in the team. The…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Simon Wardley about Wardley maps. Wardely maps are a discussion tool that surfaces assumptions about competitive landscapes. Starting with the customer, we draw the value chain of components that we need to meet their goal and then identify what stage each component is in the evolutionary…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about assessing the agile capability of individuals, teams and partners. A lot of people and companies in the agile and software development space exaggerate their capability. Certifications and big brand names don't tell you much. What really matters is experience and a commitment to ongoing …

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about Outcome-Driven Innovation with Tony Ulwick. Most products fail in the market because they don't meet customers' needs better than the alternatives. To succeed, we need to study the problem that customers are trying to solve, the process they use to solve it and the metrics they use to me…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about UX design with Debbie Levitt. UX Design is research based information architecture and interaction design that requires deep expertise. Most agile teams are feature factories that build things that don't satisfy customers. Product Managers and Engineers don't have the skills and experien…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about Software Metrics with Tom Gilb. Tom Gilb inspired the authors of the Agile manifesto with his innovative incremental and scientific approach to Software Engineering. In this podcast we talk about Evo and Value Agile. Defining your scope with objectives and success metrics. How to measure…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about agile anti patterns with Todd Lankford. Patterns are common solutions to common problems. They may be good, bad or neutral. Agile anti patterns are solutions that make it harder for agile teams to achieve the goal. The top anti patterns are: unrealistic arbitrary deadlines, functional si…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about Agile as a paradigm shift with Erik de Bos. Most organisations are slow moving bureaucracies defined by authoritarian hierarchies, rules and contracts. Agile is a completely new way of thinking and a new vocabulary which makes new concepts and information available. Agile is part of a br…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation about effective agile product teams. Business people and technical people work together daily in one long-lasting customer-focused team. Roles vs Skills. The power of words. Do titles create hierarchy and functional silos within the team? T-shaped people. Should everyone be a developer? Are sp…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Staffan Noteberg about Agile and Flow. Agile is about adapting to unexpected change. Coaches should be practitioners. Speed up your feedback loop. Set the goal and let the team get on with it. Monotasking. Set up the environment to reduce interruptions. Start small, get things working and…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Mary and Tom Poppendieck about Lean and Software Development. Organizations have queues because they don't care about the customer. The three rules of lean, customer focus, flow and highly efficient expert teams. Scale your organization like a micro services architecture. Its not about do…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Bruce Taylor about working with offshore teams in developing countries. Why do people send their work offshore? Cost or talent? Is it cheaper to send work offshore or not? Outsourcing projects or augmenting the team. How to recruit the right people in a developing country. How does Agile …

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Kyle Griffin about uncertainty, complexity and change. Our requirements are probably wrong. So show people and build small bets. Our plan is likely to be wrong. So let's do things to mitigate our plan, being wrong. Our estimates are going to be wrong. So don't rely heavily on the estimate…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson for a conversation with Raj Nagappan on using Agile 2 to create awesome products. The early Agile movement was a rebellion against traditional command and control waterfall development that was failing everyone. Agile is a very important paradigm shift that has led to great improvements but it hasn't evolved as…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson for a powerful conversation with Scott Seivwright on becoming a better leader. Leading the Agile 20 Reflect conference. Building community, co-creating a vision and principles, skeletons vs exoskeletons, dealing with conflict, angry fathers and controlling managers, letting go and sharing responsibility, the re…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson for a debate with Michael Kusters about the pros and cons of SAFe. The Scaled “Agile” Framework for enterprises. SAFe is taking over because executives like its detailed 3-month program plans, detailed processes, hierarchical organization, and comprehensive rollout plans. SAFe has been great at sales and market…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Dave Farley on Continuous Delivery. Working in a way so that our software is always in a releasable state. Establishing fast, high quality feedback so that we can make decisions based on the reality of our customers needs and our systems state, rather than on guesses. The difference betwe…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Lisa Crispin on Holistic Testing. Build quality in. Continuous testing for continuous delivery. Building shared understanding of requirements. Shorten feedback loops. Moving from traditional testing to agile testing. Test automation. The test pyramid and agile testing quadrants. Business-…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Esther Derby on Agile Coaching, Agile Leadership, Culture and Continuous Improvement. Making work more humane. Successful coaches understand the context and the content. Taking responsibility for personal growth and business outcomes. Good leadership adds a lot of value. Influencing senio…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Bas Vodde on LeSS. LeSS is true Scrum at Scale not just at the team level. LeSS applies the principles, purpose and elements of Scrum in a large-scale context, as simply as possible. Many scrum teams with one product, one product owner, one product backlog, one sprint, one sprint planning…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Jurgen Appelo on how to design an organisation to support self management, continuous innovation and human experience. Jurgens unFix model supports gradual change, dynamic teams, and recognises that managers play an important role. The model is inspired by innovative companies including H…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Marty Cagan on Empowered Product Teams. Do discovery and delivery in one team. Discover problems worth solving, rapidly test prototypes and develop the best ideas using an agile approach. Low and high fidelity user experience prototypes, feasibility prototypes and data prototypes. Good le…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Jason Yip about Spotify. The Spotify approach works for Spotify, but it might not work for you. Develop your product strategy first, and then design your organisation to support it using team topologies. To succeed, you need unity of purpose, trust in people and playful growth. When you h…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with David Pereira about Product Leaders. Successful Product Leaders don't write requirements; they define the problem, set a goal and empower the team to get the job done. Be curious about customers' problems but don't take their word on the solution. Constantly test your assumptions with pro…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Alidad Hamidi about Systems Thinking. Systems Thinking is about understanding that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It is the interactions between things that drive the outcome. For example, cutting costs locally often increases costs globally. One person's solution is ofte…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Steve Tendon about Tameflow and the theory of constraints. If you can find the constraint preventing the organisation from achieving its goal and address it, you can make extraordinary improvements in performance. But sadly most improvement efforts fail because they don't address the cons…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Daniel Mezick about open leadership. What motivates people and how to get great results in a group. Organizations are social games with goals, rules and players with different resources and decision rights. Most organizations are totalitarian dictatorships with a heavy management tax. Ope…

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Scott Middleton about his article Agile is dead. McKinsey killed it. The Agile PMO. Agile as a cost out tool. Slathering the Agile word onto everything to sell services. Do big consulting companies really understand Agile? What about people and interactions over processes and tools. What …