How It Works

You can join Open Mastery as an individual or as part of our company network.  To join as an individual, simply sign up, and we’ll invite you to Slack, show you how to measure your pain, and you can participate in all of our community activities.

As a company, you’ll kick off an Open Mastery Circle within your company to take responsibility for the local improvement effort.  The Mastery Circle is “open” to anyone who cares to join, and becomes the central forum for discussing problems and deciding on strategies for improvement.

Initially, the Open Mastery Circle starts as a reading group for Idea Flow: How to Measure the Pain in Software Development, so everyone understands the techniques for measuring development pain.

Next, we’ll ramp up your team on the Idea Flow Mapping tools and data-collection techniques, so you can gather data on your team’s biggest causes of pain.   Rather than relying on gut-feel to make improvement decisions, you’ll have data that points you to the highest leverage improvement opportunities.

During the ramp up period, we’ll meet with your team once per week, answer any questions you have, and help your team work through the initial learning curve.  At the end of the ramp up period, you’ll have one month of detailed data on your team’s biggest causes of pain.

After you identify your top three pains, we’ll schedule an online community problem-solving discussion with a virtual meeting to dig into the details of your specific problems.

To prepare for the session, describe the patterns you see in the data, and share your discoveries in a blog.   We’ll ask you lots of questions, help you identify the causes of problems, and suggest strategies for reducing the pain.

After being drilled with questions by a group of super smart engineers, you’ll walk away from the discussion with the most important ingredient to a successful improvement effort: a better understanding of your problems.

Awesome is a journey, not a destination.   We’re a community of individuals and companies committed to sustainably kicking ass, which means always learning, always improving, and leveraging the ideas on the bleeding edge.

As we learn about the causes of pain inside our companies, we’ll be building out developer insight tooling for things like Idea Flow data collection, profiling tools, monitoring tools, and supply-chain optimization.  Idea Flow lets us map the entire suite of risk management tools from the Lean Manufacturing world to software development.  The sky is the limit.  We’ll be exploring this new frontier together, and building the tools we need, as we need them.

We’ve got a long ways to go, and a lot to do, but we’ve got a strong community of passionate individuals pitching in to make this happen.  The question is, do you want to be a part of it?