Definitely, Maybe Agile – Details, episodes & analysis

In this episode of the Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss a fascinating case study of Nike's digital transformation gone awry, resulting in a $25 billion loss and 32% market share decline over three years. They explore the pitfalls of over-relying on data-driven decision-making while neglecting other crucial aspects of business strategy and customer engagement.

This week´s takeaways:

• Data-driven decision-making is valuable, but you need the right data. Companies need to balance quantitative data with qualitative insights and intuition.
• Optimizing for existing customers isn't enough for growth. Businesses must also focus on attracting new customers and exploring adjacent markets.
• Organizational culture plays a critical role in transformation efforts. Companies need to foster an environment where employees feel empowered to speak up and challenge prevailing narratives.
• Not everything that matters can be easily measured. Organizations should find ways to understand and manage important factors, even if they are difficult to quantify, rather than ignoring them in favor of easily measurable metrics.

Resources_ 
Nike’s $25B blunder shows us the limits of “data-driven-  https://uxdesign.cc/nikes-25b-blunder-shows-us-the-limits-of-data-driven-ad30b6e3d938

In this episode of Definitely Maybe Agile, hosts Peter Maddison and David Sharrock dive into the challenging world of agile practices in regulated environments. They explore the tension between modern agile methodologies and traditional audit requirements, offering insights on how organizations can bridge this gap. The discussion covers the importance of understanding compliance needs, automating evidence collection, and transforming the audit process to align with agile principles.

This week´s takeaways:

• Organizations must understand what they need to comply with and set up systems and practices that make evidence easily obtainable without disrupting workflow.
• Implement automation in the delivery system to capture and expose evidence of compliance, making it easier to demonstrate adherence to regulations without slowing down agile processes.
• Shift the audit focus from document checking and stage gates to validating system behavior. This approach can make audits more meaningful and engage development teams in solving compliance challenges creatively.

In this episode of Definitely, Maybe Agile, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock explore the critical aspects of creating a compelling business case for agile transformation. They discuss the importance of understanding an organization's current state, setting clear goals, and implementing change incrementally. The conversation delves into the challenges of organizational change, the value of external help, and the need for effective communication across all company levels during transformation efforts.

This week´s takeaways:

• Before embarking on any transformation, it's crucial to understand where your organization currently stands.
• Successful transformations require buy-in and participation from all parts of the organization.
• Rather than attempting large-scale changes simultaneously, focus on implementing transformations in small, manageable increments.

Join us as we navigate the complexities of organizational transformation with practical advice on achieving smooth, well-communicated change. 

Some projects never seem to end. Big upfront design results in long execution phases and eventually it becomes difficult to believe it will ever be delivered. This week, Peter and Dave discuss how to approach these seemingly never-ending projects once they are well underway. Having started this way, how can you bring it under control and apply what we know of business agility to move forwards again? 

 This week's takeaways:

• Stakeholder communication.
• Identify and prioritize
• Do one thing at a time.
• Work on the thing that will help us create stability and move forward.
•  Meanwhile, have everybody else focus on improving the integrations, fixing defects, and removing technical debt. 

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com 

 Learning from failure is an essential part of building your resilience. In this week's episode, Peter and Dave discuss how failure gives us the ability to improve and continually create more resilient systems.

This week's takeaways:

• The importance of understanding the resiliency of each part of our system in context of the whole system.
• Failure allows us to learn, and then we can rebuild stronger.
• Recognize that we need to persevere through failures to gain the benefits.

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com 

We're so happy to have made it to episode 52! This year has been full of guests and conversations about agility. We've also had the opportunity to share our expertise, so thank you for joining us on these journeys together—it's not going unnoticed.
This week's episode is about addressing your team's needs and not just forcing agile processes on them. You'll learn what happens when an organization doesn't put people first.

This week takeaways:

• The hiring process is our first impression. If we make a mess there, we're always going to be on our back foot.
• Talk about what's happening. Don't lie.
• Lead by example.

References in this episode:
Leaders Eat Last- Simon Sinek https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16144853-leaders-eat-last.

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

In this episode of the Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast, Dave and Peter have a special guest, Rob Hirschfeld, co-founder, and CEO of RackN, a collaborative platform for teams automating infrastructure as code. This time we'll have a slightly longer episode than normal as we dive into different aspects of complexity. This isn't one you'll want to miss. We had a lot of fun recording it and really liked the end result. We hope you do too.

This week takeaways:

• Stop trying to eliminate complexity and figure out how to manage it.
• Build systems focused on system effectiveness.
• Complexity problems are collaboration problems.

We love to hear feedback. If you have questions, want to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. 

What do you think of our services, and has it had the impact you were hoping to see? In today's episode of the Definitely Maybe Agile podcast, Peter and Dave talk about the importance of asking for feedback from our customers to prevent business agility from failing.

This week takeaways:

• Validate emergent needs with your customers
• Build a system that can respond to that.

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

 Now we are going to talk about our second antipattern that came up in episode 43, being unable to say "no". This often presents itself as confusing speed with focus.
This week takeaways:

• Reducing delivery costs starts with saying no.
• Prioritize and concentrate efforts in one place.
• Limit work in progress
• Automation is essential.

  We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com 

 In the last 5 episodes of the Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast, we presented 5 ways Business Agility can impact your bottom line. In today's episode, we start our 5-episode series of exploring antipatterns that prevent us from achieving these benefits.

The first antipattern we're going to explore is one from our discussion in episode 44 on How business agility increases revenue. While business agility can reduce the cost of delivery, you may not realize those benefits if you forget to look at the entire system and begin to build feedback loops that allow you to learn as you progress.´

This week takeaways: 

• Watch for the signal-to-noise ratio
• Consider the influence of how long your feedback loops are on the system
• Make your system visible and understand how you'll measure 

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com