Putting on the high hat and stepping up on the stage — Transitioning from maker to multiplier is hard, especially if you are also taking on management responsibilities. About a year and a half ago I transitioned from agile coach to my first management position. My motivation at the time was to become a better coach by understanding the challenges of management…

or how to build a great product while on a boat — If something is hard — you should do it often The challenge When I started at Storytel our team consisted of six developers. My first task was to grow the team, and after an intense period of recruitment, we were 15. It was clear that we could not continue working as a…

Agile software development is by now a label getting pasted onto anything and everything. It is hard to know what it actually means and what practices and tools an organization calling themselves Agile actually apply. Still, I often get the question of whether we do Agile at Storytel. While working…

One of the most powerful tools for leadership is self-leadership. Without it, leading a creative space is almost impossible. This post is a collection of valuable lessons on how to lead yourself. — I seldom reread books. One exception is the wonderful “The Art of Possibility” by Benjamin and Rosamund Zander. In the book, the authors present several lessons that are powerful tools for self-leadership. …

Øredev is a big, general software dev conference that takes place in Malmö, Sweden, in November every year for the past 15 years. In this post, I want to share some of my takeaways, recommend some brilliant sessions and tell you about my experiment with something completely new. — Before we dig into it — full disclaimer. I have been to every Øredev since 2007. That makes 2019 my 12th year. Considering that we celebrated 15 years, I have seen the conference grow, change and improve. I have also been on the program committee on and off for many…

People don’t care which company they work for, they care which team they work in. Company visions, the acting of a CEO, company culture and brand are all important, but they are always trumped by the acting of your nearest manager and colleagues. Team culture trumps company culture. Team goals and visions trump company goals and visions. The trick is to align these. — While I worked with a department in a large financial organization to do an Agile transformation we saw teams ignoring change that happened on a department level. Or rather — they were not much affected. There was the launch of a new, glossy vision, a call to action of working…

When working with a bigger organisational change — such as an Agile Transformation — I have observed that the biggest resistance comes from middle managers. In recent work I did with a department we spent a lot of efforts working with these managers, and learnt the hard way why many of our assumptions were wrong. — Talking change with upper management is easy. Most of them see the benefit of doing the change. It is cheap for them to support the change, because often they don’t have to do anything differently. They are attracted by the promises of greater speed of delivery, retention of people and…

Throughout my career I have always been a believer in making the shift to an agile mindset iteratively, in small batches. That means, start with a team, follow the pull and support the people that really want a change. The idea is to slowly reach a tipping point where the…

I think it is important to take a moment checking up on yourself, figuring out how you are doing according to your own values. I recently spent some time introspecting to learn more about my own behaviours and how to be better at what I do. I want to share…