The Business Bottleneck

Table of contents

1. Introduction: Be Like a Tech Company
2. 1. The Business Bottleneck
   1. Business and Software Development Is Chaos
   2. The Small-Batch Cycle
3. 2. The Finance Bottleneck
   1. The Business Case Is Wrong from the Start
   2. Starting Ignorant Can Be an Asset
   3. Small-Batch Finance
   4. Business Cases Focused on Growth, Not Costs
   5. Finance’s Small-Batch Imperative
4. 3. The Strategy Bottleneck
   1. A Moment of Pedantry
   2. Getting Over Digital Transformation Fatigue
   3. Sensing Your Market
   4. Know Your Customer
      1. Case Study: “The Front Door of the Store Is in Your Pocket”—Home Depot
   5. Consider Cassandras
   6. Try New Things
   7. Validation with Small-Batch Strategy
      1. Case Study: Most Viable Strategy: Duke Energy Validates RFID Strategy14
5. 4. The Leadership Bottleneck
   1. Vision
   2. Enshrine Urgency: Always Run in the Yellow
   3. All the Feels: A Note on Positive Motivation
   4. Leading Failure
   5. Organization Structure, or, Plato Never Worked at an Enterprise
      1. A Simple but Overly Cute Fix
      2. The Best Ways to Spread the Improvement Virus
      3. Introducing New Roles into the Team
   6. Strategy from the Nerds
      1. Case Study: When Vans Are Cars
   7. Do You Still Need an IT Department?
      1. Product Managing IT
   8. Understanding Tech
      1. Managing Upward
      2. Find yourself a secret nerd
      3. Case in Point: Technical Debt
   9. Metrics: Managing Like a Tech Company
      1. Eye-Balling It
      2. Technical Metrics
      3. Business Value Metrics
      4. Culture Metrics
6. 5. Conclusion