Platform Diaries with Shane Williams

Building a scalable product and proving the market is difficult, but scaling a business is harder. Whilst start-ups are often proudly scrappy, it takes a whole new level of maturity to achieve scale. Nigel Dalton, once described as the godfather of Agile in Australia, is a social scientist in the Digital Transformation and Operations Team at Thoughtworks. Nigel shares his views on the importance of ‘playing-up’ – a growth mindset that sees you thinking and executing one horizon ahead of your actual growth; using and implementing SaaS platforms to enable scale. He also explores why having a platform strategy is so important to scale-ups, dealing with complexity and uncertainty, and the steps to success.

Platform Owner’s Guidebook: https://www.shanewilliams.com.au/book 

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More than ever before, the focus of scale-ups on their data privacy posture is critical. With the increasing demands of regulators to secure personal data, the increased awareness of consumers about the privacy and the death of 3rd party cookies many businesses conducting ecommerce are struggling to keep pace. James Taylor is an authority on the space. He is founder and CEO of Particular Audience, and draws from a broad experience a founder and investor in several startups across APAC, UK and India. We discuss the challenges and solutions around data privacy that are facing the ecommerce industry.

James: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswstaylor/

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There’s any number of theories on how to scale engineering, but only those who’ve been on the journey can truly tell what works and where to tread lightly. Chris Venter CTO at REA Group shares his experiences on scaling engineering teams beyond Dunbar’s number and how to enable both flow and optimisation.

Platform Owner’s Guidebook: https://www.shanewilliams.com.au/book 

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Jamie Pride is founder of ‘humanly agile’ and author of ‘Unicorn Tears: Why Startups Fail & How To Avoid It’. Former CEO of realestate.com.au, Jamie shares his perspectives on how scale-ups should approach organisational design learned from his 20 years across consulting, founding of six start-ups, and as an investor who’s raised more than AU$20m in capital.

Platform Owner’s Guidebook: https://www.shanewilliams.com.au/book

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Recorded in November 2020 as research for the book that would become ‘The Platform Owner’s Guidebook’ Nigel Dalton social scientist, AI thought leader and the ‘Godfather of Agile’ shares his experiences of implementing complex systems.

Platform Owner’s Guidebook: https://www.shanewilliams.com.au/book

Recorded in October 2020 as research for the book that would become ‘The Platform Owner’s Guidebook’, Mike Kasparian is CIO at Forrester Research shares his insights into the importance of governance and demand management to successfully deliver and support a customer-obsessed technology vision & strategy.

Platform Owner’s Guidebook: https://www.shanewilliams.com.au/book

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Just like professional athletes, platform teams are expected to continually and consistently produce exceptional results. Is the secret to a perpetual A-Game hidden in martial arts? Frank Cuiuli, CEO of 8Squad, talks about how he combines martial arts and neurophysics to sustain high performance for his clients. He also offers a few tips for leaders on where to get started.

For more about Frank Cuiuli – http://www.frankcuiuli.com/

Shane Williams – https://www.shanewilliams.com.au/

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It’s not always the best idea that wins. Often, it all depends who has the best told story that captures the hearts and minds of stakeholders. Brooke Bainbridge, Business Development & Digital Transformation Manager at Castrol, shares her own story from growing up in the public bar in regional Victoria to leading digital transformation programs, and the key elements of a story that enable visionary human centred leadership.

Brooke Bainbridge: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brooke-bainbridge-41276668/

Platform Owner’s Guidebook: https://www.shanewilliams.com.au/book

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Part 2 of 2 in a series on organisational design. When start-up’s mature they experience the growing pains of success. Those who successfully achieve hyper-growth realise what got them this far won’t scale, and so they adapt. Xero is one such organisation. Founded in Wellington NZ in 2006, it is now global powerhouse. John Railton, GM of Customer Platforms at Xero gives us some insight into how he’s transformed their Salesforce platform practice to enable the next phase of business growth.

John Railton: [email protected]

Platform Owner’s Guidebook: https://www.shanewilliams.com.au/book

Team Topologies: https://teamtopologies.com/

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Part 1 of 2 in a series on organisational design. Jason van Lint, Head of Delivery at Flybuys (Loyalty Pacific) knows the struggle and satisfaction of building high performing platform teams in large technology businesses. We discuss the recent changes being introduced at Flybuys and Jason’s insights into how to successfully transform teams to an agile delivery model.

Jason van Lint: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jvanlint/

Platform Owner’s Guidebook: https://www.shanewilliams.com.au/book

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