On the road with Project to Product

The past couple of months have been some of the most packed and most interesting of my career. The Project to Product book became an Amazon bestseller and surpassed its lifetime publication goal of ten thousand copies within the first three months. In March and April alone, I gave four keynotes, with audiences ranging from a couple of hundred to ten thousand staff at a financial institution’s internal IT conference. But those are all proxy metrics. The more interesting thing has been the learnings from working with organizations adopting the Flow Framework? to enable and scale their shift from project to product. 

To help kick these initiatives off on the right footing, Carmen DeArdo and I created a Project to Product Executive Briefing package and pilot program that has had us working directly with some amazing organizations that are making the shift. One of the most important learnings from these has been how important it is to get the business people into the room. So we designed the Executive Briefing to accomplish just that.

Through these engagements, we have learned a ton about how best to structure an organization’s product model, how to map out the journey, and how to create a showcase of Flow Metrics feeding meaningful information to product owners and business stakeholders. We have also learned some common themes that are impeding these transitions, such as under-investment in internal/platform products that appears to be endemic in so many organizations. We will continue feeding these learnings into the program as organizations shift from the “why” of Project to Product to the “how”. 

If you're interested in learning more, please reach out. 

Latest industry insights

• Flow FrameworkTM FAQ (FlowFramework.org)
• Standing on Shoulders: A Leader's Guide to Digital Transformation - Jack Maher & Carmen DeArdo (Archway Publishing)
• 3 Trends in Tracking Software Delivery - Mik Kersten (The New Stack)
• People of ACM - Gail C. Murphy - Interview with Dr. Gail Murphy (Association for Computing Machinery)
• Using value stream management and mapping to boost business innovation - Dominica DeGrandis (Information Management)
• How Do You Know If Your Organization Is Delivering Value Through Software? - Patrick Anderson (DZone)
• Take a shift-left approach sans developer burnout - George Lawton (SearchSoftwareQuality)
• Three Tips for Dissolving QA and Testing Bottlenecks on Agile Teams - Matt Angerer (Software Test Professionals)
• How Automation in Software Delivery is Optimizing Federal Program Management - Wendy Flowers (Techspective)
• Exploring Context in the DevOps Entry Point - Al Dupree (Government CIO)
• Ten Years of DevOps - five ways businesses are still getting it wrong - Alex Fishlock (Computing)
• Finding Calm in Chaos – How to Handle Disruption Through Integration - Patrick Anderson (Business 2 Community)
• Here’s What It’s Like to Accidentally Expose the Data of 230M People - Andy Greenberg (Wired)
• Secure open source components to bypass breaches - George Lawton (Search Software Quality)
• Seeing the Full Picture: Identifying each customer request that goes into a product release - Rebecca Dobbin (Tasktop Blog)
• Interface Design: Six Ways To Create A Great User Experience - Forbes Technology Council (Forbes)

Project to Product blog series

• The Holy Grail – how to build Flow Metrics - Patrick Anderson
• How the Flow Framework? Maximizes Your Wins from SAFe? - Naomi Lurie
• Why we need a shared understanding of technical debt - Mik Kersten
• Review: Project to Product–Value Stream Management with the Tasktop Flow Framework? - Willy-Peter Schaub

Presentations

This is always a busy time for industry events and this year will be no exception. You can seewhere to find me and the Tasktop team as you plan your conference attendance. We’ll continue to add new events as speaking slots are confirmed. 

• May 21: Join me at Agile Israel as I give the closing keynote presentation on how value stream networks will transform IT and business.
• May 29-30: I’ll be at the International Conference on Software Engineering in Montreal to present “Analyzing Flow to Measure Value in Software Delivery”.
• June 10-13: I'll be in sunny San Jose to speak at the O’Reilley Software Architecture Conference
• June 24-28: The DevOps Enterprise Summit London agenda is live. Check out the lineup and register by May 31st using code “LON20” for a 20% discount.

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