Category Archives: Podcasts

Beyond the Sea of No’s, with Jon Osborn

As always, with Jon, this is a great conversation:

Demonstrating the value of software, how it contributes to revenue, is no easy feat. Staffing can be difficult, especially with an eye to sustaining teams over the years. Jon Osborn returns as a guest to discuss these and other transformation hurdles, plus successes they’ve had at the Great American Insurance Group.

Check it out, and subscribe to the podcast for more stuff like this every week.

Software Defined Talk 172: The Mainframe Strangler

There’s a new kubernetes, Oracle lay-offs, Zoom.US, and the problem with mainframe complainers.

Just me and Matt Ray this week. Check out the new episode!

Product management in the enterprise

Inside this interview, there’s an excellent explanation of what product management means in an enterprise. By “enterprise,” I mean a company who’s product is not technology. That is, most every company and organization out there. To that end, there’s a great example of doing product management and design at a food services company: discovering the actual problem to solve to meet business needs, and solving it by experimenting with a small batch loop.

See also the original show notes.

What’s knative? Serverless, functional programming, and the like’

I finally got a good overview of what exactly knative is and how it fits into things. Now that I think of it, I’ve forgotten a lot of what it is. But, at the time, this seemed like a satisfying definition by interview.

Serverless! Functions! Knative! What’s it all mean? Nate Schutta explains it all to Coté in this episode, wrapping up with a good explanation of what Knative is and how it fits in with Pivotal Function Serviceand Spring Boot.

And, see the show notes.

Optimistic About Innovation, an interview with Duke Energy’s John Mitchell

To improve the way you do software, I recommend starting up a new organization. It’s not always the right tactic, but it probably is if you’re having problems changing the “culture” at your organization.

Duke Energy has had success with this approach over the years. In one of my recent Pivotal Conversations podcasts, I talked with John Mitchell, who’s been involved in their transformation over the years. They’d just opened a brand new (well, renovated from an old factory) office to host the existing teams (something like 4 or 5 if I recall) and the supporting teams.

Here’s a summary:

Duke Energy has been working on their software capabilities for some time now. They’ve recently reached a milestone by opening a brand new innovation center in Charlotte. Coté took a tour of it recently checking out the numerous product teams and their approach to exploring and building strategy, all the way from corporate strategy down to writing code. John also shares a couple of new examples of how lean product management and design in action. Also: gingham.

Pumping the digital transformation bunny at the US Air Force, an interview with Bryon Kroger

Few organizations have or rely on as much software the US Air Force. There’s plenty of it around and, thus, plenty to be improved. In recent years, one of the more spectacular digital transformation stories has come from the USAF’s work modernizing their Air Operations Control software. In this episode, USAF’s Bryon Kroger goes over how they’ve moved multi-year release cycles to just weeks in the Kessel Run projects. Much of the work is in the “fuzzy front” end of planning and procurement, but as Bryon says, an equally, hearty serving has to do with building up people’s skills, moral, and the overall culture.

One of my recent Pivotal Conversations episodes. There’s a play list collecting together other “customers” talking, rather than the usual of us Pivotal people just talking to ourselves.