Roasting Marshmallows

The days of gathering requirements from business stakeholders and documenting them in long product requirements documents are vanishing. Instead, high-performant teams are experimenting towards solutions that will lead to the outcomes they desire.

Helping us doing just this is Teresa Torres. She recently published Continuous Discovery Habits, a book designed to guide you to a sustainable approach to continuous discovery.

Teresa Torres is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach. She teaches a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. She’s coached hundreds of teams at companies of all sizes, from early-stage start-ups to global enterprises, in a variety of industries. She has taught over 7,000 product people discovery skills through the Product Talk Academy. She’s the author of the book Continuous Discovery Habits and blogs at ProductTalk.org.

Will switching to the latest version of your libraries *really* make your development go faster?

Is it worth investing a lot of time in research while there is a tried-and-true, production hardened solution readily available?

How do new shiny things for developers help your product gain a competitive advantage?

To be fair, even e-mail was considered bleeding edge at one point, which has of course become a staple in our means of communication. Some people would even argue that e-mail is old fashioned!

To help us figure this out, we have Alpar Gal around the campfire today.

Alpar Gal is a passionate software developer. He started his journey as a c++ developer 15 years ago. Couple of years later switched to java and web application development. He is coding for fun in his free time when he is not busy at home with the kids. His is interested in software development topics in general and ios development.

When dealing with a big challenge, is it always good to break it up into small chunks?

W. Edwards Deming has said that 95% of variation in the performance of a system is caused by the system itself and only 5% is caused by the people.

Organizations can be considered systems, so in a way it is amazing that a lot of time and effort is spent in improving individual performance, while so much more could be improved by looking at the organization, or system, itself. In order to do so, one could start looking into Systems thinking.

Systems thinking is a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system's individual parts are related to each other and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems. This is opposed to the classic 'divide and conquer' pattern where systems are broken down in separate elements for further study.

Someone who applies Systems thinking in his day to day job is our guest: Gerard Janssen. Gerard has the conviction that people, teams and organizations can, and want to, do more than what they are doing now.

Gerard's linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardjanssen

Recomended reads to get you started on Systems Thinking: 

Do you want to work in the system or work the system?

Are you ready to break the chains of command and control?

There are two kinds of work. One is to Work in the System: you are a cog in the machine.

To help us work the system and break the chains of command, we have Niels Pflaeging on the show today. Niels is a passionate advocate for a new breed of leadership and profound change in organizations. He is founder and associate of the BetaCodex network

https://www.nielspflaeging.com/

https://twitter.com/NielsPflaeging

https://www.linkedin.com/in/niels-pflaeging-11a89/

https://www.workthesystem.eu/

https://betacodex.org/

What does the future of education look like? Are students taught the right skillset to be able to make an impact on the job market?

Some universities literally date back to the middle ages, such as Oxford university which has been teaching as far back as 1096. Naturally this means, in general, education is quite classic and slow to change. On contrary, especially in IT, things do change fairly rapidly and companies are looking for specific skillsets that might not match the educations on offer.

Our guest, Darjan Radenkovic thinks this can be a lot better. He was Director of Education at Brainster, a tech-education company on a mission to help people future-proof their careers by learning in-demand tech skills. 

Darjan is passionate for learning and knowledge sharing, always willing to test new approaches, while leveling the arguments with data.

What can universities, governments and companies do to shape the future of education? And by doing so, how will that shape the future of society?

#continuous-learning #future #tech #education #school

Why do teams always want to build the next best thing without focusing on the fundamentals like a simple address change or login page?

These questions and more are the focus of this episode of Roasting Marshmallows.

Our guest is Niels Talens, Chief Product Owner at Simply Deliver A.I., and he will share his views, frustrations and best practices about being a product owner and software engineering in general.  

For Niels, the most important thing is creating the best possible products in services. Whether it is agile portfolio management or continuous delivery, DevOps transitions or project management, he always looks for optimizing the whole.

He considers himself a problem solver.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nielstalens

https://nielstalens.nl

How do you get hired by right company? More importantly, how do you prepare for such an interview? What about negotiations? And what do these companies have to do to reel you in?

On this episode, a senior technical recruiter from a Big Tech company is willing to give up all secrets, tips and tricks for engineers and companies alike!

His name is Jordan Philips, and he has spent 7 years working across larger big tech like Google, but also startups like Wayve autonomous driving. At Google, he acted as an ambassador for diversity and inclusion alongside representing them in multiple global conferences around hiring, culture and Cloud.

What are his recommendations to engineers and companies alike?

Jordan's LinkedIn

#jobswithjp

How do you develop a side project and transform it into your own startup?

It is the dream of many software engineers to develop something, maybe as a side project, and then see that project gain traction. It gets adopted, downloaded a bunch of times, and maybe you even get to speak on it during conventions.

For our guest today this has happened, and many more things since then as well. He built a framework which enables teams to develop applications using Domain Driven Design, Event Sourcing and CQRS.

This framework lead to the founding of a new company, AxonIQ in 2017, and with it a whole end-to-end development and infrastructure platform for smoothly evolving Event-Driven Microservices focused on CQRS and Event Sourcing.

Joining us today is Allard Buijze, CTO and founder of AxonIQ.

Find out how Allard went from developing something during his spare time, to becoming a CTO and eventually spinning off a brand new company on this episode of Roasting Marshmallows!

Change is good, but transitioning can be arduous. What do you do when you feel stuck at your current job? You have been trying to grow and develop but you get nowhere?  Your job is not fulfilling? You know you can do better, and you know you can earn more. You are in a career that is not a good match or you have outgrown it? Or maybe, you have been fired and are forced to make a transition.

Today we are talking with Clayton Dewey about his transitioning into IT. More often we see people from various non-it related professions making the jump into IT. The reasons and the stories might differ, but patterns are starting to emerge.

Clayton shares his story, about how he was push out of a profession he loved, and found the joy in becoming a developer and later UX designer and a Product Owner.

Hope his story inspires others and provides some comfort for those struggling.

Hope you enjoy it.

Change is good, but transitioning can be arduous. What do you do when you feel stuck at your current job? You have been trying to grow and develop but you get nowhere?  Your job is not fulfilling? You know you can do better, and you know you can earn more. You are in a career that is not a good match or you have outgrown it? Or maybe, you have been fired and are forced to make a transition.

Today we are talking with Clayton Dewey about his transitioning into IT. More often we see people from various non-it related professions making the jump into IT. The reasons and the stories might differ, but patterns are starting to emerge.

Clayton shares his story, about how he was push out of a profession he loved, and found the joy in becoming a developer and later UX designer and a Product Owner.

Hope his story inspires others and provides some comfort for those struggling.

Hope you enjoy it.