1.9: Agile at Scale

07/26/23 • 34 min

As the Internet grew in the 2000s, it drove the creation of far more large and complicated software organizations than the industry had ever seen before. This posed hard new questions, leading to both a crisis of confidence -- "Agile is Dead!" -- as well as to some fresh green shoots in the form of DevOps.

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For full show transcripts, links to sources, and ways to contact me, please see the show site at https://www.prodfund.com.
Intro and outro music by Jesse Spillane.

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Support the show

For full show transcripts, links to sources, and ways to contact me, please see the show site at https://www.prodfund.com.
Intro and outro music by Jesse Spillane.

Previous Episode

1.8: Quantified Leap

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The 2010s were characterized by a huge shift toward rigorous experimentation and quantification in many aspects of software development. Big data and data science, A/B testing, data science, quantified OKRs -- it was the decade that we all needed to brush up on our statistics.
This episode, we cover the history behind this shift and the technologies that made it possible. Plus, we take a little detour into the contentious issue of how to make a proper cup of English tea.

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For full show transcripts, links to sources, and ways to contact me, please see the show site at https://www.prodfund.com.
Intro and outro music by Jesse Spillane.

Next Episode

1.10: Where We Work

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In the penultimate episode of season 1, we're finally addressing the silent partner in all our work: the place we do it.
We'll track how we got from the first large office buildings in early modern London, through the rigorously optimized work spaces of the early 20th century, on to the cubicle, the open-plan office, and finally, the the modern tech campus.
We'll also cover the history of modern work-from-home, which has a lot more to it than the recent pandemic.

Support the show

For full show transcripts, links to sources, and ways to contact me, please see the show site at https://www.prodfund.com.
Intro and outro music by Jesse Spillane.

Product Fundamentals - 1.9: Agile at Scale

Transcript

Hello friends, and welcome to the Product Fundamentals Podcast, Episode 9: Agile at Scale.

Last time, we discussed the evolution of testing and quantification in software development, which I described as a consequence of the scale of the torrent of data generated by the consumer Internet.

But the growth of the Internet drove scale in other ways. The sheer size of software organizations took off, as incumbents across industries spun up software organizations to keep up with the cha