Steve Neiderhauser

Powerful Questions

Several years ago, I was in a coaching circle. A circle is a group that meets to improve their coaching skills.

We were paired off and practicing powerful questions. I asked these three questions, waiting for a response before moving to the next question.

What are the possibilities?

What would success look like?

If a wise person were to whisper the answer in your ear, what would they say to you?

The person paired with me gave this feedback: That last question was powerful and make me go deep inside to find the answer.

Evolutionary Architecture

Nice article on Evolutionary Architecture by ThoughtWorks.

I’ve always believed in modular design as a way to increase flexibility. Here’s a quote from the article.

Inappropriate coupling inhibits evolution by propagating changes in difficult to predict ways. Evolutionary architectures all support some level of modularity, typically at the technical architecture (for example, the classic layered architecture).

Flexible architecture also supports the business and concepts like Hypothesis Driven Development.

Outcomes over Output

I’ve worked at several companies where product teams were more focused on how many stories they delivered instead of true business outcomes.

Joshua Seiden’s book Outcomes over Output gives you techniques for focusing on customer behavior — the key metric for business success.

The entire book is excellent. I finished reading a section for managers that resonated with me. For example, if asked to increase sales, create a customer journey map and review it. Ask yourself, What behaviors in the system predict higher sales and how do we encourage those behaviors?

Some takeaways from the chapter:

• Planning with outputs limits the team’s agility and problem-solving flexibility.
• Create outcomes-based roadmaps that list questions, themes… instead of features.
• Customer Journey Maps help visualize the system in terms of customer behavior. Look for outcomes in the system.

7 Ways to Make Your Best PowerPoint Presentations

Chariti Canny provides seven great tips for your next presentation. 

These tips are great because of their simplicity. Simple designs eliminate friction and allow people to employ the tip immediately.

For example, the one idea per slide tip can be easily practiced. Create a title for every single slide and as you design the slide, check in and assure the content aligns with the title at the top of page. 

I also like this tip: Create visually stunning moments with photography.

Evolutionary Design

Modern Agile created a cheat sheet for evolutionary design.

Joshua Kerievsky defines Evolutionary Design as:

A strategy for rapidly providing value by growing something from a primitive, yet complete, whole to a higher level of sophistication over time.

The sheet provides excellent insights like preserve flexibility.

Building options into your product from the start is one way to increase flexibility. For example, instead of using stored procedures that lock you into one database vendor, design the software with an object-relational mapping framework. This framework gives the option to switch databases by simply providing the connection string to the new database.

Please read this article if you wish to learn more about options thinking.