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I've seen some of the results of what you guys teach -- you do good work. This is also the first year that I've regularly had senior executives and C-suites (a

by HillRat 10y ago

I've seen some of the results of what you guys teach -- you do good work. This is also the first year that I've regularly had senior executives and C-suites (as opposed to tech) ask me about agile as a qualifying or competitive factor. I'm always nervous when process becomes a qualifier (due to the "best practices are no magic bullet" expectations management it requires, often in the face of the competition's unwarranted claims), but I'm happy to see plenty of F100+s thinking about how to effectively innovate within their core markets without throwing $20m waterfalls at the problem.

jacques_chester 10y ago
To tell the truth, we've had to re-learn how to teach in the past few years. Pivotal Labs used to work almost exclusively with startups -- a scale at which transforming most or all of a company's work is possible in a single engagement. When the students are all willing and present, teaching is easy. Now we work with a lot of enterprises, most of whom by employee headcount outnumber us by 10-100x : 1. We can't boil the ocean. We have to do it a piece at a time. Often the C-suite are converted after just a few visits to our offices, or after talking to our various office directors (nearly all of whom have come from frontline engineering, product management or design). And typically the engineers, product managers and designers we work with are quick to see the benefits too. But these companies are very large and sometimes the incentives are highly heterogenous across different individuals and departments. But slowly, surely, they change. And even when they don't completely change, it only takes an isolated pocket of fast movement to keep a large company in the game against disruptors. That said, we've found that after a while, the ideas and practices begin to spread by themselves. A good example is The Home Depot, with whom we've had several Labs engagements now. Cody, from THD, even gave a tech talk about our NYC office about the experience: http://original.livestream.com/pivotallabs/video?clipId=pla_1750f6fc-c569-4b0f-9b1e-ee8938ac5f7f http://original.livestream.com/pivotallabs/video?clipId=pla_... Unfortunately, we flubbed the audio, so Cody is a little hard to hear, but if you can hear -- it's a great story.

by HillRat 10y ago

jacques_chester 10y ago

To tell the truth, we've had to re-learn how to teach in the past few years. Pivotal Labs used to work almost exclusively with startups -- a scale at which transforming most or all of a company's work is possible in a single engagement. When the students are all willing and present, teaching is easy. Now we work with a lot of enterprises, most of whom by employee headcount outnumber us by 10-100x : 1. We can't boil the ocean. We have to do it a piece at a time. Often the C-suite are converted after just a few visits to our offices, or after talking to our various office directors (nearly all of whom have come from frontline engineering, product management or design). And typically the engineers, product managers and designers we work with are quick to see the benefits too. But these companies are very large and sometimes the incentives are highly heterogenous across different individuals and departments. But slowly, surely, they change. And even when they don't completely change, it only takes an isolated pocket of fast movement to keep a large company in the game against disruptors. That said, we've found that after a while, the ideas and practices begin to spread by themselves. A good example is The Home Depot, with whom we've had several Labs engagements now. Cody, from THD, even gave a tech talk about our NYC office about the experience: http://original.livestream.com/pivotallabs/video?clipId=pla_1750f6fc-c569-4b0f-9b1e-ee8938ac5f7f http://original.livestream.com/pivotallabs/video?clipId=pla_... Unfortunately, we flubbed the audio, so Cody is a little hard to hear, but if you can hear -- it's a great story.