A new orthodoxy awaits us
In the zeitgeist of product development, the hive mind is slowly, through repeated exploration, moulding a new orthodoxy. A set of practices which focus teams on meaningful results which help their customers and their organisations. Practices that help them understand their progress through positive movement towards successfully improving something important for their customers. Practices that help them be strongly aligned as a collective unit whilst working in a cohesive yet autonomous fashion. These ideas are being explored in software product organisations all across the planet, broadening and deepening like creeks and estuaries wearing grooves into the crust of the earth.
These are not strictly new ideas, most can be traced back to much earlier business thinking. The remarkable elements that have captured my imagination are:
- I have found from first-hand experience that there is a collection of practices which help engage teams around common goals and improve the efficacy of what they set out to achieve.
- The current proliferation of these ideas in various pockets of the industry and a growing interest by organisations to adopt.
Much in the same way agility proliferated as an approach which in time could claim legitimacy or even preference, I have come to believe these complimentary ideas will have similar ascendancy.
I have been fortunate across my career to have been able to explore product development from a variety of different vantage points and to experiment with approaches where I can influence the approaches taken, most recently at the organisational level. Most of this has involved standing on the shoulders of giants so while I believe I have some perspectives which are novel and may represent new thinking, the majority of the work will be in making the essential elements of these practices as simple to understand as possible. Through sharing, I hope that I may connect with those who have tried similar approaches or had similar suspicions such approaches may improve results and are encouraged by what I have to report to continue on the journey.
This series of writing will act as a set of living articles that attempts to distil the core of these ideas into accessible ideas which contribute to this body of knowledge and a useful reference. As the dialogue finds better ways to articulate these ideas, invalidate those aspects of my thinking which are unsupported or false conclusions I plan to incorporate those improvements.
Let me know what I have missed, what observations and experiences correlate with your own and where I have it wrong. There is something important being discovered and we will uncover it together through sharing experiences and continuing to experiment.
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If you have had your own epiphanies that changed the way you look at software product development please share that experience in the comments!
