A newsletter that started as a personal learning and getting-in-touch project by Ivan Krnic grew into a sociotechnical newsletter covering topics of technical excellence, organizational improvements, and productivity.
Product Management
Product Management is recently becoming even more important. For years we have been improving how we work. Focusing on team efficiency, we have somehow put Product Management on the back burner. We have created a well-oiled machine that produces features with great efficiency. But now we don’t know what to feed it with. That’s why we need to take a step back and hone our product management skills. So we can better understand customer needs and build the right thing in the right order.
It might look like product management is a niche skill required for building a product or a service. But it is far more than that.
It is a necessary skill for anybody who wants to do anything worth doing in a world full of uncertainties and distractions. That includes running organizational transformations as well. Knowing what your goal is, understanding why are you doing the transformation, and relentlessly focusing on the most important thing is what will move you forward. Product management skills are becoming the basic navigational skills of today.
Interview of the Month
Application security with Tanya Janca
Although taken a year ago, this is still one of my favorite interviews. Not to mention it was my first non-written interview – hence the confusion and a questionable mic quality – but talking to Tanya was great!
Tanya Janca is a super kind person bringing a security focus to DevOps movement. After working for the government and Microsoft, Tanya is now focused on consulting and education. I talked with Tanya about security in the cloud and how does one go about making teams more sensible to security issues.
PS. A lot has changed in one year – Tanya’s business evolved and now you can find her at We Hack Purple.
The cognitive load is the resident evil in organizations today! It shreds our focus and slows down the flow of value. Fortunately, Team Topologies offers a recipe to overcome it by forming the right structure of teams and establishing the right team interactions, thus supporting DevOps way of working.
Download CROZ case study and check out how Team Topologies helped us achieve a better flow of value and keep technology in check.
Hand picked
Talking about DevOps, we often hear we should “push left”. The idea is to address relevant concerns (such as security, performance, legal requirements, compliance, etc.) early in the software development lifecycle to identify possible issues as early as possible. In this blog series, Tanya is explaining what does it mean to push security to the left. A great blog series that she should compile into an e-book.
Organizations working according to ITIL are used to a waterfall-ish, phased approach to software delivery. That’s why Continuous [Anything] concepts don’t come naturally to them. Matthew Skelton offers a new perspective and shares useful tips on how to adapt ITIL to DevOps with continual service transition.
Can you count all the ways in which you can run containers in AWS? Nobody can, but Forrest Brazeal gave it a go and tried to summarize all of them in a decision tree. It’s almost like I finally understand it!
DevOps is all about operational excellence, taking small steps, shortening the feedback loop, and quickly responding to signals from the environment. Often are these signals readily available as logs, metrics, and events. But sometimes you have to look for the signals in non-integration-friendly places such as the content on particular web pages. This is where the skill of web scrapping comes in handy. People from Scraper API analyzed online web-scraping courses and shared their thoughts.
Platform teams are getting traction in modern organizations. We have finally let go of the harmful opinion that all teams in an organization should be Scrum teams and all of them should be end-to-end proficient in all aspects of application development and infrastructure. Team Topologies have finally normalized that some level of specialization is not only acceptable but necessary. One of such specializations is building the internal platform. Luca Galante is bringing another good take on Internal Platform Teams.
Read with us
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
Many are talking about Product Management, few are understanding what is it all about. No, Product Management is not some obsolete skill “superseded” by Product Ownership. Product Management is very much alive and in demand more than ever.
In this book, Melissa Perri explains why Product Management is important, what is the difference between a Product Manager and a Product Owner, and how a good Product Manager brings value to the organization.
If your role includes Product Management (and even if it doesn’t) this book is a must-read.
Photo by Ahmed Zayan from Unsplash
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