ZeroBlockers
Helping teams remove the blockers that hurt the effectiveness and efficiency of software development.
Latest Posts
The Hidden Barrier to Team Empowerment: The CapEx-OpEx Divide
In the push to empower cross-functional teams, one of the biggest challenges isn't technical, cultural, or even organisational—it's financial. Specifically, the division between capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx). Understanding CapEx and OpEx and their implications is essential to navigating this challenge and ensuring that teams can truly function autonomously.
The Role of an Enabling Team in the ZeroBlockers Framework
One of the biggest challenges when shifting from a project-based model to a product-based model, is that the different functional experts can become isolated from each other. Instead of working, and often sitting, together, functional experts are scattered across multiple teams. Left unresolved it can lead to a drop in functional knowledge, performance and ultimately product success. Enabling teams can plug this gap.
The Evolving Role of the Functional Manager with Empowered Teams
Gone are the days when teams needed constant oversight and direction. Instead, modern organisations are embracing autonomous, cross-functional teams that own their decisions and outcomes. Instead of being task allocators and process enforcers, functional managers need to become strategic enablers, focusing on long-term growth, professional development, and organisational effectiveness.
Archive
The Hidden Barrier to Team Empowerment: The CapEx-OpEx Divide
In the push to empower cross-functional teams, one of the biggest challenges isn't technical, cultural, or even organisational—it's financial. Specifically, the division between capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx). Understanding CapEx and OpEx and their implications is essential to navigating this challenge and ensuring that teams can truly function autonomously.
The Role of an Enabling Team in the ZeroBlockers Framework
One of the biggest challenges when shifting from a project-based model to a product-based model, is that the different functional experts can become isolated from each other. Instead of working, and often sitting, together, functional experts are scattered across multiple teams. Left unresolved it can lead to a drop in functional knowledge, performance and ultimately product success. Enabling teams can plug this gap.
The Evolving Role of the Functional Manager with Empowered Teams
Gone are the days when teams needed constant oversight and direction. Instead, modern organisations are embracing autonomous, cross-functional teams that own their decisions and outcomes. Instead of being task allocators and process enforcers, functional managers need to become strategic enablers, focusing on long-term growth, professional development, and organisational effectiveness.
The Role of the Product Team in ZeroBlockers
The term "Product Team" is often misunderstood in the software industry. Many mistakenly use it to describe the teams building the product. However, a product is typically too large for a single team to build, requiring multiple Stream Teams to focus on different value streams. The true role of the Product Team is not to build but to empower and align these Stream Teams, ensuring they work effectively toward a cohesive product vision.
The Risks of Empowering Teams - and How to Mitigate Them
Empowering teams can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, giving people the freedom to make decisions fosters innovation, motivation, and agility which improves the chances of product success. On the other hand, too much autonomy without the right guardrails can trigger costly inefficiencies, strategic misalignments, reputational slip-ups, and even ethical or legal pitfalls.
Why Products Fail
Product failure isn't just about poor execution or bad timing. Like nations, products often fail because of how power and incentives are distributed within organisations. Drawing lessons from "Why Nations Fail" by Acemoglu and Robinson, we can understand how institutional structures determine product success or failure.
Platforms: Finding the Balance Between Enablement and Control
Developer platforms promise to accelerate software delivery, improve consistency, and reduce cognitive load. By providing standardised tools, workflows, and infrastructure, they aim to free teams from reinventing the wheel, allowing them to focus on solving business problems. But if platforms try to take on too much they can end up slowing down teams and stifling innovation instead.
Problems with the Center of Excellence Model
The Center of Excellence (CoE) model is where a company creates a centralised function to provide best practices, tools, and expertise to the rest of the organisation. This approach is typically used for functions that have very specialised skill sets, such as research, design, data science, or cybersecurity. Despite its good intentions, the CoE model has consistently led to inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and slower decision-making.
Agile Was Supposed To Save Us
In 1996 the Standish Group released the Chaos Report which showed that 40% of IT projects failed and a further 33% were challenged (over-time and over-budget). Businesses found themselves sinking enormous sums into initiatives that ultimately resulted in obsolete or unusable software. A new way of working was needed.
Why We Work the Way We Work: The Industrial Legacy of Modern Work
The way we work today is not an accident of history, but rather a carefully designed system born in the factories of the 20th century. To understand our modern work practices—from organisational hierarchies to performance metrics—we must look back to the revolutionary ideas of Frederick Taylor and the profound impact of industrial manufacturing on workplace organisation.
A Product is not the Sum of its Parts
When Henry Ford revolutionised manufacturing with the assembly line, he didn't just create a new way to build cars, he proved that there was a better way to structure and manage companies in the mass manufacturing era. But a century later, the world has shifted from hardware to software, and with it the rules have changed. Software companies are a different beast, and they need a new blueprint for success.