Steve Neiderhauser

Rise of Platform Engineering

Nick Daigler shares an article on platform engineering.

How to rock on with Team Topologies

Team Topologies teaches you how to create fast flow systems. 

This article describes how to get started in eight steps.

Start by identifying what kind of teams exist within the software organization. There are four fundamental team types.

The third step is rather interesting: Limit the cognitive load for each team by limiting the size of the subsystem the team works on. Also, break apart monoliths using natural fracture planes.

The remaining five steps are well worth the read.

Customer Development and Rapid Dev

Funny how AI and No-Code solutions were in a deep winter. Looks like both have broken through the permafrost and are enjoying the rays of spring to flower their potential.

I’ve taken a closer look into No-Code solutions. They could provide a major benefit especially for startups. Bubble.io looks rather good and they list several startups that achieved business results with their solution.

Apps can be built in a fraction of the time and the feedback loop is dramatically accelerated. Thus, the runway is extended for startups. Rapid dev fits nicely with Design Thinking (in studies, DT correlates with revenue). When No-Code solutions reach their full potential there will be a major shakeup in software development. 

Bottom line: At the very least, companies should do Build vs. No-Code analysis. There’s a strong case for using No-Code to create MVPs.

Why is rapid dev so compelling? Because customers need to see it to understand it. And to see it, there needs to be a shared space.

Innovation Metrics

In Strategyzer’s latest book, The Invincible Company, they look at four main performance indicators.

• Risk and Uncertainty
• Expected Profitability
• Cost to test idea
• Learning Velocity and Time Spent

Learning velocity feels like the one number that matters. Because it measures how much you’ve learned during a time period.

OKR - 40 Year Old Goal-Setting Framework

Jeff Gothelf gives a wonderful description of Objectives and Key Results.

Here’s a couple things I learned.

A good objective is qualitative and focuses on the change the team desires to see. Objectives are aspirational and challenges the team to stretch further.

I don’t recalling seeing in other articles that the objective should be timeboxed. Yet, timeboxes are a powerful concept and I’m glad Jeff included timeboxes in his writeup.

So for an objective, set a deadline for achieving the goal.

Community of Practice

Bob Galen describes Community of Practice as a great way to grow the talent of people in agile organizational contexts.

Consulting companies will use a COP to develop new consulting services for areas that are new or rapidly changing. 

HEART Metrics for Product Health

I finally discovered Google’s HEART framework. Eduardo Mignot provides a great writeup on HEART and its benefits.

HEART lets you know how healthy your product is; it stands for:

• Happiness 
• Engagement
• Adoption 
• Retention
• Task

Plenty of details in the article so go ahead and read it.

Update: Kerry Rodden created the HEART framework. Her article, How to choose the right UX metrics for your product, describes a couple methods to choose and define metrics that reflect:

• The quality of user experience (HEART framework)
• Goals of your product or project (the Goals-Signals-Metrics process)