Bio

Nick is a product-focused technical leader. He has helped teams in a variety of organisations to achieve continuous delivery and high alignment, including the UK government, Salesforce, and 7digital. He is the co-author of Designing Autonomous Teams and Services (O’Reilly) and Patterns, Principles and Practices of Domain-Driven Design (Wrox), and blogs from ntcoding.co.uk.

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Devils, Wizards and Decision Making Heuristics: Magic 8 Balls to the Rescue (Workshop)

Coffee or tea? One sugar or two? Should we use Event Sourcing or does CRUD seem good to you?

Our brains are designed for making quick decisions, but quick does not always mean good… We make thousands of decisions each day but never stop to wonder: how did we come to this conclusion? Were there more choices than we realised? Did we focus on the right thing? Did we pick the right option? Are there other methods we can use to reach a better outcome?
If we improved our decision making by just 1%, overall we would achieve a massive improvement in every area of our lives, from happiness with our family to success at work. Everybody should learn decision making heuristics, yet nobody does. Let's fix that.

We're going to take a close look at a variety of key decision-making heuristics including "problem restatement", "devil's advocate", and "the wizard". Through provocative exercises, we're going to uncover the heuristics we currently use and we're going to teach ourselves when to apply certain decision making heuristics to improve our chances of getting the results we want.

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Technology Strategy: What is it and why do we need it? (Workshop)

What is a technology strategy? Is it just another form of ivory tower architecture that quickly becomes out-of-date and nobody cares about? Or is technology strategy a vision that helps teams in large organisations to stay aligned, making decisions in the best interest of the organisation as a whole instead of becoming locally-optimising silos? And is there any point in strategy now we’re all agile and everything is constantly changing?

Proponents argue that, when implemented correctly, a technology strategy improves team autonomy and agility even in constantly-changing, digital environments. They argue that technology strategy clarifies key business capabilities. They argue that technology strategy identifies platform deficiencies that need to be addressed in order for teams to build and manage services at greater speed and with reduced costs. They also argue there are lots of other benefits to technology strategy, but should we believe them?

In this talk we’re going to explore technology strategy. We’re going to look at some real examples of tech strategy and understand exactly what it is. After this talk, you’ll know whether technology strategy is something you should be paying more attention to, or whether it’s something you can happily ignore and focus on shipping stuff instead.