Pioneers are brilliant people. They are able to explore never before discovered concepts, the uncharted land. They show you wonder, but they fail a lot. Half the time the thing doesn’t work properly. You wouldn’t trust what they build. They create ‘crazy’ ideas. Their type of innovation is what we call core research. They make future success

example, it is common to see a platform DevOps team in charge of building the cloud native platform, while site reliability engineering (SRE) or first-level support teams respond to incidents (and spend the rest of their time working on automation to prevent them from happening in the first place).

Complete separation of duties: execs in charge of strategy, managers in charge of setting objectives, engineers free to execute their work as they see best.

Taking creativity too far: digital transformation is the balance between innovation and pragmatism. When faced with the pressure to evolve due to some new disruptive competitor, some companies go all in on innovation and get lost. They miss the point of balance: you need to be more creative, not all creative. For example, Google is one of the most

When experimentation becomes routine, the new is no longer to be feared. Innovation as a routine process is, after all, a core cloud native principle.

the single most important metric for executives to focus on is time-to-value, which can be instrumented most easily as committing to deploy latency for each team. Many companies can’t innovate because they can’t get out of their own way, and short time-to-value (target less than a day) releases pent-up innovation from your teams. Third, there is

system. Planning fallacy is another extremely common hazard; most companies enter into a transformation thinking it will be relatively quick and simple. They budget time and resources for only a few weeks or months, only to find that a proper transformation can require a year or more to successfully complete.

Risk reduction today is the ability to respond to sudden or unexpected changes in market conditions when you don’t have much notice, in time to meet or beat the competition. And you achieve this ability through strategy.

Agile organizations normally have wide responsibilities within cross-functional teams but narrow responsibilities for each team.