Roasting Marshmallows

• Is your startup interesting enough to find investors?
• What kind of effort does it take to have a startup?

Start ups are usually considered pretty sexy. They bring about cool new apps that your friends insist you just have to get. They disrupt the market with innovative new goods and services. They display their awesome company culture in such a way that working there becomes a goal in itself.

But what about the Business to Business startup? You don't hear a lot about those being the next hottest startup. Maybe not, but, because they cater to the needs of other businesses, they are really good at making money.

Today, we are roasting marshmallows with Alex Cojocaru, one of the co-founders of Licenseware, an open ecosystem of Software Asset Management applications that contains the collective work of thousands of experts, enabling businesses to make the most out of their licenses.

Alex started his career as an Analyst in 2011, and has had various roles with a focus on software asset management, data analytics, and software development.

In 2020 he co-founded licenseware, with the mission of commoditizing software license management.

• How to stay engaged while working remote?
• What can offshoring teach us when working remote? 
• What are Rini's laws?

We are, when recording this podcast, in lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The omikron variant is running rampant, so this means most of us are working from the kitchen table, or if you have the room, the home office again.

So, entire teams are working remote again, not physically meeting each other for an extended period of time. How do you make sure everything keeps running smooth? How do you make sure communication, coordination and control do not degrade due to increased distance of the team members?

Luckily, the software engineering industry has had decades of experience working with remote teams: near- and offshoring has been pretty common, and the lessons learnt from that can be applied to working from home.

To help us pin-point the takeaways from these lessons, we are roasting marshmallows with Rini van Solingen, speaker & author on speed and agility of people & organizations. Rini is a professor at Delft University of Technology, and he investigates how to make global teams hyper-productive and how to decrease the impact of distance in global software engineering.

Rini wrote several books, on topics about changing leadership, accelerating organizations, agile transformations and scrum.

• Does the thought of doing a presentation make your stomach churn?
• Are you comfortable speaking up in front of a group of people?
• How do you deal with being the center of attention?

Fear. We all know the feeling from a terrifying experience at some point in our lives. However, 75% of the people get fearful when having to speak in front of a group of people. Even the idea of doing it is sometimes enough for many people to get fearful.

Yes, most of us — even those at the top — struggle with public-speaking anxiety. When people think about what makes them nervous, they usually come up with the same answers:

• I don’t like being in the spotlight
• I don’t like being watched
• I don’t like the eyes on me

Some might say the fear will go away as you do more and more talks. This is not always true: our guest today, Thierry de Pauw, has done many talks: about Continuous Delivery, Agile transformations, Trunk based development and so on. However, Thierry has publicly shared about his struggle to start public talks.

Thierry is a Senior IT Engineer at the fintech startup PaxFamilia.

On the side, he founded ThinkingLabs, an advisory firm in the adoption of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

He is an occasional speaker at international conferences about everything Continuous Delivery.

• Why is it that anxiety disorders are so prevalent? 
• Why is it that depression is now the  leading cause of disability? 
• Why is that bullying is still really prevalent?

Most people don’t grow up learning very much about their emotions — what they are, how they work, or how to manage them well.

This means there are a lot of people out there with perfectly normal levels of academic or social intelligence, but surprisingly low emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence means the capacity to reflect on and understand your emotional life.

Because the clearer you can be about your emotions — what they are and how they work — the better you’ll be able to manage the most difficult and painful ones.

Thankfully, we can all improve our emotional intelligence with a little learning and some practice. This is important not just for ourselves, but for our children as well. To help us improve, we have Marc Brackett on the show today.

Marc is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine at Yale University. His most recent book, ‘Permission te Feel’ explores ways for our emotions to help, rather than hinder, our well-being and success at home, in school, at work, and in everyday life.

• Are you imposing change by decree?
• Is "the next big change" going to solve everything?
• Do your people see what is valuable about the future you propose?

Even though the world around us is changing faster and faster, it proves challenging for companies and individuals to adapt to these changes. For these, change sometimes comes much slower and more painful than hoped. Changing, or adapting to change, is not simple on any level. Often, there is no right answer, and responding requires trial and error, learning and unlearning.

Understanding that you don't have to push, prod, persuade or punish people to create change in your organization, our guest today, Esther Derby, offers change by attraction, an approach that is adaptive and responsive and engages people in learning, evolving, and owning the new way.

• What did John F. Kennedy and Steve Jobs have in common?
• Would George Washington be a successful founder of a startup?
• Would we remember Herbert Hoover as the Jeff Bezos of his time had he been elected eight years earlier?

The president of the United States is usually considered the most powerful person on the planet. Indeed, the US has the biggest economy, the most powerful military, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood and NASA.

How did America become such a powerhouse? With a little imagination, you could compare America's lifecycle to that of a product or even a company. There's the introduction, rapid growth, disruption and renewal.

With that comparison in mind, one could imagine the president to be the Chief Marketing Officer, selling us the American dream. What lessons can we draw today from developing the product that is America?

We are roasting marshmallows with Jason Voiovich, author of the book "Marketer in Chief: How Each President Sold the American Idea. In it, Jason retells the story of America, but through the eyes of its most influential salesperson - the president.

Jason’s favorite way to observe the world is through its history. He believes the people from the past have plenty to teach us about the challenges and opportunities we face today.

• How do you deal with team compositions during times of explosive growth?
• Are you looking to spread knowledge across teams?
• What metrics are out there to track team performance?

Ever since the dawn of humanity people had to work together and form teams in order to achieve a common goal. These goals could be something as vital as survival, but also, as civilizations were growing to build great structures, or in modern times, building awesome apps on your phone!

Like the times teams can and will, change as well. One would expect with all these years of teamwork that people would have gotten very good at adapting to these team changes.

Turns out, this is often not the case. Luckily for us, we are roasting marshmallows with Heidi Helfand, a software engineering leader with over 20 years of experience helping fast-growing companies double and triple in size. She wrote a book, Dynamic Reteaming, which details people-focused patterns and tactics to help companies thrive through hypergrowth.

She has helped launch Procore Technologies and AppFolio to IPO and Expertcity to acquisition by Citrix. She was on the original development team that built GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar.

She is currently VP of Engineering Growth at Kin Insurance, which offers affordable coverage to homeowners in catastrophe-prone regions.

She coaches software development teams using practical, people-focused techniques, with the goal of building resilient organizations as they experience rapid growth.

• Have you ever had an opportunity to make a change, but you chose not to take it? 
• Did you maybe respond with "What if it doesn't work?" 
• Or maybe with "Are you sure that's a good idea?"

Fear of change is subtle. It operates in your subconscious, convincing you that it's there to protect you. It will keep you safe.

Or does it?

Embracing change can help bring growth, and with that, fulfillment and ultimately success. Both for individuals, but also for organizations.

Today we are roasting marshmallows with Linda Rising, author of several books, including one called "Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas" and it's successor "More Fearless Change: Strategies for Making Your Ideas Happen", which can help you and your organization to bring change.

Linda is an internationally known presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, influence strategies, agile development, and the change process.

With a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the field of object-based design metrics, Linda's background includes university teaching and software development in a number of different domains. These include telecommunications, avionics, and strategic weapons industries (probably top secret).

• Are all your teams dependent on a few key persons calling the shots?
• Is your organization as transparent as it can be to both employees and customers?

When serving millions of customers all over the world, a classic, top-down approach to decision making is not very scalable. This was the realization that the company our guest today works at made, and has since then reversed the chain of decision making to enable the teams to make the day to day decisions by themselves.

For the last few years he has been working as Engineering Director at Klarna where he helped build the Klarna Checkout, Klarna Payment, Merchant Card Services and other Klarna products that are used daily by millions. He is active in developing the engineering culture by being involved in the open source program, events organized by Klarna and the marketing activities that Klarna does from an engineering stand point.

We are roasting marshmallows with Mite Mitreski: Director, Trust center at Klarna. Mite talks about #fintech, #security, #incidentresponse, #engineeringmanager, and #softwareengineering

• Is your organization relying on the decision making of one person?
• What kind of leadership model dos your organization use?
• Do you need someone else to empower you?

Imagine being on a submarine with your colleagues, heading out to open waters, potentially being together in a cramped space for several months. If morale and performance amongst you and your fellow colleagues is low, you would probably be reluctant to go.

Our guest today had to deal with this, being assigned command of the nuclear submarine, USS Santa Fe, the ship everyone joked about during their Prospective Commanding Officer training.

However, he managed to transform the ship into the best performing vessel in the fleet, and shared the story in his book, Turn the Ship Around.

We are roasting marshmallows with David Marquet, a retired United States Navy captain and the bestselling author of Turn the Ship Around and Leadership is Language.

Imagine a work place where everyone engages and contributes their full intellectual capacity. A place where people are healthier and happier because they have more control over their work - a place where everyone is a leader.

• When should you start selling your product?
• Is there a difference between Sales and Marketing?
• How do you stand out amongst the competition?

Ask someone what marketing is, and they will often tell you "Advertisements and catchy slogans", and maybe they continue describing a scene they've recently seen on Mad Men.

The truth is, the internet has changed how people look at the impact of interruption type marketing, like for example ads or a cold call.

When we receive anything that looks like plain old, traditional marketing, it gets thrown before it gets read.

So, how should you do your marketing in today's world? Luckily for us, we are roasting marshmallows with Ruth Plater, CEO & Founder at Radial Path, Digital Marketing mastery for the fast-moving global tech and telco industries.

Ruth has played a fundamental role in helping small to medium-sized businesses, with a focus on the tech space, revolutionise their brand and marketing activities, scale sales teams, increase customer acquisition and loyalty, and prepare for growth. Helping propel Small/Mid sized Enterprise, but also startups to their next commercial level.

What if we said that there's a list that will help you with software development, or even with your company in general? 

• Are your employees engaged?
• Can your organization keep up with the rapid changing world?
• Would you like to know more about the power of OpenSpace Agility?

There’s a crisis in most workplaces. The pace of change, driven by technology, is accelerating. Change is happening more frequently. And the impact of these changes is often big.

The workforce also brings with them their distinct values, biases and opinions. And nowhere are these distinctions more striking than in the way they view leadership and “management.”

Invitations from executive leaders to members of the workforce causes a small, temporary, but very important change in how leadership communicates. Self-management is what actually scales, and invitation encourages it.

OpenSpace Agility can help you with this. And to help us with OpenSpace Agility, we have Daniel Mezick as our guest around the campfire.

Daniel Mezick is the originator of OpenSpace Agility, an engagement model for enabling authentic and lasting organizational improvement. He is also an Advisory Board member and co-Founder of The Open Leadership Network, a certification body and community of practice dedicated to implementing Open patterns and practices inside business enterprises worldwide.

Learn everything about Open Space from Daniel at a discount by using the code TOASTING, using the following links below:

OPEN SPACE IN ORGANIZATIONS, with OLN Level1 Certificate

• What if your team would address issues immediately instead of waiting for a retro?
• How effective is it to identify action points that end up not being chased?
• When do you celebrate success?

The old saying "hindsight is 20/20" is usually used when someone should've known better. It has a pretty negative or condescending tone to it, but for agile software development, it can be valuable to apply some hindsight when preparing for the next iteration of your product.

The legend says that when you promote a Senior Developer into a Manager, you end up with a subpar Manager and you lose a great Engineer. We have heard these stories of lose-lose outcomes over and over again. Then once in a blue moon we find that perfect blend of a skilled engineer who is competent, can clearly voice their ideas, understand the business domain, are tuned to the needs of the management as well as to the needs of the developers and can rally people towards a mutual goal. Then, we end up with an admirable Engineering Manager. 

On the topic of misalignment between development and management we talk with Phil Calçado, a Director of Engineering at SeatGeek. 

What can we learn from someone who headed engineering for companies with 150 million users and no revenue or with $150 million revenue and no users?

Have developers become too self-centered? 

What can engineers learn from a basic business education? 

Should you as a manager be technical then? 

How should you explain complex technical concepts to C-level management? 

What is the role of the manager and their accountability? 

And what happens if your realise that management is not for you? Can you go back to being a full time engineer?

Phil Calçado

• Are you prepared to sink your time, money and effort into something you believe in?
• How many features you think you need before you can start promoting your product?
• What strategy should you employ to find customers?
• Do you recognize your most important feature(s) and are you willing to kill other features?

On this podcast we have talked about start-ups before, but the mystic qualities that get attributed to them are by no means rooted in reality. You have to work hard, recognize opportunities and leverage your network to be able to potentially solve your customers' problems. 

• Does copying agile practices of other successful companies work for your company?
• Are your teams doing a daily standup and calling themselves agile?
• Is your company flexible and both rapidly responsive and resilient to change? 

A book that can help companies achieve true agility is "Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy". Today around the campfire we have one of the authors: Jutta Eckstein.

Jutta Eckstein, works as an independent coach, consultant, trainer, author and speaker. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make agile transitions. She is experienced in applying agile processes within medium-sized to large, distributed mission-critical projects and has written about her experiences. She holds a M.A. Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. Product-Engineering, and a B.A. in Education.

She is a member of the Agile Alliance (having served on the board of directors from 2003-2007) and a member of the program committee of many different American, Asian and European conferences, where she has also presented her work.

• Why is it that it seems like there is a smaller presence of women in tech than men?
• What female role models are out there for the tech industry?
• Is there a gender stereotype that suggests that "boys are better with computers"?
• What difficulties do women face in tech focused teams?
• Can we attract more women to become engineers?

• Are you wondering how to take your product to the next level? 
• Do you want to seize the opportunities that are out there?
• Are you aware of what your customers really want?

The days of gathering requirements from business stakeholders and documenting them in long product requirements documents are vanishing. Instead, high-performant teams are experimenting towards solutions that will lead to the outcomes they desire.

Helping us doing just this is Teresa Torres. She recently published Continuous Discovery Habits, a book designed to guide you to a sustainable approach to continuous discovery.

Teresa Torres is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach. She teaches a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. She’s coached hundreds of teams at companies of all sizes, from early-stage start-ups to global enterprises, in a variety of industries. She has taught over 7,000 product people discovery skills through the Product Talk Academy. She’s the author of the book Continuous Discovery Habits and blogs at ProductTalk.org.

When dealing with a big challenge, is it always good to break it up into small chunks?
What if you cannot solve a problem by finding it's root cause?
How can you get, and, more importantly: understand the bigger picture?

W. Edwards Deming has said that 95% of variation in the performance of a system is caused by the system itself and only 5% is caused by the people.

Organizations can be considered systems, so in a way it is amazing that a lot of time and effort is spent in improving individual performance, while so much more could be improved by looking at the organization, or system, itself. In order to do so, one could start looking into Systems thinking.

Systems thinking is a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system's individual parts are related to each other and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems. This is opposed to the classic 'divide and conquer' pattern where systems are broken down in separate elements for further study.

Do you want to work in the system or work the system?
Can you have leadership without leaders?
Do you need annual plannings, budgets and individual bonuses?

Are you ready to break the chains of command and control?

There are two kinds of work. One is to Work in the System: you are a cog in the machine.
Which is necessary, of course, but by itself not enough to sustain organizations in an ever-changing world. To make organizations fit for the present and the future, we must also Work the System. In addition, many organizations opt to use a command and control style management, where upper management makes all the decisions for the employees. While a lot of organizations choose this as their way of decision making, it is actually making many people unsatisfied.

To help us work the system and break the chains of command, we have Niels Pflaeging on the show today. Niels is a passionate advocate for a new breed of leadership and profound change in organizations. He is founder and associate of the BetaCodex network

What does the future of education look like? Are students taught the right skillset to be able to make an impact on the job market?

Some universities literally date back to the middle ages, such as Oxford university which has been teaching as far back as 1096. Naturally this means, in general, education is quite classic and slow to change. On contrary, especially in IT, things do change fairly rapidly and companies are looking for specific skillsets that might not match the educations on offer.

Why do teams always want to build the next best thing without focusing on the fundamentals like a simple address change or login page?
Should you implement blockchain in your product or should you just improve the user experience?
Are Product Owners managing a team, or are they part of the team? 

These questions and more are the focus of this episode of Roasting Marshmallows.

Our guest is Niels Talens, Chief Product Owner at Simply Deliver A.I., and he will share his views, frustrations and best practices about being a product owner and software engineering in general.  

For Niels, the most important thing is creating the best possible products in services. Whether it is agile portfolio management or continuous delivery, DevOps transitions or project management, he always looks for optimizing the whole.

He considers himself a problem solver.

How do you get hired by right company? More importantly, how do you prepare for such an interview? What about negotiations? And what do these companies have to do to reel you in?

On this episode, a senior technical recruiter from a Big Tech company is willing to give up all secrets, tips and tricks for engineers and companies alike!

His name is Jordan Philips, and he has spent 7 years working across larger big tech like Google, but also startups like Wayve autonomous driving. At Google, he acted as an ambassador for diversity and inclusion alongside representing them in multiple global conferences around hiring, culture and Cloud.

What are his recommendations to engineers and companies alike?

For the longest time, more cost effective labor in other countries has always attracted companies to try and manufacture their products there for a more economic way of doing things.

This is no different for software development. However, especially among developers, there was and still is some resistance with hiring outside help. But currently, due to corona, everyone is working remotely, so what does it matter if you are situated in a different country?

And this is what we are talking about on this episode: Onshore, nearshore or offshore: Are you unsure which one is right for you?

Do your people know what business your company really is into?

What is it that you do?
And who does what exactly? 

The answers might scare you.

Have you ever wondered why your team is taking so long delivering new features? They are all behind their screen, headphones on, wired in, focused, programming. Why are they taking so long?

Turns out, parallelising the work that needs to be done might not be so productive at all.

Enter mob programming: a software development approach where the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer. 

What do you get when you put a Brazilian, Macedonian, Indian and Dutch person together and let them have a conversation about their cultures for an hour?

Culture shock, culture clash but also melting pot material! Which culture is the best? Is there even such a thing? Surely one culture must have the best food!?