Anneke Keller created the Cherry Model based on 25 years of experience as innovation leader. Anneke and her former colleague, technology guru Tim Meeuwissen guide you through the seasons of innovation “IT is often evaluated based on hard skills. The resilience of architecture, the amount of coding languages you master, how many years of experience the tech department has. These aspects form the pit of the cherry. They are important, but none of them bring innovation. Soft skills do. Innovation grows when people learn from each other, work together and challenge each other. Soft skills are the cherry’s nutritious, sweet flesh that brings all the birds to the yard.” Anneke Keller created the Cherry Model based on 25 years of experience as innovation leader. Every tech organisation – entire companies even – have a rhythm for growth and change. After a summery phase of seemingly endless innovation inevitably follows a harsh season of stagnation and cutbacks. How can you as a leader predict and recognise these different phases and use them to support and create an innovative organisation? In The Cherry Model Anneke and her former colleague and technology guru Tim Meeuwissen guide you through the seasons of innovation sharing their stories, lively anecdotes and helpful tips and tricks. Anneke Keller worked as CTO and IT leader at Wehkamp, Jumbo, Coolblue, TomTom and KPN. Anneke owns a food forest where she grows fruit and vegetables for and with her neighbours. Tim Meeuwissen has a career in transforming organisations to create software that scales and lasts, and currently works at Jumbo. Tim is a tinkerer and a hobby farmer who keeps chickens, bees and a small flock of sheep. The gap between digital companies and companies that still need to make this change has widened in recent years. Bridging this gap is hard and needs persistence. Anneke Keller, previously CTO at Wehkamp and Head of Software Engineering at Coolblue and Jumbo, has led several digital transformations. She helped scale tech teams and technology to be able to accommodate growth (TomTom, Coolblue and Jumbo), single brand to multi-brand (Wehkamp), and modernise the technical architecture (all of the above). These experiences taught Anneke that technology teams, entire companies even, need a certain rhythm to adapt to change. A certain method that you can follow as a leader to support your team in growing to innovation. Anneke and Tims book "The Cherry Model" is about this method and gives plenty of examples from their experiences. Both successful and less successful, all with the intention for others to learn from it. The book is expected to be ready in August 2023 Introduction The company’s problem child 11 The structure of this book 14 The cherry tree in the seasons 16 The team’s perspective 17 How the idea started 18 The model 19 Roots 21 Winter Stormy weather 29 Fix the processes 31 Through the fire and flames 33 In short 39 Big outage, little hassle 40 Trust your team 41 Never, ever again 43 Agile leadership squeeze 44 Stay out 45 Making the right call 46 Spring The first blossom 51 It’s not about being right, it’s about getting it right 53 Organisational awareness 54 Your team as cherries 55 The rest of the cherry tree 58 Management as the supportive trunk and branches 58 The organisation as an ecosystem 58 Foundation for growth 59 The Cherry Model blueprint 61 Jumbo Tech Campus organisation structure 62 Our new structure 62 Pathfinders 63 Not a market standard 64 How did we innovate? 65 Conway’s law 67 The Cherry Model blueprint overview 68 A leap of faith 69 The right people in the right place 70 Top-down decisions in an Agile organisation 71 Filling in the blueprint 72 Matchmaking 73 Don’t outsource your recruitment issue to HR 74 Tell your story 75 Actively search for candidates 76 Getting to know each other 76 The two traits I look for when hiring 78 Structure 79 Fostering Innovation 80 Change how you prioritise: WSJF 81 Change how you organise 84 Summer Growing an engineering culture 89 Too much to do 90 The importance of “how you get there” 93 Help, my product owner wants a broken car 94 First, set the purpose 96 Making it happen 98 Filling in the borders 98 Things management gets to decide on 99 Strategy 99 Organisation 100 Metrics 101 Budget 101 Team policies 102 What teams get to define 104 Progress 104 Deadlines 105 Technology 107 Autonomy that bites the hand that feeds 108 TechBoard for consensus 109 Influencing is all we can and should do 109 Processes 110 So when is your team ready? 111 Pizza sessions 112 Autumn Mirror the team 117 Meltdown 118 Defeated 120 Close the loop - again 122 Success 125 Spread the news 126 Time to think ahead 128 Don’t overcomplicate your technology strategy 128 Different types of software 128 To build or not to build. That’s the question 130 Why Lego Technic is the microservices architecture of toys 131 Phase 1, DIY software 132 Phase 2, Standard products 132 Phase 3, Customise, customise, customise 133 Phase 4, Help! It is getting too complex 134 Phase 5, The future 135 Scrum your architecture 136 Epilogue The tree keeps on growing 137 How the Cherry Model came to be 139 KPN 139 TomTom 140 Coolblue 141 Jumbo 141 In conclusion 143 Executive Summary Thank you! 153 About the authors 154 Anneke Keller 154 Tim Meeuwissen 155