Introduction
Welcome. This post provides the backstory, status and plans for the Online Product Engineering Dojo.
DevOps Dojos
DevOps Dojos became popular since Target, an important U.S.-based retail company, started to introduce such a practice back in 2014 in support of its DevOps transformation. Since then, multiple conference talks, white papers and books have been published about DevOps Dojos.
DXC have been running DevOps Dojos for own employees and customers for some time, however we quickly came to a point where our physical DevOps Dojos were not enough to cover all the needs. Everyone was loving the experience, and to this day the on-site experience still leads to great results. But we had a scalability issue: we could not accommodate everyone we needed to address so we developed an interactive browser based DevOps Dojo for our staff.
Following the success of that effort we released an open source version of our DevOps Dojo - the Online DevOps Dojo.
In parallel we continued to apply the Dojo model to other problem domains.
Product Engineering Dojo
DXC’s customer-centric approach is facilitated by the judicious application of product engineering, underpinned by Agile and DevOps principles.
As a result DXC invests heavily in helping customer-facing teams adopt new approaches like Product Engineering to increase their agility, collaboration and responsiveness to customer needs.
Product engineering embraces concepts of design thinking, which aims to create better products and services by understanding how users interact with them and the conditions under which they are to operate. It emphasizes bidirectional communication, feedback loops, learning from mistakes and experiential approaches.
DXC wanted to provide training to help our people make the cultural shift from a project mindset to a product mindset, to do so we created an interactive browser based Product Engineering Dojo. The objective being to help ensure the software applications and integrations we develop, as well as the managed services we provide, are better suited to the needs of the business and the demands of the market.
Open Sourcing the Online Product Engineering Dojo
We are now open sourcing a version of Product Engineering Dojo which we use internally to:
- Train people at scale on Product Engineering.
- Help people prepare for a face-to-face or virtual Product Engineering Dojo or Design Thinking Workshop by learning techniques in advance.
- Provide a product engineering curriculum with interactive modules.
- Provide a browser based way to allow students get knowledge when they need it.
- Share what “good looks like” when answering enquiries in relation to Product Engineering or Design Thinking patterns
- Following on from the success of the Online DevOps Dojo - continue to leverage the story and the characters by extending the story and thus create more learning experiences.
We are making the Online Product Engineering Dojo available to benefit the product engineering community. We hope the modules will be useful. Our hope is that the community will use these to help assemble and create more content in support of the adoption of Product Engineering.
Universal Imports - A Story
Our challenge as coaches was to make the experience engaging. There is nothing better than a good story to engage people, so we created one to support the training.
The modules tell the story of a fictitious group of companies, the “Universal Imports Group” and its employees on their Product Engineering journey.
Let us introduce you to some of the team members:
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Charlie is the CEO of the Universal Imports Group and a technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He views the discipline of Product Engineering as being essential to tilting the scales in favour of future successes rather than in favour of future failures. |
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Brenda from the Business, is keen to understand how Product Engineering principles can be applied to help ensure the right product are developed for the intended users in the most efficient manner possible |
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Miyagi Product Engineering Coach and Mentor hired by Charlie to increase the use of Product Engineering within the United Imports Group |
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Adriana is an Architect working on the R237 control software for Redrum, InGen’s revolutionary rocket designed for suborbital flights. Adriana has an interest in all phases of the Product Engineering life cycle but has a particular interest in architecture for testability |
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Pennyworth a Project Manager from the Daily Mentioner national newspaper is a servant leader, he facilitates the work of the teams on the projects he manages. |
In the modules you get to learn about these and other characters. You will get to interact with them, and understand how each one plays a role in the adoption of Product Engineering in the Universal Imports Group.
We hope that people see themselves in one or more of these characters, whether they’re on the team working with the customer to develop ideas, they’re architecting and designing the solution, or part of delivery and support teams.
Learning modules
At launch, we have released 5 modules:
Open Source License
The Online Product Engineering Dojo learning modules are released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.
What’s next?
Shall we play a game?
First, we would like to welcome everyone trying out the Online Product Engineering Dojo. We sincerely hope it will help in supporting the adoption Product Engineering in your organization.
Second, we hope to release new modules this is dependent on the reception of the initial launch.
Beyond the initial launch, we are eager to build a community around the Online Product Engineering Dojo — a community of module maintainers, translators, story tellers and even creators of new learning modules.
Use the dojo!