Product Managers, Ravi Jay, Culture Transformation Challenges

What do Product Managers joining a transforming organisation see?

Value, Value, Value! Demonstrate incremental value”. Clarion call is loud and clear.

One of the first things most transforming organisations develop are new agile processes that help them focus on the most valuable things to do. 

More often than not, it will be called a variant of ‘Digital Recommendation Board’. Folks from functional silos collaborate to consider value, estimate costs, weigh risks etc to ‘recommend’ portfolio epics that await decision by a Senior Executive / Board member.

Feel / sound familiar? It is possibly because the process has enough familiarity to current ways of working (/culture) for Portfolio managers (now rebadged as Product Managers in new Org) allowing actual control to be held centrally (/hierarchically.. as before) while introducing elements that appear to be devolved decision making and inclusivity.

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Generation Diversity in Enterprise Agile. Part 2

Welcome to part 2 of my Enterprise Agility blog series. In Enterprise Agility part 1, we looked at pace of agile adoption. In part 2, let’s discuss the impact of agile change programmes on people from different age generations.

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Enterprise Agile at Pace or Steady as She Goes? Part 1

Throughout my career I’ve seen a lot of change but I like to think I’ve thrived on it. Agile is the latest change effecting and exciting me. Still a novice, my understanding has developed to a point where I am starting to understand some of the nuances around adoption of agile at scale. In my first attempt at blogging I will share some of my reflections on agile to date. This is the first of a three part series.

Enterprise Agile at Pace, Simon Chandler,
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KAI, Leading indicators of agility, Key Adoption Indicators, Key Competency Indicators, Key Transformation Indicators, KAI, KCI, KTI. Business Metrics

Leading indicators of agility: Part 1

In my journey seeking to understand how we tangibly communicate agile transformation momentum, I’ve come to the conclusion that agile practitioners should break the cycle of relying on ‘Metrics’, that are often lagging indicators of success, to communicate progress towards the target transformation state. But what do you replace it with?

Let’s discuss through this 3 part blog series. This is part 1.

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How does Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics apply to everything?

How does Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics apply to everything?

Before we begin, let’s share our understanding about Syntactics, Semantics and Pragmatics with a simple refresher; broadly speaking, there are 3 kinds of ellipsis:
1) Syntax: Programming languages have constructs with which you write software to get machine to do something exactly how you want it. When we grew up, our parents told us how to ‘sit’ or ‘sleep’ or ‘stand’ – and so we did. And, we learned.
2) Semantics: Learning how to write software comes with the realization that there is more than way to tell the machine to do something exactly how you want it. Granted the programming constructs (and syntax) exist, but the way we craft commands differ from person to person. As we grew up, we learned that there is more than 1 way to sit, stand and sleep and more than once place to do it. And, we evolved our application of learning.
3) Pragmatics: As we started learning more than 1 programming language, we started to think about context and how to get what we want in a good way rather than focus on syntax itself. As we grew up, we started to think why we sit or sleep and realized that ‘rest/relaxation’ is what we want and there are many ways to get ‘rest’ and it depends on where we are and who we are with. And, we started thinking less about what we say/do and more about outcomes we want to drive in that context.
How important is context to understand meaning
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What will happen when Conversational UI disrupts as expected?

What will happen when Conversational UI disrupts as expected?

Before we begin, let’s share our understanding about Conversational UI with a simple refresher; (very) broadly speaking, there are 2 types:
– Voice agents: We interact with machines by speaking to them in our natural language (eg: English). Voice driven interfaces like Siri, Cortana and Echo are examples.
– Chat bots: You could engage in a chat conversations in Natural language (English) without being limited (too much) by syntactical constructs. Messaging platforms like SlackBot, Facebook Messenger etc are examples.

Conversational UI design - header
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De-construction of myKerala culture

De-construction of myKerala culture

My name is Ravi Jay and I grew up at beautiful Kerala, India. Unsurprisingly, like many, I’m living away from home working in the IT industry. Uniquely, I work with Digital across industries. I find myself having several conversation about Kerala with curious folks. One such conversation during a May bank holiday in London prompted me to dust off my blog and share my take on how I’d caricature recent news headings in Kerala.Beautfiul-Kerala-Gods-Own-Country
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Why the modern #CMO should #ThinkLookActDigital

Why the modern #CMO should #ThinkLookActDigital

According to a research published by Accenture Interactive in July 2014, while only 21% of CMOs believe their company will be known as a digital business in five years, they predict that digital budgets will account for more than 75% of the marketing budget. As testament to its tech and consulting prowess, Accenture was mentioned in the top 10 most admired Tech companies in 2013; I’m waiting to see Accenture listed in Top 10 most admired Digital companies.

Accenture Interactive Research - CMO 2014

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Digital marketing - What's in it for me - Social media marketing

Social collaboration in a corporate context

What is collaboration and is it important in a corporate context?
Is collaboration relevant in a decision making context?
Does social collaboration foster creativity?
Does it create silos?

These are some of the questions that bubble up when the subject of social collaboration in a workplace is brought up with friends or colleagues. Conversations about collaboration normally tend to branch out beyond the confines of ‘social’ so I’ll structure it based on three pillars: Tools, Process and Data. But first, let us look at the history of social collaboration to contextualise. Continue reading “Social collaboration in a corporate context” »