Many are wondering when hiring and consulting will return to normal, but the reduced hiring and corporate spending we’re seeing is not just a cyclical downturn that will reverse once the economy picks up. Traditional treasury functions (cash management, liquidity planning, growth and investing...| Viktor Cessan | Enterprise Agile & Product Coach
Financial discipline is back. And with it, many roles are disappearing, among them, the Agile Coaches. This isn’t because Agile itself is failing—but because capital is expensive, and companies now demand real returns on every role. It’s not just about cutting costs—it’s about making smarter...| Viktor Cessan | Scaling & Execution for Product & Tech Leaders
Following the impact of COVID-19, and shifting consumer behaviors, Viafree, an ad-supported streaming service, saw a natural decline in usage. This, coupled with a strategic reprioritization within NENT (now Viaplay), meant that nearly all teams developing Viafree would be disbanded. The...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching
Agile coaches often get caught up in the excitement of solving the next big problem or frustration when things don’t match their ideals. I’ve been there myself. Early in my career, I relied heavily on intuition, and was impulsive until I learned how to observe more deliberately through Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, and Jerry Weinberg’s PSL-training. My coaching practice transformed further when I got my ICF-ACC and started using a coach log—a tool I now rely on to track my interventi...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
For the past year, I’ve been helping one of my clients with company wide adoption of their enterprise architecture. Their pursuit of this has been long, and filled with challenges. So far, they’ve approached it by utilizing external advisors, communicating rules through the chain of command...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching
A few weeks ago, I received the Hexi Base Kit V2 from The Cynefin Company. It features 120 Hexis, and contains core Cynefin and SenseMaker methods. Last week, I used it with Johan Axelson, Johan Sjöström, and Christian Fredrikson and I wanted to share our experiences with it. I want to mention...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching
We’re advised to pay attention to interactions at work. It is believed that untapped performance potential lies in altering how people interact with each other, advocating investing in developing more productive workplace interactions. Various research, and philosophies, articulate this sentiment in different ways, and from different angles. There are references to the importance of improving interactions in: Lean with its laser focus on cross-functional collaboration, value stream mapping ...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
The Challenge: Addressing Shallow Communication in a Newly Re-Missioned Team In 2019, I worked with a feature team that was about to re-mission, and that would receive expanded responsibilities. The re-missioning necessitated a wider range of skills which resulted in the addition of three new team members. Initial Team Structure and Challenges Prior to the re-missioning, the team consisted of seven members, an Engineering Manager (EM), and a Product Manager (PM). Despite having worked togethe...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
The Challenge: Role Complexity and Overwhelm Following a reorganization at one of my clients, various formal and informal leadership roles were consolidated into a new position—the Engineering Manager. This role encompassed a wide range of responsibilities, from recruitment and career development to handling expenses, internal mobility, product and value creation, collaboration and processes, and technology. The large scale of the organization, along with technical interdependencies between...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
Controversial topics are topics that elicit strong emotions, have little or no effort invested into resolution, and unequal participation. Whether you’re a coach or manager, recognizing controversial topics is crucial because dealing with controversial topics is expensive, difficult, and painful to all involved parties. But because controversial topics are an inherent aspect of working in large product and tech companies, where diverse teams and multiple layers of leadership coexist, you ne...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
A while back, I coached two management teams that were exploring their contexts. The first management team looked at their organizational setup from the point of view of Team Topologies. The other management team was mapping their departments stakeholders, their needs, and how they best ought to collaborate with them. As both teams made progress in visualizing their context, their visualizations got messier and messier to the point that they became overwhelming. “I think I’m doing somethi...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
The best way to kill a grassroots movement at your company is to assign an owner, sponsor, or steering group for it. Below is a story about ACME, a fictitious software company, and how it responded to a grassroots movement. In the story, I discuss things to be aware of when new grassroots movements form both as a member of the movement and as upper management. I share pitfalls and summarize takeaways so that you can be more mindful of how to let the energy of grassroots movements flouri...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
Anyone doing Agile Coaching long enough will inevitably find themself in a situation coaching teams that: do not want to be coached. should not be coached. cannot be coached. do not respond well Your coaching. The differences between these situations are significant. Yet it is difficult for many coaches to understand what situation they are in. One reason for that is the similarities in how these situations display themselves: You’re being challenged directly There’s poor meeting attendan...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
At work, and in society, we use “Voice”, and “Exit” to create change. “Voice” is when you try to change a system from within, “Exit” is when you try to change a system by creating a new system that replaces the old system. People mass-leaving companies, or countries, or currencies, taking their business elsewhere, deleting their Facebook accounts, shifting to other search engines than google, are examples of “Exit”. People demonstrating through walk-outs, changing how they...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
Earlier this fall, I looked out my daughter’s window and saw what must have been close to 100 spiderwebs. I often gaze out her window as it’s my favorite view in the house–a natural, perfectly groomed forest. But I’d never seen even one spiderweb out there before. Unique viewing conditions The spiderwebs had of course always been there. But under normal circumstances, the air outside is dry. And there’s not a lot of angled sunlight, so I couldn’t see the spiderwebs. The spiderwebs...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
I recently held a talk on Agile By Example about the importance of agile coaches making informed interventions when coaching systems and agile, and that many coaches are making dogmatic interventions. I argued, and still do, that more often than not, agile coaches and scrum masters fall short in their intervention process. They intervene when they ought not to, and they skip interventions that could have a significant and positive impact. I want to make some clarifications in this post, mainl...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
This is blogpost two in a series of posts originating from the ”Re-Wilding Agile” Masterclass that I took with Dave Snowden. In this post, I look at how we too often destroy symbiotic relationships that have emerged over time and through necessity. And how it is our vanity and ideals about “what workplaces should look like” or “how people ought to collaborate” that is the source of this. I start this post with a story about my garden and its ladybug and aphids. I then relate my ...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
When Charles Darwin studied the animals on the Galapagos islands, he found that finches had adapted to their circumstances and developed distinct traits. Some Finches had evolved to eat seeds, some to spear insects, and eat cactus fruit and seeds. They evolved together with their environment over a very long period of time. Their beaks have high utility in their contexts yet if you moved a Ground Finch to an environment where the main source of food were cactus, that finch might starve, or at...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
We speak a lot about interventions when nudging teams along their team effectiveness journeys. But what are we really aiming for here? Interventions alone and just for the sake of doing something are not enough. We need our interventions to also be strategically placed at the right leverage...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching
Book clubs can be a great way for people to learn more about a subject or concept–if they are designed with that in mind. Unfortunately, many book clubs are poorly designed and lead to entrenched habitual thinking. “How so”, you might wonder? When book clubs ask what people liked and disliked about a book, or what parts seem relevant or irrelevant for their context, it’s very subjective to biases. We are bombarded with information, there’s a lot going on at our workplace and in our ...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
For the past six months of working from home, I’ve been experimenting with practices that make remote meetings more effective particularly when it comes to balancing speaking time between participants. Those of you who have facilitated, or even just participated, in in-person meetings and workshops know how difficult it can be to ensure that everyone even gets an opportunity to speak, let alone to achieve equal speaking time between the participants. The post 10 Virtual Table Tips That Make...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
Psychological safety in the workplace is a hot topic, and that’s a good thing. When psychological safety increases, it improves motivation, quality of life, and performance—and who doesn’t want that? I imagine that psychological safety is something you’ve heard a lot about. And that’s great. It’s very important after all. But what’s less great is that it’s often just the management aspect that gets talked about. Psychological safety in the workplace is really about so much mor...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
Overview Avanza Bank underwent a comprehensive agile transformation to address internal inefficiencies and enhance its market responsiveness. Initiated by a need to overcome inter-team dependencies, increasing lead time to change, decreasing staff motivation, and leadership silos, the transformation sought to implement systemic changes across the organization, aligning with its customer-first culture. The Challenge Initially, Avanza’s structure comprised component teams that had naturall...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
Social and Organizational Psychologist Richard Hackman observed that one of the most crucial components necessary for enabling high performance in teams is that they have a compelling mission. Missions become compelling when they’re clear, coherent with the company vision, aligned throughout the company, and appealing to the team members. So if you’re aiming for empowered teams with high product autonomy (level E-I on the picture below), team missions (expressed through team mission state...| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching – I do Agile and Orga...
In this post, I’ll elaborate on what temporal dynamics is, why it matters, and how you can help a group that has gotten themselves stuck in a cycle of temporal oscillation (no matter what your job role is).| Context specific agile, product, and systems coaching
