What is our problem? What is the root cause?  Let’s fix that. Then move onto the next problem.

Three combined topics:

• From "Projects" to "Products".
• From retrospectives to continuous improvement.
• From self-organizing teams to well lead teams.

Leadership, Management, and Self-Organizing/Self-Managing Teams

• Teams need someone large and in charge. Someone to call the ball.
• Leadership in the agile space.
• Management and leadership are not the same thing.
• Leadership is the ability to inspire people to do thing. Inspirational.
• If I am doing a good job as a leader I need to be expendable.
  • leader's role is to develop / grow more leaders
• Management is focused on status quo.
• Management is responsible to work towards the overall goal
• Leadership is inspirational motivational.
• Leader is an agent of change
  • "leader" and "manager" competing roles? 
• Corporate managers need to have leadership skills as well.
• What does well lead teams mean ?
• Orthodoxy -à Something new.
• Agile teams at some point feel they don’t need to be directed.
• What happens to a team when the leader disappears.
• Small well lead teams are the most effective fighting force.
• It is harder to get a good leader "naturally" in a larger team
• Good leaders inspire people to get things done.
• Leaders need to be developed.
• A leadership vacuum can kill an effective team
• Rejection of direction.
• Leadership metaphor Jazz Band.
• Leader of next song comes “naturally” when team is small. Until team (band) is of a larger size then you need a director (leader)
• Director doesn’t necessarily play the instruments.
• Agile developers need to be careful challenging authority all the times. Sometimes you need to do stuff as you are told. Sometimes you need to be a private and not a general.
• Let me justify to you why you need to do that is not always a good way to work.

Some Interesting Ideas

• Earning respect and trust.
• Protect your teams interest.
• Build a respect based culture.
• “Military” is not == “militaristic”
• Not all managers are bad. If you assume management is bad you are creating a self fulfilling prophecy.
• Agile should not have the assumption that management.
• How much time is your company willing to spend training you?
• Book: “managing to learn” by Jon Shook
• What is the happy medium between lots of “command and control” and no “command and control”
• Stereotypes are bad.
• Does your manager need to be technical?
• Trust based culture.
• Leaders should be paired with opposite skills.
• We are transitioning to a more sane method of developing software.
• What do we expect out of a leader or a manager?
• How can you manage (make a decision) about what you don’t technically understand?
• Emotional intelligence
• Self reflective. Resonate with people.
• Training on counseling?
• How do you counsel ? mentor ? You need to make others better than you.
• Individualism.  Career progression.
• How do you instill self reflection ?
• Training for first line supervisors. Assessment forms
• Training for project managers. Assessment forms.
• Project managers do not have the responsibility for success of a project. Only time and schedule.
• Products live on beyond the projects.
• Align goals of a project to a business.
• Measurement of success of a product/project.
• Cost and schedule are sub-optimizing measurements. Did you deliver the value?
• Deliver something useful that has business value.
• Project management is a waste smell.
• Goals are not aligned.
• Software product companies don’t typically have project management.
• Product managers own products.
  • best product managers are responsible for product success years down the road. How?
• Products live forever.
• When is release complete?
• Sometimes it s just fun to listen to a session at Kaizen Conf (Rodman)
• Stairstep funding vs spiked funding.
  • the big difference between project and product
• What is defect rate after delivery?
• Value, Value, Value!!!
• What is the value of what is delivered?
• Process improvement meeting.
• What can we make better? What kinds of steps can we take? How do we measure?
• Root cause analysis
• Do we have the correct root cause?
  • "correct root cause" is something that can be changed, and the change will fix the problem
• What worked what didn’t?
• We need time to do improvement.
• Sometime you need to pause to improve.
• How much re-work are you doing?
• There is way more to process improvement than Retrospectives.
• Continuous improvement requires follow up.
• Book: “The team handbook” by Scholtes
• Spend time working on improvement.
• Empower people to make changes or request them.
•  Ask: Whats wrong with what we are doing?
• Make time on your teams for Process Improvement.