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5 Practical Tips for Successful Business Transformation Programs

The business world has undergone some dramatic changes; a few years back the greatest concern was cybersecurity, but in 2021, the focus shifted to digital transformation. While cybersecurity remains a source of potential danger to their survival, businesses have realized that you must be in the market before you start thinking of breaches and the only thing that can make you remain relevant is to focus on improving customer experience.

However, it’s not enough to just say you are embarking on business transformation; the most important thing is how to ensure your business transformation program is successful. The Kotter change model points out that improving the outcomes of business transformation programs relies heavily on the employees who are the ones actually implementing change programs.

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How to Game Dev Metrics

What leads teams to game metrics within their organization?

On a recent episode of Dev Interrupted, I talked with agile expert Ray Elenteny, Principal Owner at Solutech Consulting, about how people game dev metrics and the underlying issues in culture & leadership that lead to it.

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Engineering Productivity and Culture at Netflix

What is it like to work at Netflix as a developer? How do they think about culture, customers and engineering productivity?

In this incredible episode of Dev Interrupted, I bring in Kathryn Koehler, the Director of Productivity Engineering at Netflix, to chat about what makes Netflix so unique and why they are standardizing data-driven engineering today.

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Focus, Culture, and Metrics in a Remote-First World

How can you build and scale an effective remote organization?

In our digital world, figuring out the answer to this question is crucial, and Chris Brookins the VP of Engineering at Appcues, has some great ideas about how to improve team focus time and maintain company culture in remote-first work environments.

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Why Scrum Requires a Failure Culture

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. To make things worse, a crucial success factor of every Scrum team is not even mentioned in the Scrum Guide: Any organization that wants to employ Scrum to learn faster than its competitors needs to have a solid failure culture.

Join me and explore the consequences of not living a failure culture in less than three minutes.

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Dev Interrupted: Async Dev with DuckDuckGo Engineering Director

This week on the Dev Interrupted podcast, I spoke with Cate Huston, Director of Engineering at DuckDuckGo. She’s an expert in asynchronous development and shared tons of interesting ideas: 

  •  How DuckDuckGo utilizes transient and permanent spaces differently
  •  How product feedback sessions are completed asynchronously
  •  How to help new remote employees feel a sense of belonging and accomplishment. 
  •  The unique relationship between asynchronous managers and developers  

Cate is really smart and has a super-awesome sounding accent so check it out! 

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Avoid Groupthink and Herd Mentality At Work

When you are part of a group, do you speak up and voice your opinion or avoid criticism and choose a path of fewer conflicts. When popularity takes priority over individual responsibility, people develop a tendency to conform to ideas and beliefs that lead to conservative thinking, ignore potential signs of failure, and make decisions with incomplete and biased information leading to groupthink.

When such behavior becomes part of an organization's culture, it gives rise to collective blindness to unethical ways, regressive thinking that ignores the future demands of your business and a propensity to ignore truth especially if it requires taking a hard stance.

Without the environment that encourages fresh perspectives, constructive conflict with a desire to learn new information, and a clear process for making decisions, it's easy to succumb to groupthink where herd mentality drives decisions instead of utilizing the collective power of group intelligence.

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Align Engineering Metrics to Business KPIs

What's your cycle time? If you can't answer it, don't worry, you're not alone. Many engineering leaders couldn't tell you without some significant number-crunching. Gaining visibility into performance is only half the battle though. Knowing how to interpret metrics and how to apply them to improving performance is where the magic happens. Many CEOs do not know how to align engineering metrics to business KPIs (revenue, customer retention, etc.). Bringing metrics to your board or non-technical CEO for the first time may be challenging if you are unable to help them bridge the gap.

Learn which metrics matter for engineering leaders.

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“Our Dev Culture Is Based On Bushido Samurai Code”

My interview with the VP of Engineering at GigSmart

I’m a culture nerd. Obsessed with the idea that you can have two groups of software engineers with similar talent and experience and one group might build better products than the other because of this amorphous thing… culture. 

I talk to 5-10 engineering leaders every week in my role at LinearB. And I always ask them about their dev culture. 

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Abruptly WFH: 11 Things Changed and 8 Things Stayed The Same

Work-life balance is taking on a new meaning for many. The dev team at LinearB is no exception now that we’re abruptly working from home.

My team works out of our Tel-Aviv office. There are 10 of us here. Recently, we decided to prepare for our team to operate remotely for an extended period. To do this, we decided to run a remote “test day.” What we didn’t know at the time is that the remote prep day ended up becoming the first day of the new “normal” way for our team to work.

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Tell Your Junior Dev To Do This Before Your Next Stand-Up

“Yesterday I worked on feature X. Today I’m working on feature Y. No blockers.”

Sound familiar? It’s the update your new junior developer gave in the stand-up meeting this morning. You told them not to ramble, but this isn’t really what you had in mind. When you were explaining stand-up 101, you told them to:

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Can Software Leaders Use Metrics Without Damaging Culture?

I'd love to adopt and champion metrics, but I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll lose my team. They’ll think big brother is always looking over their shoulder and start looking for jobs elsewhere. This is a sentiment I’ve heard from several software development leaders when talking about trying to become more data-driven to improve their team’s productivity.

At this fall’s GitHub Universe, one of the best-attended sessions was on how metrics can help dev leaders. The presenter focused mainly on all the pitfalls of measuring the wrong things.

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The 3Cs That Will Boost Your ROI of Software Development

The 3Cs of software development.


Innovative products, a loyal customer base, and consistent top-line growth – that’s the holy trinity of success for any ISV. Top ISVs invest significantly to drive quality, collaboration, and customer-centricity. The ROI of software development is closely linked to those attributes. How do they do it? Let’s find out.

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Scaling Agile to Create “Frictionless IT”

Creating a modern and flexible operating model for IT is no easy feat. Many technology organizations are still operating as a “service provider” to their business units, rather than a strategic partner. The moment this model becomes a problem is often when the business begins to move quickly or veer from the plan. For most companies undergoing a digital transformation, that time is happening now.

The foundation of much of enterprise IT is the budget under which they operate. Unfortunately, in many organizations, technology teams are still simply looked at as a cost center. This means they are seen as not contributing to the profit of the business. This is amplified when the tech teams themselves have this mindset.

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Want Better Collaboration at Work? You’d Better Tackle That Trust Problem First

The magic happens when good people come together for a common cause. Well, it does as long as there's a healthy dose of trust in place.

Improving or enhancing collaborative working is often one of the main reasons for choosing to implement online communication channels, such as Slack or Asana, but all too often, companies fail to get virtual teams and collaborative ways of working off the ground.

But why? There must be a reason why it is difficult to encourage virtual teams when you provide all the tools to facilitate it.

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Trust and Openness Are Key to Innovation

Would you trust your team members in this scenario? Well, metaphorically speaking, you'd better if you want to be innovative.

Innovation thrives on openness. While it’s common to think that innovation largely consists of revolutionary breakthroughs, in reality, it is much more common for it to be a slow and iterative process of gradual improvements and remixing of existing technologies in new and novel ways. 

You may also like:  How to Shift Your Internal Culture Towards Innovation

As such, being open with your own insights, and others doing likewise, is crucial to the innovation process.