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

The culture-clash conundrum works backwards, too: you can’t have otherwise full-on cloud native culture but not have microservices. If it takes you six months to deliver, you can’t be truly distributed. There is nothing to be gained in simply re-creating a monolith on the cloud — yet companies try do it all the time.

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.

Conflict arises when new technology gets applied through the old way of doing things. Trying to do cloud native by using methods from your previous paradigm will wreck your initiative. This is in fact the root cause of most of the problems we find when we get called into a company to rescue a stalled cloud native transformation.

A Collaborative organization tends to have big but not deeply specific goals (i.e., there may be a wide vision but without a detailed specification or a fixed delivery date). This culture embraces learning and consistent,

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.

teams are still not really in charge of what they are building; their authority is limited to how to build whatever they are assigned.

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 fa

Now we are changing everything in every part of the organization all the time, and all at the same time, which is a completely different way of thinking. You will always be doing this, innovating and moving to the next thing, and the next. Innovation now needs to be simply another piece of your workflow — one that is built right in.