From change management to marketing and product management, our guest Egil Østhus and I hit on a wide array of topics in our quest to understand and illuminate the humble feature flag. The idea of the feature flag is an important one because it's one of the primary supports to *actual* continuous delivery - it enables engineering teams to deliver with minimal friction. This multiplies creativity (that is to say "innovation"), the impact we're bringing to the lives of our customers, and through that, our own happiness and satisfaction with our work.

While surprisingly powerful in their consequence, feature flags can - at times - also be surprisingly difficult to put into play. 

Egil helps with tangible, practical advice on how to get over some of these challenges - and of course offers a powerful tool ("Unleash") that we can all immediately leverage.

To start with the open source tool - or to even jump in all the way with Unleash - go to getunleash.io.

About Egil -- Egil Østhus is the founder and CEO of Unleash. Unleash is the largest open source FeatureOps platform globally today, and is used by massive enterprises across the globe. Prior to founding Unleash, Egil has worked in different corporate jobs including Cisco, Accenture and Visma as an SVP. Egil is super excited about software engineering leadership and is all about building high efficiency organizations that have a lot of fun together. A fun fact: Egil holds 2 patents in the video conferencing space. When not at work, Egil loves to run and spend time with his wife and two boys, age 13 and 17.

Taking the step from focusing on tactics to delivering a well-crafted, world-class engineering organization isn't as difficult as you might think. It's a lot like improving your health, though - easy to talk about but takes relentless discipline to do. 

Listen this month for some clarity on this topic - as we explain the move from Executive Tactician to Executive Craftsman.

Join in as our guest, Molly Jaggers, and I dive into the details of an emerging best practice - structuring organizations around a holistic product-engineering approach. Disappearing are the days when engineers can crawl into their coding corners only to emerge days or weeks later with some new bit of functionality. Disappearing also are the days when a product management organization disappears offsite only to reappear at a later time with a grand roadmap.

The act of building a product - something that is actually useful to a human being - is an experimental one. It's an iterative thing. So those joining in on the invention must have imaginations and intellects that are joined - otherwise the invention they pursue will be ungrounded in either need or technical possibility....or both.

We hope you are as excited as we are to start this important discussion - and hash out some of the details about how such an integration might be practically pursued.

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Molly is a seasoned product and marketing leader with over 11 years of experience driving revenue growth, scaling teams, and leading cross-functional initiatives across diverse environments, from nimble growth-stage startups to established corporations. What truly sets Molly apart is her unique ability to bridge the gap between product strategy and market impact, while keeping a close eye on the process and ensuring teams are focused on getting the right work done efficiently. She has been instrumental in establishing the go-to-market process and integrating it seamlessly into the product development lifecycle. 

The role of engineering manager is often quite enigmatic.  It often finds itself in emergency mode - with little time to fix the broader structural issues that are hindering the team or teams being led.  Much more of this dilemma falls under the control of the engineering manager himself - much more than is immediately apparent.  Listen to this month’s episode for a framework that will help to think about influencing and leading in the areas available, and understanding what progress actually looks like.

Looking into the future with our guest Erik Erichsen.  AI is already making a huge impact on our craft, changing the way we solve problems and even how we conceive them.  As Engineering Leaders it falls on us to prepare our people, and to keep our perspective broad enough so that the ongoing evolution of our industry is something that we can leverage and not something that crushes us.

This means understanding the timeless principles that make for great software development - for great value add to our customers.  It simultaneously means not ignoring the new context or how those principles are expressed in the new environment.

Join us as we explore this and more in this month's episode...

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Our guest Erik Erichsen:

Erik has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry ranging from startups to the enterprise organizations in both the public and private sector. During this time, he's served in a variety of roles including software engineer, architect, technology leader, product manager, and Divisional CIO for a Fortune 500 organization.   His passion is leveraging technology to transform Mission-Led organizations and empowering individuals to have transformative impact.  While he has been in various management roles for more than a decade, he stays closely connected with emerging technologies and trends.

Working up from first principles, it becomes clear that code reviews (as typically conceived) do far more damage than good.  If we want to move past this legacy approach into the faster, better, more valuable world of continuous delivery, we do need to really understand these baseline principles.

This episode works through this - and will help you understand how you can apply these principles in your context.

The important thing, ultimately, is to be delivering the highest value to our customers.  To get there we do need to get past this all-to-common stumbling block.  All it takes is a little bit of courage and a readiness to do the work. 

Are you with us in this? 

I know you are.

(Book mentioned in the episode: Powerful, Profitable Software Products: The Executive Guidebook)

Join us as seasoned engineering leader Chuck Goss pops the hood on his eminently practical but quite refined engineering practice.  Currently leading the engineering organization at the innovative Kizen Technologies, Chuck will share some key tactical tools that he's used to create a powerful and productive engineering machine - even in a highly distributed context.

Dr. Kyle Smith joins us today on this extra special episode.  This neuro-ophthalmologist turned technology executive explains the lessons he learned as he made the transition from customer to creator!  I know you'll appreciate his perspective as much as I do - and that you'll take some great wisdom away from his unique perspective. So grab some coffee and settle in as we take in what Dr. Smith has to say.

2025 is all set to be an epic year.  

As 2024 is coming to a close the question is - what can I be doing to make sure my organization and I are nice and early to the party.  How can we be setting ourselves up to maximize the impact and growth that will be coming to us from this bright future. 

As John Maxwell says, everything rises and falls on leadership.  That's even more true in technology, where we regularly define and redefine the nature of our business.

How can we be Executive Craftsmen that build and lead great organizations. 

Join us this episode as we dig into this.

(Powerful, Profitable Software Products, The Executive Guidbook - https://a.co/d/gyRwMWj )

There aren't a lot of metrics out there that actually work.  At least toward building up a great software engineering practice. 

There is one that does carry a bit of signal with regard to health, and that's TBD.  Your maturity with TBD implies maturity with a number of the core practices involved in building software well.  Further, it implies that you are actually pretty good at those things (as a team). 

As long as you avoid the pitfall of "cowboy coding" - there aren't a lot of dangers in measuring and even holding yourself accountable to your TBD maturity.

Even if it turns out that your maturity is low - probing even a little at that will yield massive concrete, actionable improvement opportunities. 

So join us this month as we dive into this unique and powerful idea.