Engineering Culture by InfoQ
InfoQ
Software engineers, architects and team leads have found inspiration to build better, high performing teams by listening to the weekly InfoQ Podcast. We have achieved that by interviewing some of the top CTOs, engineers and technology directors from companies like Uber, Netflix and more. Over 500,000 downloads in the last 3 years.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Apr 7, 2020 • 27min
Helen Bartimote and Jamie Dobson on Mental Health and Wellbeing During the COVID-19 Pandemic
In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Helen Bartimote and Jamie Dobson from Container Solutions about maintaining mental health and wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Mental health and wellness is not a new challenge for the technology industry, and it is more openly discussed today that is has been previously
• The COVID-19 pandemic has put many people into a collective state of shock.
• Acknowledging the emotional reactions and their impact is an important part of being able to cope with what is happening. It's really important to give them time and know that they will pass, come back again and pass, and that’s OK.
• It’s important to identify what you can control and acknowledge what you cannot control, accept that the feelings of being out of control are real and they are stressful, and that you always have control over how we respond to a situation, even if you can’t control the circumstances
• Empathic responding, finding ways to care for and help others, is one of the best ways to respond to a crisis and contributes to our own wellbeing
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2Ri0283
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Mar 30, 2020 • 31min
Johanna Rothman & Mark Kilby on Their Book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Johanna Rothman & Mark Kilby about their book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams
Why listen to this podcast:
• There are important mindset shifts that are needed to help enable distributed teams to be effective
• You can’t take practices and approaches that are designed for co-located teams and apply them to distributed teams without adapting them to the new context
• Distributed teams need to identify and align on their hours of overlap
• Transparency and experimentation are important for a distributed team to build their culture
• Communication needs to include personal context, not just focusing on the work but get to know the people
• Let the teams identify and evolve their own ways of working, do not impose it from above
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ bit.ly/2Jwg9u5
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Mar 23, 2020 • 51min
Panel: Suddenly Distributed - Effective Agility in The Age of Coronavirus
In this special edition of the podcast, made in conjunction with Retrium and the Agile Alliance, we brought together a panel of remote working experts to explore and share experiences around what teams and individuals can do to cope and be effective in the environment where so many people are suddenly forced to work from home and collaborate remotely.
The panel consisted of:
• David Horowitz
• Mark Kilby
• Lisette Sutherland
• Judy Rees
• Steve McCann
• Charles Humble
• Shane Hastie
The full video recording of the webinar can be found here: https://bit.ly/2wniFjL.
• Huge numbers of people around the globe are suddenly having to work remotely and figure out how to cope in these turbulent times
• Part of what makes this environment so stressful for many of us is the fact that life feels out of our control
• One way to gain back some semblance of control is to come up with 15% solutions, small actions that you can take immediately
• Remote work can be effective and efficient provided people are supported properly
• When meeting remotely the experience is far more effective for everybody when you have video cameras on
• Working agreements with your teams and with your family about how we will support each other to work remotely are important
• Taking care of yourself and your family is more important than being busy with work
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2UfYA85
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Mar 18, 2020 • 34min
Andrea Tomasini of Agile 42 on influencing change in complex environments
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Andrea Tomasini on organisational change, sense-making, leadership and organic agility
Why listen to this podcast:
• Organic Agility is a way to help make organisations more resilient by making culture explicit and visible
• You can’t design culture, you can only influence it
• Interviews and questionnaires give a limited a biased view of culture – you need other tools to make sense and truly understand organisation culture
• Organisations need to be seen as complex systems and analysed from that perspective, not through mechanistic view
• You influence culture by making the stories visible and letting people move in the direction that makes the stories more positive
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2QsqMCf
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Mar 9, 2020 • 23min
Howard Sublett on current and future state of the Scrum Alliance
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Howard Sublett about the current and future state of the Scrum Alliance.
Why listen to this podcast:
• When organisations and teams adopt Scrum effectively the difference in atmosphere and attitude to work is palpable
• There is still a lot of faux-agile/scrum where practices are adopted without the mindset shift
• The Scrum Alliance have appointed Howard as the Chief Product Owner, responsible for defining the what and the why of the organisation, and Melissa Bloggs as the Chief Scrum Master responsible for the how of implementation
• The Scrum Alliance has moved to a self-selected, cross-functional team model based around customer segments
• With7 billion people working in the world today, even with 1.2 million people certified in Scrum, there’s still a huge amount of work to be done to improve the world of work for the majority of people
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2TUCTcf
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Feb 24, 2020 • 26min
Diana Larsen on the Origins of Agility and Agile Fluency
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Diana Larsen about the origins of what became agile development, where business agility is header and the agile fluency project .
Why listen to this podcast:
• There is a deep history of business improvement initiatives that predates the agile manifesto
• It was a part of a cultural movement that was moving more toward more humane workplaces that could deliver more value
• When you give people a good environment and good support to do their work, you get better work and better products
• The ideas of business agility predate the work in agile development – engaging support structures in organisations to enable change
• You can't change one part of a system without it having effects on other parts of the system
• The Agile Fluency Model is a tool to help teams diagnose themselves and to expose the system to leadership
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/3acIJwf
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Feb 18, 2020 • 17min
Steve Milligan on Agile Finance and Finding Synergies
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Steve Milligan about his work in Agile Finance and bringing the back-office along on the agile transformation journey.
Why listen to this podcast:
• The funding of agile initiatives has been largely left outside of the scope of transformation efforts, which results in dysfunction and cross purpose
• Agile finance introduces structure so that financial aspects (target setting, budgeting, expenditure and reporting) become synergistic and add to the positive impact of transformation
• Attitude changes need to start with the agile coaching and transformation change agents – they self-constrain and are biased against working with finance groups
• The need to move from static budgets to activity-based budgets and investigate ideas like Beyond Budgeting
• The authoritative bodies (SEC, AICPA) have issued guidance for the accounting profession regarding investigating and determining the applicability of concepts like Beyond Budgeting
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2SYlOOd
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Feb 10, 2020 • 25min
Dave West on Agile Beyond Software, Organisational Alignment and Product Ownership is Hard
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, CEO of scrum.org about agile beyond software, the need for organisational alignment and how product ownership is a major inhibitor for many organisations because it is not done well.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Agile ideas are taking root beyond software development, in business areas and in complex engineering environments
• The scope of agility is more than just delivering great product – it is delivering great product, getting great feedback, experimentation and learning
• The large consulting firms have the relationships at the most senior levels to enable top-down change in organisations
• Most software teams today are delivering relatively well, however there is misalignment between the delivery teams and the wider organisation’s ability to accept and release product to the market effectively
• Good product ownership is incredibly hard and most organisations do product ownership very badly
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/3bvC9lY
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Feb 3, 2020 • 25min
Caitlin Walker on Clean Language, Anti-Fragility and Inclusiveness
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Caitlin Walker about clean language, anti-fragility and inclusiveness.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Clean Language is a way of communicating that helps reduce bias and influence in order to help bring clarity to a situation
• Clean language questions can be used anywhere where gathering high quality information without biasing the answer will be useful
• The questions expose diversity in thinking and attitudes and enable greater connections and empathy between people
• An antifragile system is one that when you apply stress to it, it grows stronger
• Clean language applied to teams helps them create the conditions for antifragility
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2OiMjwb
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Jan 27, 2020 • 17min
Steve Persch on Open Source Communities and Tough Challenges in Technical Leadership
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Steve Persch of Panthion about supporting open source communities and leading technical teams
Why listen to this podcast:
• Communities need to be nurtured and supported
• The open source community is based around the idea that you can build on the knowledge of others
• Leadership technical teams can be challenging and there are some simple (but not easy) things that can be dome to be better at it
• The goal should never be to follow a brand or methodology slavishly – it should always be about solving customer problems and delivering business value
• Successful projects happen as a result of the people who work together, not the technology used
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/30Xi6rq
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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