Roasting Marshmallows: Recent Episodes
FourScouts
đ§ Are you looking to expand your mind? đ€șDo you like to challenge and be challenged? đ€Do you want to improve yourself and share your experiences both personally and professionally?
You're in the right place! Welcome to Scoutcast - Roasting marshmallows where we talk about just about anything that interests us. Join us in our journey for continuous improvement of ourselves, our company, our lives, our jobs and you!
For more great content and to stay up to date, visit https://www.fourscouts.nl, and on twitter @fourscouts.
- Are you very sensitive to even constructive criticism?
- Do you agonize over even the smallest mistakes or flaws in your work?
- Do you downplay your own expertise, even in areas where you are genuinely more skilled than others?
The game âAmong Usâ is all about finding the imposter and throwing it out of the spaceship. When you play as imposter, your job is to sabotage the ship and kill the crew mates. Playing as either role is pretty fun, but it is always a little bit more exciting when you get to play as the imposter.
While being an imposter in a video game is good fun, in real life many people feel like an imposter at their job. They fear that others will find out about them, that they are incompetent, that they achieved their success through sheer luck and that voice in their head saying that one day everyone will find out they are useless.
As consultant being hired for our expertise, we also sometimes experience imposter syndrome. Can we help this client? What our my help isnât good enough?
Today, we are roasting marshmallows around the campfire, sharing stories of imposter syndrome and how we cope with it.
Way back in episode 13, we discussed mobbing, or ensemble programming, with Woody Zuill. While we think this topic deserves more widespread recognition and adoption, thereâs no denying that pair programming is more well known, and is being done more.
Of course, pairing is not limited to just programming. For example, studies have shown that kindergarteners sharing an iPad enables them to learn more and score better on certain tests, most likely due to forcing them to collaborate, which in turn emphasises communication and sharing alternative viewpoints.
Collaboration and communication are the key words here, and increasing that will eventually yield  significant benefits, such as increased quality, widespread knowledge and improved morale. These things will all contribute to a higher productivity.
So today we are discussing these benefits, but also drawbacks, of pairing!
Nowadays, everyone wants to make an impact. Nobody wants to do meaningless work. What it means to make an impact is different for everyone, but it is the driving motivation why people do the work that they do, be it helping senior citizens out of their beds, or maximizing profit for multinationals.
Indeed, some of the low points of my career as a software engineer is being part of a project that ends up in the bin. Sure, sometimes a project might fail, which in itself is ok, but if you spend a lot of time on something that ultimately did not even get a chance to make an impact is demotivating at best. If you base an entire business on something like that, you are in big trouble.
That is why Tim OâReilly has been urging people to work on stuff that matters for over 10 years now. He talks about working on something that matters more to you than money, creating more value than you capture and taking the long view.
This does not mean everyone should do non-profit work, but it does mean the social value of businesses to be done right.
How can you apply these guidelines to your organization? What does working on stuff that matters mean to us? That is the topic of the show today!
- 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.
https://licenseware.io/
Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-cojocaru/
- 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.
Rini's website: https://rinivansolingen.com/
Rini on twitter: @solingen
Rini on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/solingen/
- 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 â even those at the top â struggle with public-speaking anxiety. When people think about what makes them nervous, they usually come up with the same answers:
- I donât like being in the spotlight
- I donât like being watched
- I donât 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.
Thierry's website: https://thinkinglabs.io/
Thierry on twitter: @tdpauw
Thierry on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tdpauw/
- 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 donât grow up learning very much about their emotions â 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 â what they are and how they work â the better youâll 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, âPermission te Feelâ 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.
Marc's website: https://www.marcbrackett.com
Marc on twitter: https://twitter.com/marcbrackett
Get the book here
- 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.
She is the author of the book "7 Rules for Positive Productive Change: Micro Shifts, Macro Results for Change by Attraction". In it, she presents a set of seven heuristicsâguides to problem-solvingâthat empower people to achieve outcomes within broad constraints using their personal ingenuity and creativity.
You may also know Esther as co-author of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great.
Esther on twitter: https://twitter.com/estherderby
Esther's website: https://www.estherderby.com
Different problems need different solutions. An approach that aids in decision making is The Cynefin framework, which was created in 1999 by Dave Snowden and was born with principles related to theories of how we perceive things. Cynefin (pronounced âkuh-nev-inâ) is a word of Welsh origin that means habitat or place of many belongings.
Cynefin is a model that can be used in different sectors, at different levels in an organization and in different contexts, in fact context is the key word for Cynefin. Its main use is for effective decision making based on the analysis of the context in which we are inserted.
We are roasting marshmallows with Dave Snowden, founder and chief scientific officer of The Cynefin Company, formerly known as Cognitive Edge, a Singapore-based management-consulting firm specializing in complexity and sense-making, to thrive in a complex world.
Dave's specialties include: Sense making, Knowledge Management, Complexity Science applied to organisations and Narrative. Dave is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style, and is a popular and passionate keynote speaker.Â
- Is the nobel peace prize actually a bad thing?
- What about that cum laude degree?
- Did your grades ruin you for the rest of your life?
Do awards motivate people? Yes. They motivate people to get rewards. You can pretty much bribe anyone to make them do what you want them to.
Consequently, the quality of the work or the learning suffers for it. This goes for children, students, but also in the work place, where reward structures might be in place that incentivize destructive behavior.
The book "Punished by Rewards" details the trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, grades, praise and other bribes, and we are roasting marshmallows with it's author: Alfie Kohn!
Alfie is an author and lecturer in the areas of education, parenting and human behavior. He is a proponent of progressive education and has offered critiques of many traditional aspects of parenting, managing, and American society more generally, drawing in each case from social science research.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/alfiekohn
Website: https://www.alfiekohn.org/
- Does financial incentives promote commitment and motivation?
- Is your company really doing well when you make the budgeted revenue?
- Is your decision-making on hold while the numbers for the budgets are being negotiated?
Creating a budget is one way to stay on top of your expenses. Most companies spend a lot of time analyzing past performance to come up with budgets for the next year, trying to stick to them as close as possible. However, due to todays rapid changing markets, traditional budgeting might not be the best fit for companies anymore.
Beyond Budgeting is the idea of abolishing traditional budgeting processes to eventually establish a highly decentralized organizational system and adaptive set of management processes. We are sitting around the camp fire with Bjarte Bogsnes, Chairman of the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable, and has helped numerous companies globally getting started on their own Beyond Budgeting journey.
Bjarte Bogsnes has a long international career, with more than 25 years of Beyond Budgeting experience, having worked in both Finance and HR.
He is a popular international business speaker and is the winner of a Harvard Business Review/McKinsey Management Innovation award.
He is author of "Implementing Beyond Budgeting - Unlocking the performance potential", a theoretical introduction and a practical guide to bringing such a more empowered and adaptive management model to life.
Beyond Budgeting Roundtable: https://bbrt.org/ - sign up for the newsletter!
Bjarte's website: https://bogsnesadvisory.com/
Bjarte on twitter: https://twitter.com/bbogsnes
- What if you could elect your boss?
- Why aren't companies run as countries?
- How does sociocracy fit in with agile?
In the age of liberated companies, there are different models of governance where individuals are responsible to undertake actions on behalf of their company.
With a participatory decision making process and distributed leadership at its core, sociocratic governance is at odds with the traditional vertical management system.
A sociocratic organization allows the individual to express oneself within a group, and allows the group to function in an autonomous and co-responsible manner.
Sociocracy produces organizations that are both collaborative and highly productive. The process for decision-making is very different from majority voting that inevitably produces majority rule.
As with society, the majority rule easily leads to polarization and promotes competition and dominance instead of coöperation and equality.
Using consent and collaboration as a foundation for decision-making and communications, Sociocracy builds a strong governance structure that extends from the mailroom to the boardroom and from the client to the founders.
We are roasting marshmallows with John Buck, co-author, along with Sharon Villines, of the book "We the People, Consenting to a Deeper Democracy - A Guide to Sociocratic Principles and Methods" and "Agile Bossa Nova" with Jutta Eckstein
Governance alive website: https://www.governancealive.com/
John on twitter: https://twitter.com/johnabuck
We, the People book: https://www.sociocracy.info/we-the-people-2/
Bossa Nova book: https://www.agilebossanova.com/
- 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.
Jasonâs 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.
Get the book: https://marketerinchief.com/
Jason's website: https://jasontvoiovich.com/
Jason on twitter: https://twitter.com/jasontvoiovich
- Is it hard to write a book?
- Do product owners need to be aware of software development practices like Behavior Driven Development?
- How do you cope with writer's block?
On the show, we have talked a lot about books, and we have even had a few guests that wrote one. It has crossed our minds to write a book of our own a few times as well.
Today, we are roasting marshmallows with Wouter Lagerweij. Wouter is currently in the process of writing a book called: "A Product Owner's Guide to Escaping Legacy: how to get back in control and start delivering again". As a developer, manager, product owner, and as an Agile Coach working with people in all those roles, Wouter has been dealing with legacy for a large part of his life.
To make that happen Wouter uses the knowledge and skills gathered in over fifteen years of experience applying Agile processes and practices from XP, Scrum, Kanban, Lean and Systems Thinking.
- 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.
Heidi's website: https://www.heidihelfand.com
Heidi on twitter: https://twitter.com/heidihelfand
Get the book "Dynamic Reteaming" here: https://www.heidihelfand.com/dynamic-reteaming-book (Amazon)
- 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).
Linda on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindarising
Linda on Twitter: https://twitter.com/risinglinda
Linda's website: https://lindarising.org
- 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
Mite on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitemitreski
Mite's website: https://mitemitreski.com/
Mite on twitter: https://twitter.com/mitemitreski
- 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.
David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmarquet/
David on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ldavidmarquet
David on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/LeadershipNudges
- 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.
Ruth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruthplater/
Radial Path's website: https://www.radialpath.com/
What if we said that there's a list that will help you with software development, or even with your company in general?
It's called Heuristics for Effective Software Development Organisations: A continuously evolving list, and it contains as of this episode 27 nuggets of wisdom for your benefit. It started out as a way to present the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto in a clearer and more contemporary way, although the author, Allen Holub, has added a few things.
Who is Allen Holub? Allen Holub is an internationally recognised software architect and Agile consultant/trainer. He speaks all over the planet about these topics and agile-friendly implementation technology like microservices and incremental architecture, but his bread and butter is in-house training and consulting in how to create highly functional Lean/Agile organisations, and how to design and build robust, highly scalable software architectures suitable for agile environments.
Allen's website: https://holub.com/
Allen on twitter: https://twitter.com/allenholub
Allen's books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Allen-I.-Holub/e/B001IXRSV2
- 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?
Thereâs 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 âmanagement.â
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
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/open-space-in-organizations-with-oln-level1-certificate-tickets-146819341603
THE 8 PATTERNS OF OPEN BUSINESS AGILITY, with OLN Level1 Certificate https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-8-patterns-of-open-business-agility-with-oln-level1-certificate-tickets-162860097937
Daniel's website: https://danielmezick.com/
Daniel on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmezick
- What is Large-Scale Scrum, aka LeSS?
- Which rules does LeSS require you to follow?
- Why should you adopt LeSS rather than plain old scrum for your teams?
After an earlier episode about SAFe, we felt it is only fair to put LeSS in the spotlight! While you cannot really compare the two, much like apples and oranges, they both promise to bring agility to the enterprise. Being a certified LeSS instructor, Viktor will show us how and why LeSS works for his clients.
Viktor is a Software developer, Agile Coach and Certified LeSS trainer with 17 years of experience in delivering enterprise systems and helping organizations with Agile transformations.
- https://less.works/profiles/viktor-grgic
- https://twitter.com/vgrgic
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/vgrgic/
- 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.
Indeed, reflecting on past performance and analyzing what worked and what did not can enable you improve over time, but many teams end up going through the motions every sprint, ticking off a bingo card.
In this episode, we debate among each other of our perceived effectiveness of periodic retros.
What do you think? Do you feel retrospectives are a vital part of making teams more and more effective or are they redundant and you should just address issues as they come up?
- Are you able to do your best work?
- Do you feel proud being an employee of your company?
- Are you enjoying the work you do? Do you feel like you fit in with the people?
- Are you expecting to work their for a long time?
These might sound like a lot of different questions, but they all boil down to the same: are you happy at your work?
Today we are roasting marshmallows about our company history: why did we choose to leave our previous companies, and why did we choose to stay at FourScouts? Finding the right company will be different for everyone, but in this episode we will share our experiences with you and it might help you find the right company!
- Is your work / life balance in a state of equilibrium?
- Do you keep your personal issues from spilling over into work?
- Are you able to talk about your problems with your colleagues?
Everyone deals with their personal issues in a different way. At some point, your personal issues could affect your work: your concentration is affected, you might lash out at co-workers, or even worse, customers.Â
Today, we are sharing our stories about how our personal life affected us at work, and how we dealt with themÂ
Poor work-life balance can have serious effects on your mental health. However, work-life issues are common, and mental health experts are well-prepared to help you through any particularly rough patches. Don't hesitate to seek professional help if you feel you could benefit from a better work-life balance.
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
Personal website: https://philcalcado.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/pcalcado
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pcalcado
- 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.Â
Today, we are roasting marshmallows with someone who has been through this and ultimately ended up getting his start-up, linc.sh, acquired by Cloudflare.
Even though his start-up has been a success, when people ask Erwin that they want to have their very own start-up, his initial response usually is a very puzzled "why??".Â
Erwin describes himself as an eternal developer, recovering management consultant and never satisfied with a status quo.
Erwin on twitter: https://twitter.com/evanderkoogh and linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evanderkoogh/
- 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.
Jutta on twitter: https://twitter.com/JuttaEckstein
Jutta's website: https://www.jeckstein.com/
The book: https://www.amazon.com/Company-wide-Agility-Beyond-Budgeting-Sociocracy/dp/394799107X
How much are you able to learn on your own? For some people, reading books, articles, and going to certain training courses are all they need to keep steadily growing their skillset.
For teams however, things are a bit more challenging. Retrospectives are indeed a great help, but these are still from the team's own perspective. Sending a team to training could help as well, but how do you know what training to pick? Sometimes external help, in the form coaching, can be beneficial for you and your team.
Someone who does such coaching is GeePaw Hill, an independent software development coach. A geek for nearly 40 years, he has been doing, teaching, and coaching software using the various techniques of agility since the late '90s. He has worked with large teams and tiny ones all over the world, creating everything from satellite control modules to desktop graphics to that old standby, it-puts-the database-on-web-browser.
GeePaw on twitter: https://twitter.com/GeePawHill
GeePaw's website: https://www.geepawhill.org/
- 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?
As a first today on roasting marshmallows, we have two guests! Ankita Sahni and Maike Visschedijk, who are both software engineers, and they will share with you their experiences on being a women in the tech industry.Â
- 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. Sheâs 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. Sheâs the author of the book Continuous Discovery Habits and blogs at ProductTalk.org.
- Blog: ProductTalk.org
- Courses: Learn.ProductTalk.org
- Book: ContinuousDiscoveryHabits.com
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ttorres
- Linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/teresatorres/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ProductTalkVideos
Will switching to the latest version of your libraries really make your development go faster?
Is it worth investing a lot of time in research while there is a tried-and-true, production hardened solution readily available?
How do new shiny things for developers help your product gain a competitive advantage?
To be fair, even e-mail was considered bleeding edge at one point, which has of course become a staple in our means of communication. Some people would even argue that e-mail is old fashioned!
To help us figure this out, we have Alpar Gal around the campfire today.
Alpar Gal is a passionate software developer. He started his journey as a c++ developer 15 years ago. Couple of years later switched to java and web application development. He is coding for fun in his free time when he is not busy at home with the kids. His is interested in software development topics in general and ios development.
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.
Someone who applies Systems thinking in his day to day job is our guest: Gerard Janssen. Gerard has the conviction that people, teams and organizations can, and want to, do more than what they are doing now.
Gerard's linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardjanssen
Recomended reads to get you started on Systems Thinking:
- The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practive of The Learning Organization - Peter M. Senge
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
https://www.nielspflaeging.com/
https://twitter.com/NielsPflaeging
https://www.linkedin.com/in/niels-pflaeging-11a89/
https://www.workthesystem.eu/
https://betacodex.org/
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.
Our guest, Darjan Radenkovic thinks this can be a lot better. He was Director of Education at Brainster, a tech-education company on a mission to help people future-proof their careers by learning in-demand tech skills.Â
Darjan is passionate for learning and knowledge sharing, always willing to test new approaches, while leveling the arguments with data.
What can universities, governments and companies do to shape the future of education? And by doing so, how will that shape the future of society?
continuous-learning #future #tech #education #school
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?Â
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. Â
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.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nielstalens
https://nielstalens.nl
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?
Jordan's LinkedIn
jobswithjp
How do you develop a side project and transform it into your own startup?
It is the dream of many software engineers to develop something, maybe as a side project, and then see that project gain traction. It gets adopted, downloaded a bunch of times, and maybe you even get to speak on it during conventions.
For our guest today this has happened, and many more things since then as well. He built a framework which enables teams to develop applications using Domain Driven Design, Event Sourcing and CQRS.
This framework lead to the founding of a new company, AxonIQ in 2017, and with it a whole end-to-end development and infrastructure platform for smoothly evolving Event-Driven Microservices focused on CQRS and Event Sourcing.
Joining us today is Allard Buijze, CTO and founder of AxonIQ.
- What enabled him to take his side project and make it into a company?
- What challenges have he faced and how did he tackle them?
- What advice does he have for people looking to change their idea into reality and making it into a successful startup?
Find out how Allard went from developing something during his spare time, to becoming a CTO and eventually spinning off a brand new company on this episode of Roasting Marshmallows!
Change is good, but transitioning can be arduous. What do you do when you feel stuck at your current job? You have been trying to grow and develop but you get nowhere? Â Your job is not fulfilling? You know you can do better, and you know you can earn more. You are in a career that is not a good match or you have outgrown it? Or maybe, you have been fired and are forced to make a transition.
Today we are talking with Clayton Dewey about his transitioning into IT. More often we see people from various non-it related professions making the jump into IT. The reasons and the stories might differ, but patterns are starting to emerge.
Clayton shares his story, about how he was push out of a profession he loved, and found the joy in becoming a developer and later UX designer and a Product Owner.
Hope his story inspires others and provides some comfort for those struggling.
Hope you enjoy it.
Does your IT-department not deliver?
Are there always new bugs introduced with each release?
Have you missed opportunities because your software is too old to support new features?
If this sounds familiar, you are probably looking to fix your IT-department. Maybe you're looking to hire an extra manager to ensure all processes are being followed. Before you do that though, listen to this episode of scoutcast, where we discuss the pain points described above, and how to tackle those! Hint: Not by hiring more managers
IT is never the problem, it is a symptom. There usually is an underlying root cause. Which one is it? We will try to point you in the right direction!
Are you feeling SAFe? What riches can you find when you crack the combination of SAFe? SAFe is a framework that empowers complex organizations to scale up agile practices across the enterprise. SAFe stands for Scaled Agile Framework, and it's being used by hundreds of the worldâs largest organizations. It promises to sustain and drive faster time-to-market, dramatic increases in productivity and quality, and improvement in employee engagement. The experience we as FourScouts have with SAFe has not always been super stellar. Maybe it is because we have never been properly explained how to effectively employ SAFe by an expert. Today, that is going to change! We are roasting marshmallows with Jesse Wierenga, a certified SAFe agilist. Jesse has spent the last 5 years at  Eurail where he started as a project manager, became a Scrum Master / Agile Coach and later an Agile Organization Coach. How does he make SAFe work for him and his teams?
safe #agile #enterprise
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?
We are roasting Marshmallows with CTO Arjan Kolkman: how does he successfully outsource his development?
Do you feel satisfied with your accomplishments in life?Â
Are you where you want to be?
A surprising amount of people will say ânoâ to these questions â and you might be one of them.Â
People who havenât made satisfactory progress in life often fail to reach their goals â because theyâre stuck inside their comfort zones.
What are the good and bad things about being in the comfort zone? On this episode of roasting marshmallows, we will talk about how we sometimes find ourselves stuck in the comfort zone and what we do to step out of it to hopefully become a better ourselves.Â
Many teams that develop a product nowadays feel like it's a bit like building a space ship only for it to be launched in a black hole.
All this work is done to build something awesome, but they never really know if it is of value to the customer. Are they building The Right Thing, and are they building it Right?
What does a modern software development company look like and what do they do?Â
Spoiler alert: it's not about the programming language, tabs versus spaces, or Subversion versus git: it's about people, teams, communication and of course best practices, for example having a CI/CD pipeline in place as early as possible. You also don't need to have a greenfield environment to start doing modern software development.Â
The stuff we discuss in this podcast can be applied today in your current codebase!Â
Do your people know what business your company really is into?
What is it that you do?
And who does what exactly?Â
The answers might scare you.
There are a lot of things that can (and frequently do) go wrong inside of a business. Sales fall through, products don't work, team members get frustrated, and clients get upset. Often, these things happen due to a single reason: lack of organizational clarity.In this episode of Roasting Marshmallows, we are navigating the organizational clutter with Michiel Toes, CEO of NetYCE, and how he gets his people on the same page and talking the same language.
clarity #ceo #success #team #organizationalclarity #smooth #sailing
Everyone wants their team to be high performant. The idea of one cohesive unit, working in harmony with one another, that are highly focused on their goals and deliver superior business value is of course very appealing.
But what does it take to cultivate a high-performance team? One of the foundations is trust and respect.Â
Today on Roasting Marshmallows, we will share with you our experiences in building this trust and respect with you. We do this, among other things, by getting naked with each other. This does not mean we regularly take showers as a team, but that when you let people see you for who you really are, you can make real connections and build trust. Given the competitive nature of business, this is a lot easier said than done.
Do your colleagues know you, really?Â
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.Â
Today on Roasting Marshmallows, we are sitting down with Woody Zuill, co-author of the book on mob programming, and he believes we can always find a way to improve by rapidly taking countless, continuous tiny steps in the direction of "better".
The accumulation of these tiny steps leads to many wonderful things.
On this episode, you will find out that working as a team can be many times more productive, and a lot more fun, and who better to learn it from than the founding father himself: Woody Zuill
Woody's website: woodyzuill.com
Woody on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/woodyzuill/
Woody on twitter: twitter.com/woodyzuill
Mob programming book: leanpub.com/mobprogramming
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!?
At FourScouts we already have a diverse representation of different cultures, but for todays episode we have invited someone from India, currently living in Amsterdam. Anikta Sahni is joining us today to give you her background and experience living in the Netherlands.
What does everyone like, and dislike, about their own culture, traditions and customs?
What is your cultural background? What are you most proud of?
Have you ever considered going freelancing? Or does being part of something greater than yourself sound more appealing? Today we roasting marshmallows with Michiel Rook, a passionate and pragmatic freelance IT consultant.
In the past, Michiel has joined several companies, including FourScouts, so he has seen his fair share of both freelancing and working at a company. Today, we will discuss with him the pros and cons of being a freelancer, and why he chose freelancing over being part of a company.Â
- What is expected of you as a freelancer?
- How do you find (new) customers?
- Is there any social security?
If you're considering going to freelance, listen to this podcast!
Michiel's website: https://www.michielrook.nl
Michiel on twitter: https://twitter.com/michieltcs
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if everyone working in a company were paid the same salary, regardless of position and level of experience?
What if there's no envy, no competition, no stressful negotiations? Everyone, regardless of role, makes the same amount of money. This way, people can focus on their job rather than their compensation. Â
At FourScouts, we decided to do an experiment and try just that! What do we think are the pros and cons? Does it actually matter?Â
Find out on this tenth episode of ScoutCast - Roasting Marshmallows!
How does one find the right person for the job? And once found, what other steps do you need to take, such as for example relocating this person and maybe his or her family?
That is what we are talking about on this episode: recruitment, and we are roasting these marshmallows with Dominika Sawa.
By day she's a Recruiter & Partner at Van Storm, a recruiting & contracting company founded by a group of like-minded enthusiasts who believe that recruitment can be stress-free and fun! She recruits engineers that help her clients build their new yacht.
What does Dominika do to bring the right talent to the appropriate challenge for her clients?
You can also check out this episode on YouTube!Â
While this podcast is being recorded during the Covid-19 pandemic, many people are confined to their homes working remote.
There has been a group of people who took this remote work to the next level, even before Covid-19, and they live the dream that many people may have: a nomadic lifestyle of traveling to beautiful parts of the world, earning their money online.
These people are called digital nomads: someone who desires the freedom to work and live anywhere and uses technology to make this desire a reality.
On todays podcast we have such  a digital nomad  and his name is Paulo Alves, currently residing in Fortaleza, Brasil, but he has traveled to and worked in many different countries all across the globe. We will ask him all kinds of questions like:
- What does it take to become a digital nomad?
- What are the up- and downsides of the lifestyle?
- How do you deal with loneliness?
Join us in our journey to continuous improvement!Â
A few episodes ago, we had Patrick de Veer of Greenaumatic as our guest to talk about his view on sustainability and his throw at becoming the minister of New Economy in the Netherlands. Today we are talking the same subjects but with a different guest: Bart Joling.
Bart Joling is a cofounder of TenStripes, a marketing agency in the Netherlands, specialised in providing strategy and execution for sustainable organisations. A committed believer in telling stories through data. Â Initiator of the Impact Project and promoter of Impact Marketing.
- How does he see the New Economy?
- What does TenStripes do to attract like-minded people?
- Did Bart become the minister of New Economy?
- What special meaning do some of Bart's tattoos have?
Find out on this episode of Scoutcast - Roasting Marshmallows!
Are you looking to make an impact? Disrupt the market with your product or service? Starting a startup is exciting, fun and maybe also a little bit scary. How do you go about starting a startup?
On today's episode of Scoutcast - Roasting Marshmallows, we have invited Manuel Cayre of ParkNow (known in the Netherlands as Parkmobile), an app that helps people pay for parking, to share with you his experience on starting up a startup. In the past, Manuel has co-founded MobyPark, a peer2peer parking platform, but he also initiated TuRodeo with Henrique Santana de Miranda (a regular on the podcast, also present), who himself has had a startup called Goosit in the past. Manuel eventually passed the torch to a new team at MobyPark, and the company is still going strong, whereas Henrique decided to pull the plug on Goosit.
Today, we will talk about the different approaches these gentlemen took: why was Manuel's startup successful, while Henrique's startup was not? And, more importantly: what can you learn from this?
Are estimates a necessary evil? Is it just good business? Are you able to predict the future based on the past? Or is it just an enormous waste of time?
The #noestimates movement started with the No Estimate Programming Series on Woody Zuill's blog. Since then the #noestimates hashtag on twitter has seen a vast amount of discussion, and today's episode of Roasting Marshmallows probably won't be an exception.Â
We will talk about both sides of the discussion: Why estimates are important and how they lead to success, but also why estimates are a waste of time and how it enables destructive behavior.
Let us know your opinion about #estimates or #noestimates on podast@fourscouts.nl or on twitter @fourscouts!
On this episode of Scoutcast - Roasting Marshmallows we are having an interview with Patrick de Veer of Greenaumatic about sustainability and the misuse and misunderstandings that revolve around this term. Has it become just a buzzword?Â
We will also talk about how Greenaumatic can help companies gain insight about the environmental impact their spending has. This way companies will know if they are helping making the world a better place or if they are contributing to its destruction.
đ§ Are you looking to expand your mind? Â
đ€șDo you like to challenge and be challenged?Â
đ€Do you want to improve yourself and share your experiences both personally and professionally?
Join us in our journey for continuous improvement on everything!
Should your boss be very visible? Are the best bosses the ones that don't bother you? How much responsibility can you handle?
On this episode of Scoutcast - Roasting marshmallows, we will try to answer these very questions, and who better to ask these questions then our own boss: Silvester van der Bijl, founder & CEO of FourScouts. How much feedback can he handle?
At the end of the episode, the point is proven. Silvester does what bosses tend to do đ Take a listen!
- đ§ Are you looking to expand your mind?
- đ€șDo you like to challenge and be challenged?
- đ€Do you want to improve yourself and share your experiences both personally and professionally?
Join us in our journey for continuous improvement on everything!
Should you speak Dutch in the Netherlands? Today we are talking about if you should speak Dutch for foreigners living and working in the Netherlands. Our guests today is an expat that has learned the language, and one that after 10 years still cannot speak Dutch. What are their insights about not speaking the native language? Did they encounter any embarrassing situations and missed business opportunities because of it? Find out today on Scoutcast - Roasting marshmallows!
- đ§ Are you looking to expand your mind?
- đ€șDo you like to challenge and be challenged?
- đ€Do you want to improve yourself and share your experiences both personally and professionally?
Join us in our journey for continuous improvement on everything!
- đ§ Are you looking to expand your mind?
- đ€șDo you like to challenge and be challenged?
- đ€Do you want to improve yourself and share your experiences both personally and professionally?
Today on Scoutcast - Roasting marshmellows we will discuss a list of most heard excuses we've encountered not only in our work as software engineers, but also in our day to day lives. More importantly, we discuss how to take away these excuses and actually move forward in a productive way.Â
Join us in our journey for continuous improvement on everything!