AppsJack Podcast Episode 4 - Developing & Managing Products and Services
Recorded 2/11/17 in West Seattle
On the show
- Eric Veal
- Andrew Sengul
- Christian Harris
- Steven Kubacki
Part 1 - Butterfly effects
- How do small changes and decisions ultimately create huge changes down the road
- Need to innovate and change, continuous transformation is required
Kubacki
- Past behavior predicts future behavior
- A person's ego needs to be fairly flexible
- Compartmentalization
- Chaos and non-linear dynamics
- People want to eliminate and reduce conflict
- Idea of random eliminatation of people within a company
- Fear of failure
Andrew
- Example by Andrew of a single checkbox feature that crashed an entire system
- Examples of the C: drive, NT, DOS and other legacy with in Microsoft
- Q-DOS
- Local Maximums work for a time and place but there's something better out there
- Ego
- "Very happy crews tend to produce very bland films"
- Gravity well effect
Veal
- Seduced by Success
- Dead & Bloated vs. Struggling Entrepreneur scenarios
- GM almost went bankrupt
- Organizations build up inertia and baggage and legacy that prevents them from being successful now
- Backward compatibility has held Microsoft back
Part 2 - Fixing Messes
Q: Can you think of any cases you had to clean up?
Eric
- Acuson purchased by Siemens and the following merger
- What are the challenges we see people facing today?
- Competing forces of innovation
- People are trying to develop things
- People perceive development differently
- Incubators and accelerators like Y Combinator to nurture
- Feedback is a learned response, an interaction between the object and context
- Sometimes you need to retract and shrink
Andrew
- How entities connect with the public
- Trump bypassing the media
- There are those who want to develop and others who want to simply preserve statis
- Entropy is part of any process
Steve
- The more centralized and larger, the less flexible, adaptable and the more moribund
- GE has a knack of creating new companies within itself
- Negentropy
- Systems are constantly building and getting larger
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negentropy
Part 3 - Planning and design
Eric
- Planning is really boring
- Want a balanced view across the portfolio
- Need agile mindset
- If we are trying to create balanced organizations, then why don't we design them that way?
- Flexibility/Non-Linear/Yin/Chaos/Manual/Dynamic/Random vs. Control/Linear/Yang/Order/Automated/Programatic/Planned
- Hire a random person
Andrew
- Planning is a way of life
- Scenario Engine
- Helps to do many things at once and have multiple projects in many phases
- Agile and Scrum can be quite bureacratic
- Order and Chaos each has a seed of the other
- Ask people to look at something from the perspective of a different person
- Psychodrama
- Fictional conversations
Christian
- How effective your planning is depends on your experience of what you are trying to plan
Steve
- Linear and non-linear intertwining
- Planning is linear
- The bias in many organizations is to move toward planning and linearity
- How do you offset this tendency for bureaucracy?
- Doing the opposite or "not-doing" is good to break the "linear set"
- Example of Google's 20% time for innovation
- Let go of the old and let the new arise
- The pretending becomes automatic
