Interview Tips Part 1 - Find Out What The Company Values

OK forget the above picture! Although it did make me giggle!

Recently I have had the pleasure of going through a few interview processes in order to get my career back on track. Although the interview process can be unpleasant, essentially you are selling yourself and to some that can be uncomfortable, it is definitely a challenge. If you like a challenge, to break the norm once in a while, then going through a round of interviews should help you out!

One thing I would stress is to not take the interview process lightly. Research the company that you are going to interview with. A solution that really worked for me was to find what the company values, and then think about how you would fit in with those values. A classic example are the Amazon Values. This tells you exactly what the company is looking for in all candidates. Pretty much well every company, that has an on-line presence, will have a similar page to the one at Amazon.

If the company you are interviewing with is actually serious about these values, then most of the questions that they will ask you should be able to be mapped back to them. So print out the values. See if you agree with them. If you don't, then you have to ask yourself why are you going to go for an interview with the company. It's a pretty safe bet that you won't enjoy your time there, if you are offered a job, as you disagree with the values that the company aspires to!

If you do agree with the values, then write down how you have met them and more importantly how you have lived them in previous roles, or indeed in your day to day life. If in your past roles you have not had the chance to aspire to the values, then write down how you would! Then read what you have written a couple of times to see if you actually believe in what you have said. Again if you don't then you have to think to yourself, would you enjoy your time with the company you are interviewing with.

If the company is serious about the values, that it is openly promoting, then most of the interview questions that you are asked should be directly mappable back to the values that you have studied. As you have highlighted how you have managed to aspire to these you invariably have a coherent and simple answer to provide in an interview. By studying what values a company aspires to, and determining if you believe in them, you are essentially able to find out the types of questions you might have to answer and you are then able to find the best situation, you have previously been involved in, that demonstrates how you personally aspire to that value.

If in the interview you don't get questions that relate to the published company values, then in my opinion you have to ask yourself whether that company is actually serious about them. Are their published values simply lip service that attention is never paid to. If you feel this is the case, then you again have to ask yourself whether you would be comfortable working in an environment like that. 

OK just because in a single interview you are not asked about anything that maps to the company values doesn't mean that the entire company doesn't aspire to them. You are typically interviewed by members of the team that you are going to work with though, so it might be an indication that the particular team doesn't aspire to them. Remember an interview is not a one way process. Sure you are going there to sell yourself, however the company that you are interviewing with should also be selling itself to you as well. If you don't get a great feel through the interview process, again you need to ask yourself, would you feel comfortable working there. 

Interviewing is not necessarily an easy or comfortable process. If you are not a natural sales person, then going out and selling yourself is not a trivial thing. It can be a very hard slog! Knowing, and understanding, the values of the company that you are interviewing with will at least help you know if you would be comfortable working there. It should also give you an insight into the questions that should be asked in the interview process. If questions are not asked in the interview, that can be mapped to promoted company values, then this should provide an indication as to whether the published core values are simply lip service, or actually aspired to. All great personal indicators to highlight if you would feel comfortable working in a company.

Next up STAR answers to questions ..... but this is another blog coming soon!

When Process Is Valued Over Innovation You Are In Trouble

If you deliver products to Customers in a market that driven wildly by innovation, lets say for example Internet services, if your delivery mechanism is bound tightly by process you are in trouble. This is as innovation cannot be governed strictly by process. It is not possible to simply say "Do something innovative next week". Sure you can allow someone the time to try and be innovative but this doesn't mean they will be.

Innovation is not something that can easily be measured and it is a continual process. You don't be innovative for a week and then spend the next 6 months delivering the innovation. Innovation means being able to adapt to new ideas and concepts as they inexplicably fall in your lap from time to time. You have to be able to adjust. Of course, arguably, this is exactly what the Agile software development process allows you to do. Adapt and change the process that is used by a self organising team so they can best suit the manner that is required to deliver a product that will delight Customers.

Of course if you work in an environment where following a set process is valued more than innovation and change. Then if the market you deliver in is fuelled by change and innovation - you are in trouble. Innovation invariably results in change. change to your processes and change to your products. Innovation is all about being able to predict a Customers needs and delivering that need. Or alternatively spotting a customer trend and delivering that trend. Of course spotting trends gets you into the market at best second, but by allowing processes to change and adapt, and products to change and adapt, at least you can be in the market.

If however you are dictated to delivering your product, without room for thought and innovation, and rather by steps on a spreadsheet, then invariably by the time you deliver your product, the market you are delivering it to will have moved on and your Customers will not be interested. 

The Scrum Process Should Drive Out Fear

I was interviewing a candidate recently and the question was asked "When you don't have clear requirements from project stakeholders, what do you do?". The candidate provided an excellent example of a project he had worked on, whereby he had simply provided the stakeholders with the requirements that he was going to implement, based on the vagueness that they hold told him, and then asked for comment. He then went about working with his team, delivering and demonstrating the requirements as they were built. His reasoning was that stakeholders were not providing clear requirements because they feared making mistakes and feared that what they were attempting to do would result in failure. His process of defining and demonstrating requirements, as they were built, drove out the fear and provided a platform for the successful delivery of a product. A great response to a difficult situation and a great interview answer. One well worth remembering ;-)

This is exactly what the Scrum delivery process does. With the product owner sitting in the scrum delivery team they are able to see early in the product delivery process the difficulty, or not as it may be, to deliver certain use cases. If the scrum team, prioritised by the product owner, attempt to deliver, and demonstrate complex use cases first, then it is possible to determine if certain use cases are possible.

Alternatively it is possible to see if product complexity will be detriment to the product as a whole, i.e. by concentrating on complexity first to guarantee it is delivered might not leave enough time towards the end of a product release schedule to complete the product as a whole.

By demonstrating sprint deliveries every 2 or 4 weeks the scrum team, at the behest of the product owner can self correct and re-prioritise functionality to ensure successful delivery. This might entail demonstrating the complexity of a certain use case, resulting in the product owner rethinking and reworking a set of use cases with stakeholders. The critical thing is that fear is driven out of a project as early as possible:

• The 'northbound' stakeholders (management) get a clear indication of progress at regular intervals. they don't wait until the end of a 3-4 month software delivery cycle to get an outcome they don't want. They can see at regular time intervals progress and if issues arise, expectations can be reset. There should be less fear from management as they have a clearer indication of what can be achieved. They get this vision at a very early stage in the delivery cycle.
• The product owner can also see progress immediately as they are sitting with the delivery team, working on the hardest use cases first. This gives the ability for the product owner to assess the over all project commitment and assess at a very early stage the chance of delivery success. The product owner then has the data they need to set expectations.
• The Scrum team can drive out fear as working closely with the product owner they can assess what can be delivered at a very early stage in the software delivery cycle. This gives the power for the team to self correct and concentrate on delivering the core value of any given product in a specified time frame.

This is one of the key benefits of the Scrum process. As the team are empowered, or should be, to deliver a product that they have ownership of, they have the power to set what is achievable within a given time frame. This means, as long as 'northbound' stakeholder expectations can be managed, that the delivery team can drive out fear as they can commit to what is possible, as opposed to worrying about what is not possible.

It is worth the 'northbound' stakeholders while to work in this fashion as if they drive a team to deliver, what cannot be delivered there are two possible outcomes:

• The delivery team will simply burn out trying to achieve the impossible. On the odd occasion they may well actually deliver the impossible, but it's no way to maintain the long term health and prosperity of a team. Undoubtedly there will be a lot of recruitment after each project as teams break up with individuals moving on elsewhere.
• The delivery team will simply become demoralised. This is as they will feel that their concerns are simply being ignored. Again expect to have to manage a lot of recruitment during and after the project.

the difficulty on the product owners part is:

• knowing what is hard and
• knowing what is impossible. 

If the product owner knows this, then hopefully prioritising what is hard, at the beginning of the project can drive out the fear. If they prioritise the impossible, then a load of time is going to be wasted not delivering anything. More on this later! ;-)

Cheers

m    

I'm Finally Leaving My Current Job

I am leaving my current job at the end of April. The almost universal response when I tell people is "Well done! It's about time!". The sometimes harsher response - "Well it's about 4 years late!". I would like to think that these comments are wrong and a little misguided. Unfortunately, deep down .... in fact not even deep down, rather quite close to the surface ... I know they are reasonably correct.

Ho hum. Onwards and upwards I say! Looking forward to new opportunities elsewhere!

A Successful Product Manager Has To Know How Their Product Is Built

If a product manager doesn't know how the product they are managing is built there is simply no way for them to be successful as they should be. That is unless they are carried by their team. It is essential that to make coherent and intelligent decisions about a product, that the product manager understands the impact that these decisions might have. The only way to do this is to understand how the product is built.

This doesn't necessarily mean that in a software development project that the product manager has to be a software developer. What it does mean is that the product manager works with the team to understand the implications of decisions. This understanding is facilitated by the product team sitting together. In a scrum sense, this means that the product owner, scrum master and scrum team all sit together. This means when an issue arises everyone in the team knows about it simply through work based conversation. Status meetings become less of a priority when the team sits together as immediately the entire team knows of an issue and can define ways to solve it - together.

By sitting together, even if the product owner is not a software developer, the team as a whole learns the impact of how decisions affect the team and conversely the team gains a finer understanding of why some decisions are made.

If the Scrum team and product owner are not co-located:

• The scrum team has no vision of why decisions are made and what 'north bound' management issues are influencing decisions
• The product owner has less 'south bound' vision of how stake holder issues impact the scrum development process.

The answer to overcome these issues is simple. A product team should sit together. A team that sits together by default will communicate more often, more clearly, solve issues far more quickly and pass on knowledge to each other through osmosis. This means that knowledge is shared without team members even trying to share it. This in turn creates a motivated team that learns together, delivers together and more importantly has fun doing so.

Co-location of a team is a simple mechanism to improve. 

Cheers

Murray

Negative Thought Blocks Creativity

Negative thought blocks creativity. That's it. Sometimes though when you are in an environment where negative energy is allowed to build it becomes challenging to accept ideas that might not be fully thought through. All to often the reaction is "That's not thought through - that's rubbish!". Sometimes this is a challenge to overcome, especially if the environment is in a glut, and not seemingly able to change.

The challenge then is how to overcome this, and how to do something yourself to promote change such that negative energy is not allowed to fester and destroy the creative process. There are many ways to address this, however one simple way is to start with ones self and not simply disengage with someone else's idea as it wasn't your own. Sure some idea's may not be thought through to completion, however this is exactly what the creative, product generation, process is about - working through a series of ideas to come up with a coherent set of engaging product features that your Customers will love.

In an environment where self is valued over team, this can be a real challenge. Nothing can seriously be completed if a creative process involves 10 people in a meeting room shouting over the top of each other, and not actually listening to what each person is saying. An idea needs to be logically explored to it's completion. There are many ways to do this, including hopefully an analysis of data to support a product feature. I think this however is the subject of another story. For now though rest assured that not listening to an idea and not exploring it, is a sure fire way to kill creativity, kill morale, kill team productivity and even worse - kill joy.

So here's a really simple tip. When you are in a creative meeting with others, instead of talking, first listen. Listen to what other people are saying before running with your ideas. If someone then gets in ahead of you with an idea that you think is brilliant, and that you were going to suggest, simply support them with their idea and build consensus that way. If there is an idea that you think is daft, ask the person who suggested it to qualify the use case for the idea and see how it might actually work within a product. Let the person run with the idea and provide support, if needed, and let their creativity flow into consensus. Who knows, that daft person might be the one who is actually thinking outside the business realm that you find yourself stuck in, and might actually be opening an entirely new stream of revenue for you.

Listening, promoting others to run with their ideas, and encouraging them to think freely by offering support to work through a thought into a deliverable concept, is going to pay off quickly.  This will generate a self motivated team that enjoy working together. This is a team that will want to deliver yours and their ideas, and turn them into a reality. What's more as they are a motivated team it is most likely they will exceed the Customer expectations as they will always want to deliver more than is promised.

Alternatively, as you are always right you could simply dismiss all ideas that aren't your own. You could do this, but when your delivery vehicle, i.e. your team, get that idea and are allowed to run with it to release, that run will most likely turn into a slow walk.

Cheers

m

What Agile Isn't - A Cross Domain Team Existing Only Of Product Manager Folks

Agile Scrum teams should be made up of team members across business domains. The Product owner should represent the needs of stakeholders and the Scrum team should consist of whoever is needed to deliver the product. This should include product designers, software developers and testers. Ideally all team members can work across disciplines, however in the real world this is most often not the case.

A scrum team should not consist only of Product Managers. This cannot be a scrum team as it cannot deliver anything. Some, although very few, would argue that a team like this can deliver the concept or a 'vision'. Arguably if this was the case that 'vision' would be delivered to a Customer so a Customer can engage with it. However unfortunately a 'vision' is not a deliverable product. In my view a collection of thinkers does not deliver a product.

This is often emphasised when a 'vision' is delivered to a delivery team and it is not possible to implement. There may be many technical reasons why it is not possible to deliver something. Some are so obvious that if a technical representative, i.e. someone from another business domain, were present in the team of thinkers many hours of wasted effort could have been avoided. This is precisely why scrum delivery teams are cross domain. Everybody that is required to deliver a product is available in the decision making process (or at least should be!). When this is the case if there is an impediment to delivery it is seen immediately, by someone in the team with the core knowledge of the reasons why, and can be analysed immediately. Then alternatives that could be delivered can be proposed, agreed and delivered.

Cross domain teams identify potential risks to delivery as early as possible and provide solutions to avert these issues. It is precisely why, when the concept of a 'vision' is discussed, that a cross domain team should be involved. The same principle of early issue identification and risk mitigation applies. By involving a cross domain team when the 'vision' gets to the delivery stage, it will actually be possible to deliver it, as opposed to spending 6 months fighting as to why it cannot be delivered.

Its a very simple, and obvious, thing to do when coming up with an idea.

Cheers

m