David Anderson & Mark McCann’s Lean Engineering Organization Playlist

David Anderson and Mark McCann, coauthors of The Value Flywheel Effect, helped create the Serverless-First strategy at Liberty Mutual in 2016. They were able to achieve significant, multi-million dollar business results; create a new, industry-leading engineering standard within Liberty Mutual; and lead a generation of architects to become cloud leaders in their own right.

The Value Flywheel Effect

I know we are biased. This talk introduces the Value Flywheel Effect and how we use it to create space for innovation. Some of the underlying principles are the culture in the organization and the coverage to focus on value. We believe these are table stakes for a lean engineering organization. https://player.vimeo.com/video/708278624?title=0&byline=0

The Flywheel Effect Creates Space for Innovation (Europe 2022)

Fast Flow

The concept of fast flow is critical for every organization, but we often focus on activity metrics and lagging metrics as opposed to flow metrics. Dr. Mik Kersten is the King of Fast Flow, and this talk describes how you can design, assess, and continually improve toward fast flow.

Product Org Design: Flow Follows Form (Europe 2022)

Organizing Flow in a Service Organization

Dr. Mik Kersten drove the project-to-product community, and many companies have successfully pivoted to become more product-focused. But not all companies need to embrace product.

In this talk, Ivan Krnic shows how a service organization can manage flow and adopt some of the “product” thinking without organizing around product.

Managing the Flow of Value in Service Organizations (Europe 2022)

Leading from the Middle

Effective organizations need change agents. Executives can be change agents and are certain catalysts for change, but “the middle” can make or break a change. Related to the excellent Leading from the Middle book by Scott Mautz, Steve Pereira and Andrew Davis give a fantastic talk about how you can drive change from “the middle.”

Leading from the Middle (Europe 2022)

Organizing with Team Topologies

No playlist around the engineering organization would be complete without reference to Team Topologies. In the fascinating and frank talk by Matthew Skelton, he talks about Team Topologies, some other techniques that he uses (Wardley Mapping and others that we are also big fans of), and, most interestingly, what happened as they applied these changes in actual companies.

Emerging Patterns & Anti-Patterns With Team Topologies (Europe 2021)

Creating a Flow Culture

Information flow is an excellent property to observe when assessing the health of an organization. Ron Westrum is the master of this thinking, and his work on organizational culture is unsurpassed. This talk is deep and well worth a watch.

Information Flow Cultures (Europe 2021)

The Work Revolution

Finally, we have Matt K. Parker talking about high performance and painting a picture of the future. There are many parallels between the Value Flywheel Effect and Matt’s book, A Radical Enterprise. We believe a quiet revolution is coming in how companies and enterprises are structured, how they work, and their methods of success. It’s a velvet revolution happening around us as we speak, and we may not truly understand it until it has happened, but that makes it exciting! Open your eyes. What changes can you see around you?

A Radical Enterprise: Pioneering the Future of High Performance (US 2021)

- About The Authors

David Anderson

David Anderson has been at the leading edge of the technology industry for twenty-five years. He formed The Serverless Edge, and continues to work with clients and partners to prove out the thinking in his book, The Value Flywheel Effect. He is also a member of the Wardley Mapping community.

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Mark McCann

Mark McCann is a Cloud Architect and leader focused on enabling organizations and their teams to rapidly deliver business value through well-architected, sustainable, serverless-first solutions. He was heavily involved with Liberty Mutual's journey to the cloud, leverages Wardley Mapping, and writes for the The Serverless Edge.

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