Pivotal Conversations

Designers play a critical role in software development. They impact not just what users see on the screen, but impact important decisions about product direction. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Nate Clinton, managing director at Designit, a unit of Wipro, and Tim McCoy, Senior Director of Design at Pivotal, talk about the evolution of design thinking in software development and share best practices for designing modern software.

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Validating your assumptions about app features is one of the core benefits of proper product thinking. This means testing out your design theories, but also testing out higher level, strategic questions. Pivotal's Alex Tran walks us through it all. He also goes over a few examples, mapping metrics to design, discover and framing (D&F), and discusses the idea of product vs. project.

In 2017, Rachel Stephens of Redmonk wrote a great piece about how technical debt is an incomplete analogy. But she agrees that it shouldn't be abandoned. In this episode, she and I expound on the analogy to its breaking points, including liquidity, derivatives, and the perpetual state of refinancing we're all in. See full show notes at: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/continuous-refinancing-of-your-tech-debt-with-rachel-stephens-of-redmonk Register for SpringOne Platform today and save an extra $200 with S1P200_DDREWITZ.

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The platform team at The Home Depot has many years of experience running Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Returning guest Tony McCully tells us how it's being used and managed now, plus some compliance automation and process tuning the team has been working on. We also discuss how the team is thinking about using kubernetes. Also, egg salad, carrots, and mustard.

At CF Summit 2019 in Philadelphia, I sat down with Jon Ravenscraft (@Jon_Ravenscraft) and Nick Kuhn (@tehkuhnz ) from Kroger to see what was interesting to them from the event and what was on their list to play around with once they got back home. What ensued was a survey of the many ways that Cloud Foundry is evolving. From Eirini, to Buildpacks, to ISM, to Knative.. they all come back to making developers productive. See the complete show notes and links to Jon and Nick's favorite talks from CF Summit at: Article URL: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/making-the-right-thing-easy-with-jon-ravenscraft-and-nick-kuhn-of-kroger

What's life without a little chaos? And why not a little chaos impacting your production systems? Sounds scary, but turns out intentionally introducing random errors into production systems helps identify vulnerabilities so you can do something about them before they result in major disruptions. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Gremlin's Tammy Butow, one of the leading practitioners of chaos engineering (as the practice is known), talks about the benefits of and shares best practices for introducing chaos to your production systems.

In this episode, Captain Bryon Kroger of the U.S. Air Force's Kessel Run dispells myths about the so-called "frozen middle," and finding resistance—and support—from all levels in an organization. He also shares some of the practices he's used to retain support for ongoing change, including growth boards and collecting feedback quickly.

This week I've got a discussion about DevOps I had with Nate and Paul. I've been curious about the changing nature of DevOps as SRE and platform operations comes into vogue. It seems like the idea of "full stack" DevOps is being dimension...and maybe DevOps itself? Maybe now it's just OpsOps. We also talk about enterprise architecture and governance in the age of decoupled, event-driven, microservices. And somewhere in there, we talk about how culture gets changed and who needs to do it.

Nobody likes to be uncomfortable, by definition. And experienced software developers and architects, like all of us, want all the answers. "But if you are really trying to achieve the agility that transformation promises, you have to let go of some of that," says Bob Cunningham, Senior Manager, Enterprise Application Architecture at TD Ameritrade. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, recorded on the floor of Cloud Foundry Summit 2019 in Philadelphia, Bob chats about his experience leading digital transformation efforts at the online brokerage, including the importance of being comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Microsoft Build brought a bevy of Windows news this week, plus, there's some more Windows support in Pivotal land and an overview of Pivotal Cloud Foundry's road-map. Our guest is Derrick Harris who's recently joined Pivotal and runs the CIO crib-notes news site Intersect. Additional topics: Coté might have a tape-worm. In Europe, pizzas are sandwiches. Images in RT's. Coffee and chicken AI/ML. "Will robots come for our jobs, Derrick?" GoGrid, Joyent. "Application first." Boring AI. Edge computing.

Enterprises across industries are modernizing legacy applications to improve performance and provide great customer experiences. But it doesn't how snappy your application is or how pretty the user interface if the data supporting the application can't keep up. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Redis Labs' Adi Foulger and Cassie Zimmerman talk about the challenges of modernizing your data architecture.

Five years into their journey with Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Liberty Mutual is not standing still. Talking with Jai Schniepp, Senior Product Owner of Secure DevOps Platforms at Liberty Mutual, Dormain learns how the team keeps iterating. Not resting on their laurels from their initial foray into pipeline generators, Jai's team have iterated to solve more of the developer experience in a secure way.

Dick's Sporting Goods has been on an accelerated journey to "own their own destiny" when it comes to digital. But this isn't just e-commerce: this transformation includes melting the barriers between brick-and-mortar and e-commerce teams, as well as literally bringing down the walls between groups working on digital at DSG.

There's a lot of "backing services" in Cloud Foundry: not only middleware like databases, but also operations services like auto-scaling. This week, Richard & Coté talk with Laurel Gray, the product manager for those services at Pivotal. We discuss the services themselves, the open service broker, how to product manage APIs and services, and product management in general. Also, we hop-scotch through the news: a new version of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Google's recently cloud announcements, and a new version of kubernetes.

We've touched on the mindset shift of treating your internal application platform as a product (or offering) for your developers. In this episode, Dormain talks to James Urquhart about defining the go-to-market strategy of that offering. Have you built the right service? What does my MVP look like? How do we educate, broadcast, and onboard developers? This conversation builds upon previous episodes on the topic of "platform as product." We refer to the episode with Paula Kennedy, as well as Dormain's post on "How to Get Developers to Start Using Your Application Platform." https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/for-platform-teams-the-developers-are-the-customer-with-pivotals-paula-kennedy https://content.pivotal.io/blog/how-to-get-developers-to-start-using-your-application-platform

Most enterprises start their cloud-native journeys with lots of enthusiasm and big plans. But reality often sets in when they try to scale transformations by modernizing hundreds, sometimes thousands of legacy apps. The biggest digital transformation roadblock? It's a lack of cloud-native skills, says HCL's Alan Flower. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Alan shares tips and strategies for overcoming the cloud-native skills gap.

Demonstrating the value of software, how it contributes to revenue, is no easy feat. Staffing can be difficult, especially with an eye to sustaining teams over the years. Jon Osborn returns as a guest to discuss these and other transformation hurdles, plus successes they've had at the Great American Insurance Group.

There are a number of changes to process and culture needed to be good at software development, and one of the most challenging for many enterprises is creating a team dedicated to the platform and treating it as a product. But that, says Pivotal's Paula Kennedy, is a major predictor of success. "The [Pivotal] customers that are the most successful are those that have their own dedicated team with its own dedicated product manager," says Kennedy. "Those are the ones that are able to prioritize, able to meet users needs, able to release features quickly." Listen on for this and other insights from Paula, a member of Pivotal's PCF Solutions team, on best practices for platform teams to successfully adopt platform-as-product.