Forward
Background and history on Boss Logic, Customer Obsessed Engineering, and the Customer Obsessed Delivery Playbook.
Origins
Boss Logic dates back to the mid-90’s. At that time, we were a small startup building digital document management solutions on the NeXT Computer platform in Objective C and Sybase. I loved the team and that amazing time in Silicon Valley working with Steve Jobs, and have kept the name ever since.
In the intervening decades, I’ve always been an architect and team lead. From the early 2000’s, I started codifying my approach to software development and team leadership. At the time, things like Rational Rose and Scrum were gaining popularity, and my thinking leaned more toward methodology. This led to an early iteration of today’s playbook that I named “Rational Scrum.” I published my first formal methodology guide in 2011.
Since then, my approach has evolved greatly. My time at Lightbend and Accenture pushed me to scale my approach with hundreds of clients. Many you’d recognize: Verizon, T-Mobile, USAA, Capital One, Ernst & Young, BP, Dream11, Starbucks and many more. It was during this time that I began to realize the challenges so many teams run into, and where things fall apart: Reliably, repeatedly, delivering what the customer wants and delighting the customer. I started to shift away from methodology and focus on value. This is when value stream engineering came front-and-center in my approach to software delivery.
Which brings us to today: Customer Obsessed Engineering and the Customer Obsessed Delivery Playbook. My playbook is not a methodology; it’s an approach to the design and delivery of software. You can use it with whatever methodology you like, whether iterative or traditional. It’s a technique for making sure customer value is identified, protected, and realized throughout delivery. No customer misunderstandings or disappointments. As pointed out in the playbook introduction, it’s been vetted and proven with hundreds of clients. It’s a mature approach to design and delivery that will raise your, your team’s and your organization’s maturity dramatically. Most importantly, it will enable you to delight your customers.
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