Episode 52: Mik Kersten

About Dr. Mik Kersten

Dr. Mik Kersten

Dr. Mik Kersten is the chief technology officer at Planview, joining the company in 2022 through the acquisition of Tasktop, where he was CEO. Mik founded Tasktop and is the best-selling author of “Project To Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework®.” Mik’s experiences working with some of the largest digital transformations in the world has led him to identify the critical gap between business leaders and technologists, resulting in his creation of the Flow Framework® to connect strategy to delivery. He started his career as a Research Scientist at Xerox PARC where he built the first aspect-oriented development environment. He then pioneered the integration of development environments with Agile and DevOps tools while working on his Computer Science PhD at the University of British Columbia. Founding Tasktop out of that research, Mik has written over one million lines of open-source code that are still in use today and has brought seven successful open-source and commercial products to market.

About this episode

In this episode of Mik + One, we’re flipping the script!

Debbie Konrad, an early Value Stream Management advocate, interviews Mik. The two discuss a new report, the 2023 Project to Product State of the Industry Report, that analyzed anonymized data from 2022 of 3600+ software delivery teams representing over 38,000 business product owners and engineers combined with 326 targeted survey respondents in 34 of the world’s leading enterprises. It revealed that five years into the shift from project to product, following the publication of Mik's seminal book on the subject, only 8 percent of sample have operationalized the product model.

Debbie and Mik discuss how the report’s findings are timely and relevant, as technology leaders are under increasing pressure to match tech giants and unicorns on digital innovation and wrestle the competitive advantage from the hands of a few companies. In this episode, Mik shares how to shift the management approach in digital portfolios from a project to a product-based model.

Debbie and Mik also address the importance of combining systems data with survey data in order to provide additional insights into the adoption curve of value stream management.

Key discussions include:

  • The 2023 Project to Product State of the Industry Report
  • The seven dimensions of change required for a product operating model
  • Product Management Maturity
  • Insights from the 2021 State of Value Stream Management Report
  • The Journey from Product Experimentation to Operationalization
  • Survey Responses and System Data on Product Operating Model Transformations
  • Autonomy and Dependencies for High Performance Teams
  • The Benefits of Value Management for Software Development Teams
  • Implementing Build and Run Teams for Software at Scale
  • The Importance of Backlog Management and Prioritization in Product Management
  • Creating an Effective Product Management Function: Strategies for Success
  • Exploring the Benefits of Flow Metrics for Improved Efficiency and Time to Market

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Follow Mik on Twitter:

@mik_kersten #MikPlusOne

www.planview.com

Additional Resources:

To download the transcript for this episode, click here.

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