2025 is all set to be an epic year.

As 2024 is coming to a close the question is - what can I be doing to make sure my organization and I are nice and early to the party. How can we be setting ourselves up to maximize the impact and growth that will be coming to us from this bright future.

As John Maxwell says, everything rises and falls on leadership. That's even more true in technology, where we regularly define and redefine the nature of our business.

How can we be Executive Craftsmen that build and lead great organizations.

Join us this episode as we dig into this.

(Powerful, Profitable Software Products, The Executive Guidbook - https://a.co/d/gyRwMWj )

There aren't a lot of metrics out there that actually work. At least toward building up a great software engineering practice.

There is one that does carry a bit of signal with regard to health, and that's TBD. Your maturity with TBD implies maturity with a number of the core practices involved in building software well. Further, it implies that you are actually pretty good at those things (as a team).

As long as you avoid the pitfall of "cowboy coding" - there aren't a lot of dangers in measuring and even holding yourself accountable to your TBD maturity.

Even if it turns out that your maturity is low - probing even a little at that will yield massive concrete, actionable improvement opportunities.

So join us this month as we dive into this unique and powerful idea.

Ask 5 people this question and you'll likely get 5 different definitions - "what is software architecture?"

It's a challenge because it originates from an very interesting metaphor; one that explains a lot, but that simultaneously opens a number of questions.

In this episode with guest Erik Erichsen, we dive into what software architecture is, how it provides value for an organization, and some thoughts about how our practical approach has to be deeply considered in the face of theory.

Our guest Erik has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry ranging from startups to the enterprise organizations in both the public and private sector. During this time, he's served in a variety of roles including software engineer, architect, technology leader, product manager, and Divisional CIO for a Fortune 500 organization.

His passion is leveraging technology to transform Mission-Led organizations and empowering individuals to have transformative impact. While he has been in various management roles for more than a decade, he stays closely connected with emerging technologies and trends.

Large swaths of our technology brethren have concerned themselves with "keeping the lights on". That is, we want to apply technology, but only in proven, predictable ways that don't rock the boat. Like the King's sycophantic advisor, we like our cushy life and we don't want to make waves.

Unforunately trying to ensure we safely and securely profit from our easy life is the best way to ensure we won't.

In Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" he shows that this pattern regularly repeats in business. Business is markedly less successful when it rests on its laurels and attempts to milk previous success indefinitely. So are businessmen.

Success requires invention, and invention today is done with software.

While many legacy businesses don't consider themselves "software shops" - successful businesses do.

This month we dive into the tricky topic of dealing with jerks.

Eric Williamson teaches us some tricks for dealing with difficult people. More importantly, of course, he sheds some light on how to not be difficult people ourselves.

I hope you enjoy listening in on this conversation as much as Eric and I did having it.

Just for some background, Eric is a professional development consultant, business coach and keynote speaker. He is the author of the book, How to Work with Jerks: Getting Stuff Done with People you Can’t Stand, and co-author of the best-selling book, When Work Works: Cutting Edge Solutions for the Contemporary Workplace. He has over two decades of professional development experience, speaking, and most importantly, real-life, hands on in-the trenches business experience in both the private and public sectors. He works with organizations to build more collaborative and harmonious workplace environments by building stronger customer and workplace relationships.

(Brené Brown book mentioned in the podcast: Dare To Lead)

While you might have seen this month’s topic - “Maximizing Innovation” - on corporate motivational posters, we assure you that we go deep in this month’s podcast to uncover exactly how we can win in this arena.

The phrase we like, “Building more cool, useful stuff” maybe says it more aptly. Whatever words you use though - a central part of software development is simply to figure out how we create the most value, the most usefulness for our customer.

So please join us as and listen along we dig into this important topic!

Improving in the art of software development can be intimidating. With this month’s episode we dive quickly into the basic algorithm that we’ve used repeatedly to realize powerful improvement on software teams!

Is this a feature? Or is it an implementation detail?

It’s easy to get the answer to this question wrong - and the wrong answer here can have profoundly negative consequences. We’ll look at three regularly mis-interpreted aspects of software development and talk about how to correctly think about them - ultimately, learning to leverage them better in order to enhance our ability to deliver software.

Whether it’s data, information security, or devops - join us as we dig into how to model these correctly and to put them to use well in our systems.