The Value Flywheel Effect: Power the Future and Accelerate Your Organization to the Modern Cloud

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There’s a whole bunch of advantages. One is a problem-prevention culture, which is an exciting concept. Do companies understand that they need a problem-prevention culture in their engineering and product areas? It doesn’t exist in many organizations; It hasn’t cut through. They’re still on the feature, factory, and server mindset. Deliver, deliver deliver. Feature, feature feature. Don't just lift and shift your datacenter to the cloud. Learn how to truly harness the power of technology by bringing alignment to the business and IT. Required reading for every level of an organization adopting modern cloud, and grounded in unparalleled lived experience of transformation. I’m sure I’ll be referencing this for years Ben Ellerby There are many flavors of business or product roles, but they should all represent customer value. For the third phase of the Value Flywheel Effect, the product leader, who represents the customer, is the driver. They ask the question: How can we optimize for maximum customer value? It’s important to recognize the depth of the product discipline and the many important techniques available. In The Value Flywheel Effect, we’ll focus on speed—deciding what to build is a whole other set of books! The Value Flywheel Effect always intends to move and absorb challenges, energized through pragmatic decision-making. It’s crucial to maintain momentum—to never slow down or stop. Note that the Value Flywheel Effect is neither a hybrid strategy nor operational efficiency. It’s about creating a true bias for action, aligned with the pragmatic and proven ways of working that we’ve seen work in our own experiences.

The Value Flywheel Effect - IT Revolution

The Chicago Bulls, a basketball team in the National Basketball Association league in the United States of America, is an example of an organization that experienced both the “Flywheel Effect” and the “Doom Loop.” While most people think of Michael Jordan’s breakout season in 1991 as the “event” that led to the team winning six championships in eight years (1991 to 1998), it was actually the many decisions made by General Manager Jerry Krause between 1985 and 1991 that accumulated to build a team around Michael Jordan and resulted in the “overnight” success of 1991. PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Value_Flywheel_Effect_-_David_Anderson.pdf, The_Value_Flywheel_Effect_-_David_Anderson.epub There’s also another dimension to this. I’ve experienced squads that work with well-architected and commit to work through all the processes. And I have worked with teams that don’t engage. When you compare the two, they’re very different. In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University. And it is interesting for an engineer or developer to hear that their purpose is not to write code! Don’t come to work to write code. Come to work to achieve clarity of purpose for the team and the company. You may do that by writing code. But writing code is not your job. Writing code is what your company or team does. It’s quite a subtle thing. But we’ve met developers in the past who feel happy and productive when they are writing code. But that’s not why they should be here. The goal for an engineer, leader or manager is to know what they are working on. And how it aligns with the value being delivered for the company. How does it align with the company mission? And how does it deliver an impact? Just answering those questions is a worthwhile endeavour for any individual or team. And to understand if what you’re doing has an impact or not.Another advantage of scale comes from psychology.The psychologists use the term social proof.We are all influenced — subconsciously and to some extent consciously — by what we see others do and approve.Therefore, if everybody’s buying something, we think it’s better.We don’t like to be the one guy who’s out of step.

the Value Flywheel - IT Revolution Using Wardley Mapping with the Value Flywheel - IT Revolution

With well-architected and engineering excellence, you can build things that run and increase in value. And there’s less work over the long term while your teams move on to what the business needs. I don’t think a lot of orgs think in that way. By the time they do get thinking that way, they’re already experiencing a lot of problems. The Value Flywheel Effect is the third iteration of the concept of the organizational flywheel, combining elements from Jeff Bezos’s Virtuous Cycle and Jim Collins’s flywheel and applying much of our own technical leadership lessons learned.The social proof phenomenonwhich comes right out of psychology gives huge advantages to scale — for example, with very wide distribution, which of course is hard to get. One advantage of Coca-Cola is that it’s available almost everywhere in the world. Network Effects (Demand-side Economies of Scale) One of the biggest misunderstandings in the world of software is the value of code. But code is a liability, as we’ll say repeatedly in this book. The more code we write, the more complexity and risk we generate for ourselves. In the modern cloud, it’s important to offload as many capabilities to the provider as possible. Less code allows teams to move faster. Taking advantage of serverless is the clearest next best action for many modern organizations.

The Value Flywheel Effect - The Serverless Edge Introduction to The Value Flywheel Effect - The Serverless Edge

One thing most organisations don’t have a problem with is enthusiasm for what they’ve been doing, what they could be doing and what is the right thing to be doing. It also acts as a form of verification. We’ve decided on the priorities, and these are the things that we’re talking about. But what’s the best way to go about it? The best way is by having a conversation to look at the landscape and evaluate our position. Are we being realistic? Good conversation and rationale form the basis of this phase. The flywheel effect is a model used by businesses to ensure an incremental change in growth and performance in their operations, finances, and other functions by leveraging the results of the efforts put in previous cycles. This enables a business to build momentum in every cycle and achieve better results. However, this cycle becomes a virtuous cycle only if the result of a cycle becomes a positive one and if it doesn’t then it can lead to a vicious cycle. We love saying, ‘Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.’ So how do we set ourselves up for that? Initially, we like to look at our process by asking, ‘How are we going to test that this is successful in production?’ And how do we limit errors? What do we know, and what do we not know? Also, what do we need to do upfront? Leaders must go slow and put those things in place to enable teams to operate more effectively. We discuss baking problem prevention in the value flywheel’s long-term value section. You either pay upfront, do discovery, and put rigor into pathways to production. Why is it a flywheel and not a linear thing? It’s because you keep going around. So you don’t spend one year going around, and then you’re done. You continually go around. Because when you go around it once, the circumstances will change. The value flywheel effect is intentional because the flywheel builds momentum as things go faster.

Power the Futureand Accelerate Your Organization to the Modern Cloud with ‘The Value Flywheel Effect’ It’s not what your boss says! Your boss should explain what the clarity purpose is, but they may not. So don’t blindly follow what your boss says. Mark McCann: Then finally, the observations. We use these observations really to drive, “Well, what are we actually going to do? What is this map telling us? What actions is it compelling us to start thinking about?” The observations we have here around, that increased the attendee-speaker interaction. The virtual platform has created a new value proposition. A speaker to attend the interaction is now easier, so we probably should do something about that and start capitalizing on that. The well architected practice helps problem prevention. Failure isn’t an option on a virtual conference. You need this to be up and resilient and highly available. So the platform needs to be very robust and you don’t want to custom build that for a few extra features. You want to basically leverage and do your homework, but leverage a class capability that already exists out there that has those well architected characteristics that you need to deliver a compelling virtual event. A conference for enterprise leaders transforming their organizations, implementing techniques such as DevOps, Team Topologies, Learning Cultures, and Platform Engineering. Well-architected is a vehicle for continuous improvement. It’s evaluating where we’re at and what we could do better. Self-serve and learn