Category: Organisational Design
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Leading data and AI teams
I gave my 2026 YOW! Tech Leaders Summit talk the alternative title lossy compression, as it squeezes 28 years in tech into 25 minutes. Many individual slides are are pointers to multiple blog posts or book chapters in their own right! This post includes references, by section from the source slides. Applications over three decades…
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Hard problems in highly agentic coding
Highly agentic coding with LLMs has great promise: automatically generating software to solve a wide range of problems. But it comes with its own hard problems to solve. With my experience in product design search and optimisation, software development, robotics and manufacturing, it’s an area I’m very interested in understanding better. What I share here…
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Why are teams twelve times faster?
In my writing about team effectiveness something like the following quote might appear: How bad is backlog coupling? At an Australian telecommunications company, my colleagues did a study of hundreds of pieces of work or tasks passing through a delivery centre. Some tasks could be completed by a single team without dependency, specifically without scheduling…
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The life-changing magic of tidying your data
After tackling data waste for some years now, I thought it would be fun to revisit the Marie Kondo approach to tidying up work in large organisations (from 10 years ago), and apply it to data too… Surprise! Managing work data in a large organisation is a lot like keeping your belongings in check at…
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Data and AI mini blogs
A brief reflection on Thoughtworks Australia Data & AI mini-blogs. From May 2021, we set ourselves a target to publish a short blog on a different AI, ML or data topic every week. Here’s the pitch from the landing page: Bite-sized content delivering valuable insights from Thoughtworkers who wrestle varied client problems week in and…
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GenAI in Data Platforms
I was part of a panel on the Impact of GenAI on Modern Data Platforms recently, hosted by the Data Engineering Melbourne meetup. It was great to chat with MC Ryan Collingwood and fellow panellists Rahul Trikha, Peter Barnes and Tony Nicol in front of a large and curious crowd. Like the crowd, I felt…
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Team Topologies x EMLT
To provide more resources around the excellent conversation we had with Matthew Skelton on the Stream of Teams podcast in late 2024, we collaborated on an article summarising our chat, which was based on the final chapter of Effective Machine Learning Teams (EMLT). The article titled Team Topologies in action: Effective structures for Machine Learning…
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Waste not Programmable
Programmable 2025 Melbourne featured a fantastic program, heavy on practical data & AI in an apt reflection of the times. It was also a great chance to catch up with many in the Melbourne tech community. I presented my 7 Wastes of Data Production talk. In the spirit of continuous improvement, I made some minor…
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AI conversations for every role
We always envisaged Effective Machine Learning Teams (EMLT) speaking to multiple roles. Recently we’ve spoken to 4 distinct audiences about ML development, and you can listen in too. Whether you identify with: there’s a podcast* for you with popular presenters – see more below. Product We joined a Product Tank Melbourne event, along with Ana…
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Stream of Teams
It was great to chat with Matthew Skelton about the intersection of Team Topologies and AI/ML product delivery – watch the recording. This was the subject of the final chapter of Effective Machine Learning Teams, in which we used the Team Topologies model to explore effectiveness at the level of “between teams”. We covered a…