From Software to Systems: Modern Agility
summary
Argues that agility scales only when teams shift from feature work to designing socio-technical systems and teaches five concrete practices: share expertise by partnering, respect each other’s leadership, invest energy and attention, learn together, and iterate system rules. Gives concrete evidence: first microservices replicated the monolith and needed rethinking; skipping email verification produced spam and had to be fixed; skipping performance testing caused a production outage tied to a MySQL max bug. Rejects SAFe as the prescription.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:31Rethinking agile discourse
- 5:59Moving from software to systems
- 10:51Conway's law and communication
- 12:18Defining modern agility
- 16:22Partnering for shared expertise
- 20:29Leadership and accountability
- 26:21Energy, attention, and habits
- 30:21Continuous learning and improvement
- 33:04Technical mastery and closing
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