In Episode 10, Collin and I dive into a question I was asked during an interview:

“We do an offsite with our leadership team, and it’s a great couple of days… but once we’re back in the day-to-day, it all sort of disappears. As a coach, how do you help with that?”

The question has lingered with me for quite some time, and I thought it would be an interesting topic to unpack with Collin.

In this episode, we explore:

• How coaches can help “hold” a team’s desire to change, providing structure and accountability without getting pulled into the daily fires
• Why working with digital leadership teams means going beyond agile frameworks into the messier world of team dynamics and organizational complexity
• The importance of examining your own unconscious beliefs about leadership
• Three common offsite mistakes we often see—and how to avoid them:
  • Senior leaders facilitating instead of participating
  • Agendas so full there’s no space for reflection
  • Avoiding the hard conversations that matter most

We share personal experiences to keep the conversation actionable and grounded in the day-to-day realities of organisational life.

I hope you find Episode 10 useful.

Thanks to everyone who’s been following the podcast and leaving kind reviews—it means a lot.

What if you could measure what really matters to your customer?

In our latest episode of Talking Product, Collin and I chat with Alex Hidalgo—author of the O’Reilly book Implementing Service Level Objectives. Alex shares how Service Level Objectives (SLOs) can help teams zero in on customer priorities and bring people across the organisation together to define what really matters.

SLOs are powerful, but they can also be tricky to implement. I’ve struggled with them myself, so it was great to have the chance to explore this topic in depth with Alex and learn from his expertise.

In this session, we cover:

• Practical steps to get started with Service Level Indicators (SLIs), the foundation of SLOs.
• How to start small and iterate as you refine your SLOs over time.
• The cultural challenges of implementing SLOs—and how to navigate them.

If you’re just starting out or looking to improve your approach, I hope you find this episode full of insights to help you on your SLO journey.

Alex’s book is an excellent resource for making SLOs meaningful and achievable in your organisation. I highly recommend it.

I hope you enjoy listening to this session as much as we enjoyed recording it.

If you liked the episode, please give us a rating—or go all out and write us a nice review. It makes a big difference!

A huge thank you to Alex for making the time to share his insights with us.

In this session Collin & I use Volkswagen’s struggle to build Electric Vehicle (EV) software as a way to explore two themes:

1. the importance of getting a digital transformation right, and
2. the opportunity presented to competitors when large players simply cannot deliver good quality digital products.

We use two articles from the Financial Times as a springboard for our conversation. The first article, dated Jun 28, 2024 “Oliver Blume, VW and Porsche boss steering an EV strategy shift” and the second one, published September 2, 2024 “VW considers closing factories in Germany and cutting jobs” (both behind a paywall - sorry)

The first article describes an investment of $5 billion in the US based EV startup Rivian. The purpose of the investment is to create a joint partnership that allows VW to use Rivian’s EV software. The article quotes VW’s CEO Oliver Blume as saying, “In terms of a big tech transformation, you can’t do it all on your own… It should be a win-win situation . . . The motivation from our side is to speed up software transformation at Volkswagen in all our brands. Rivian has best in class architecture . . . Volkswagen has the scale”.

Collin and I explore this thinking of an acquisition / strategic partnership as a means for fixing an internal digital transformation challenge. For those of you who have listened to Collin and I, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that we are not convinced that such an approach will easily remedy digital product development challenges.

As we ask in the show, what mental models will need to change for these two companies - a digital native and a non-digital native, to work effectively together? As Collin highlights, ultimately these transformations are culture changes, which require heavy-lifting.

Since recording this session, the FT has come out with more articles on the challenges Volkswagen is facing. I have also started listening to some of the VW YouTube influencers who have been discussing software issues for a number of years. I am finding this to be a fascinating case study, albeit quite sad for the workers of Wolfsburg if the leadership of VW can’t get its digital act together.

In this session, I also refer to a 2017 Medium post on how Revolut used the build-measure-learn cycle to develop digital products quickly and acquire customers.

Hope you find the session useful.

If you like the show, please give us a nice rating and recommend the show. It helps others find the podcast.