But questions only seek answers--inquiry provides insight. When, instead of just questions, clients hear their thoughts, opinions, and beliefs spoken by someone else, it prompts them to critically consider how their thinking affects their goals. Reynolds cites the latest brain science to show why reflective inquiry works and provides techniques, tips, and structures for creating breakthrough conversations.This book will free coaches from the cult of asking the magical question by offering five essential practices of reflective inquiry: focus on the person, not the problem; summarize what is heard and expressed; identify underlying beliefs and assumptions; unwrap the desired outcome; and articulate insights and commitments. Using these practices, combined with a respectful and caring presence, helps create a space where clients feel safe, seen, and valued for who they are. Coaches become change agents who actively recharge the human spirit. And clients naturally dive deeper and develop personalized solutions that may surprise even the coach.

    ―Jacob Boudreau CTO of Stord | Forbes 30 Under 30 Joel's book and show provide incredible insights for young startup developers and fellow CTOs alike. Joel offers a human perspective and real practical advice on the challenges and opportunities facing every Modern CTO. ― Christian Saucier | Entrepreneur and P2P Systems Architect I've really come to respect what Joel is doing in the community. His podcast and book are filling a much needed hole and I'm excited to see what else the future has in store. ― Don Pawlowski Chief Technology Officer at University Tees Modern CTO Everything you need to know to be a Modern CTO. Developers are not CTOs, but developers can learn how to be CTOs. In Modern CTO, Joel Beasley provides readers with an in-depth road map on how to successfully navigate the unexplored and jagged transition between these two roles. Drawing from personal experience, Joel gives a refreshing take on the challenges, lessons, and things to avoid on this journey.Readers will learn how Modern CTOs: Manage deadlines Speak up Know when to abandon ship and build a better one Deal with poor code Avoid getting lost in the product and know what UX mistakes to watch out for Manage people and create momentum … plus much more Modern CTO is the ultimate book when making the leap from developer to CTO. Update: Kindle Formatting issues resolved 5/13/18. Thank you for the feedback.

    Rose Randall is the archetypical reluctant project manager. Following a painful project failure years ago, Rose s life is cast into chaos when she is once again thrown into the role against her wishes. Faced with a struggling project, help comes from an unexpected source guiding Rose in the direction of Real Options.When you have read Commitment , you:* understand what the Real Options model is;* can apply the Real Options model to manage project risks successfully;* understand why much of your life involves options that you currently are treating as commitments;* see the world through a different filter opening up many new possibilities;* understand the difference between Commitments and Options.Because the book will:* provide specific examples of how a project can manage its risks using the Real Options model;* outline a simple technique for making decisions;* make you aware of all the decisions you make every day;* build your confidence in your ability to decide when to commit and when to leave options open.In short, this book is indispensable for new and experienced project managers plus anyone else who is interested in knowing more about managing large projects.

    Quantum leaps in technology are enabling organizations to observe and measure people’s behavior in real time, communicate internally at extraordinary speed, and innovate continuously. These new, software-driven technologies are transforming the way companies interact with their customers, employees, and other stakeholders.This is no mere tech issue. The transformation requires a complete rethinking of the way we organize and manage work. And, as software becomes ever more integrated into every product and service, making this big shift is quickly becoming the key operational challenge for businesses of all kinds. We need a management model that doesn’t merely account for, but actually embraces, continuous change. Yet the truth is, most organizations continue to rely on outmoded, industrial-era operational models. They structure their teams, manage their people, and evolve their organizational cultures the way they always have.Now, organizations are emerging, and thriving, based on their capacity to sense and respond instantly to customer and employee behaviors. In Sense and Respond, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, leading tech experts and founders of the global Lean UX movement, vividly show how these companies operate, highlighting the new mindset and skills needed to lead and manage them—and to continuously innovate within them.In illuminating and instructive business examples, you’ll see organizations with distinctively new operating principles: shifting from managing outputs to what the authors call “outcome-focused management”; forming self-guided teams that can read and react to a fast-changing environment; creating a learning-all-the-time culture that can understand and respond to new customer behaviors and the data they generate; and finally, developing in everyone at the company the new universal skills of customer listening, assessment, and response.This engaging and practical book provides the crucial new operational and management model to help you and your organization win in a world of continuous change.

    As the first act of flight, a rocket launch requires an entire set of systems to lift the vehicle into orbit-not just the vehicle itself, but all the systems needed for smoothly moving off the ground into space. Likewise, your project needs its entire set of supporting systems in place to begin a successful journey to delivery. Whatever you call it (project kickoff, bootcamp, inception, or jump start), liftoff gives your team its trajectory, and launches your project. This critical practice informs, inspires, and aligns everyone to a singular purpose: the successful delivery of software. This success is in your hands! Agile veterans Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies teach you how to organize and conduct liftoffs, hold team activities to discover what's most important, and offer a working framework for effective and lightweight agile chartering.

    Team change will happen whether we like it or not. People will come and go from our teams. Our companies might double in size or even get acquired. We can catalyze team change to reduce the risk of attrition, learning and career stagnation and the development of knowledge silos. Dynamic Reteaming describes practices for effective reteaming as well as antipatterns. In this book you'll learn how to integrate new people into an existing team, how to deal with the loss of team members, when to split a team, how to isolate teams for focused innovation, how to rotate team members for knowledge sharing, how to break through organizational stagnation and much more. Learn to apply the five team change patterns: Isolation, One by One, Grow and Split, Merging and Switching. Get practical tips and tricks for managing team change.

    Kanban leverages visual management techniques to involve stakeholders and to facilitate understanding of how the work works. Through limiting the amount of work in process, and by focusing on finishing that work as soon as possible, kanban helps you to adjust demand to capacity, to reduce lead times and to create a driver for continuous improvement.Kanban in Action is a down-to-earth, no-frills, get-to-know-the-ropes introduction to kanban. It's based on the real-world experience and observations from two kanban coaches who have introduced this process to dozens of teams. In this book, you'll discover basic but powerful techniques on how to visualize and track work, how to construct a kanban board, how to visualize queues and bottlenecks, and much much more. You'll learn the principles of why kanban works as well as nitty-gritty details like how to use different color stickies to help you organize and track your work items.

    The book has three parts: Principles: Part one covers the leadership principles that PMs use to lead their team to overcome adversity. When your product fails to gain traction, when your team falls apart, or when your manager gives you tough feedback—these are all opportunities to learn principles that will help you succeed. Product development: Part two covers how PMs at Facebook, Amazon, and other top companies build products. We'll walk through the end-to-end product development process— from understanding the customer problem to identifying the right product to build to executing with your team to bring the product to market. Getting the job: Part three covers how you can land a PM job and reach the interview stage at the right company. We'll prep you for the three most common types of PM interviews— product sense, execution, and behavioral—with detailed frameworks and examples for each. Hear directly from product leaders at Airbnb, Amazon, Google, and more on: How to overcome challenging situations from a VP of Product at Amazon. How to build a great product roadmap from product leaders at LinkedIn and Airbnb. How Google, Airbnb, and other top companies evaluate PM candidates from leaders at those companies. How PMs can grow their career from a Director at Instagram and Twitter. Table of Contents1. PrinciplesTake OwnershipPrioritize and ExecuteStart with WhyFind the TruthBe Radically TransparentBe Honest with Yourself2. Product DevelopmentProduct Development LoopUnderstanding the Customer ProblemSelecting a Goal MetricMission, Vision, and StrategyBuilding a Product RoadmapDefining Product RequirementsGreat Project ManagementEffective CommunicationMaking Good Decisions3. Getting the JobPreparing for the TransitionMaking the TransitionFinding the Right CompanyAcing your PM InterviewsProduct Sense InterviewExecution InterviewBehavioral InterviewYour First 30 Days4. Product Leader Interviews

    Managers will learn to recognize their leadership style and understand how they, too, can become Hundred Percenters." Laura Christiansen, Vice President Human Resources, VTech Communications, Inc."Heavily-researched and loaded with tools and examples, this book shows you how to challenge your employees to achieve the kind of extraordinary results and innovations that every CEO dreams about. Every leader needs to read this book!"Ned Fitch, CEO, Kalahari Tea"Murphy finds that most workplaces are brimming with untapped talent. Only it's suppressed by goal-setting that discourages big ideas and leaders who focus on happiness rather than greatness.""Training Magazine"We've all heard the saying that a happy employee is a motivated employee. But what if that's not true?Leadership IQ CEO Mark Murphy says the "happy employee" philosophy doesn't work. A study of more than 500,000 leaders and employees shows that despite the billions of dollars organizations spend to satisfy and engage workers, 72% of employees admit they're still not giving their best effort at work. Rather, it's leaders who focus on making their people great--not happy--who inspire Hundred Percenter performance.If you talk to the employees behind today's great innovations, you're unlikely to hear, "I was inspired by a boss who coddles me." Instead you'd probably hear, "My boss challenges me and pushes me past my limits." Most workplaces are brimming with untapped talent-- only it's suppressed by leaders who fail to connect with and challenge employees to unleash their true potential.Here are just a few of the big ideas in "Hundred Percenters" The harder the goals you set, the better your employees will perform You should never use a Compliment Sandwich to deliver feedback Talented Terrors--people with great skills and a bad attitude--can destroy your company culture Before you can start motivating Hundred Percenters, you have to stop demotivating them You should never ask your employees if they're "satisfied"This groundbreaking book debunks management fads that don't apply to today's workplace and provides the facts, theories, and direction you need to become a 100% Leader. Apply Murphy's leadership lessons and you'll see innovation, productivity, and profits soar, while employee turnover rates plummet. "Hundred Percenters" will bring out the best in your workforce.

    You’ll explore how four different teams used Kanban to make paradigm-changing improvements in software development. These teams were struggling with overwork, unclear priorities, and lack of direction. As you discover what worked for them, you’ll understand how to make significant changes in real situations.The four case studies in this book explain how to:Improve the full value chain by using Enterprise KanbanBoost engagement, teamwork, and flow in change management and operationsSave a derailing project with KanbanHelp an office team outside IT keep up with growth using KanbanWhat seems easy in theory can become tangled in practice. Discover why “improving IT” can make you miss your biggest improvement opportunities, and why you should focus on fixing quality and front-end operations before IT. Discover how to keep long-term focus and improve across department borders while dealing with everyday challenges. Find out what happened when using Kanban to find better ways to do work in a well-established company, including running multi-team development without a project office.You’ll inspire your team and engage management to make it easier to develop better products.

    Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder's global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas.Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments.Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to:Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.

    They have a loud voice, a wealth of choice and their expectations are higher than ever. This book covers ten principles you can use to make real world improvements to your customers’ experiences, whatever your business does and whoever you are. For managers, leaders and those starting a new business, the book shows that making improvements customers will appreciate doesn’t need to be complicated or cost a fortune.

    They do this by doing things differently: hiring the right person instead of the best person; focusing on one priority while leaving room to explore new ideas; creating an environment where people are comfortable dealing with the uncomfortable; and maximizing profit by not making profit what matters most.The book takes you inside top companies and examines the teamwork experiments powering their results, including how:● Pixar’s teams use constant feedback and debate to transform initially flawed films into billion-dollar hits● A culture of radical “freedom and responsibility” helps Netflix execute on the next big thing● Whole Food’s super-autonomous teams embrace hard metrics and friendly competition to drive performance● Zappos fuels the weirdness and fun that sustains its successTimes change, and so must teams. Designing and managing high-performance teams requires upgrading outdated beliefs and behaviors, and spurring a level of intensity and collaboration that lets them face down any challenge.

    A key component of the facilitator-lead Five Dysfunctions of a Team Workshop, the Team Assessment delivers what the name implies "a team assessment" rather than an individual self-assessment. It provides participants with an opportunity to begin exploring the pitfalls that are side-tracking their team. Easy to use, the Assessment is ideal for team off-sites, retreats, or a series of team development meetings. It will help teams of all types increase their cohesiveness and productivity.

    When inexperienced entrepreneurs ask my advice about their idea for a tech startup, they often worry "What if Google decides to compete with us? They will crush us!" I respond that far more startups die of suicide than homicide. If you can avoid hurting yourself, then you are already better off than most of your competitors. Startups are a chance to build something entirely original with brilliant and ambitious people. But startups are also dangerous. Limited money means there is little room for mistakes. One bad decision can mean bankruptcy. The potential payoff attracts capital, which in turn attracts scam artists. The unscrupulous often lack the skills needed to succeed, but sometimes they are smart enough to trick investors. Even entrepreneurs who start with a strong moral compass can find that the threat of failure unmoors their ethics from their ambition. Emotions matter. We might hope that those in leadership positions possess strength and resilience, but vanity and fragile egos have sabotaged many of the businesses that I’ve worked with. Defeat is always a possibility, and not everyone finds healthy ways to deal with the stress. In this book I offer both advice and also warnings. I've seen certain self-destructive patterns play out again and again, so I wanted to document one of the most extreme cases that I've witnessed. In 2015 I worked for a startup that began with an ingenious idea: to use the software techniques known as Natural Language Processing to allow people to interact with databases by writing ordinary English sentences. This was a multi-billion dollar idea that could have transformed the way people gathered and used information. However, the venture had inexperienced leadership. They burned through their $1.3 million seed money. As their resources dwindled, their confidence transformed into doubt, which was aggravated by edicts from the Board Of Directors ordering sudden changes that effectively threw away weeks' worth of work. Every startup forces its participants into extreme positions, often regarding budget and deadlines. Often these situations are absurd to the point of parody. Therefore, there is considerable humor in this story. The collision of inexperience and desperation gives rise to moments that are simply silly. I tell this story in a day-to-day format, both to capture the early optimism, and then the later sense of panic. Here then, is a cautionary tale, a warning about tendencies that everyone joining a startup should be on guard against."