John Sadler: 5 Essential Habits for Accelerating Your Product Development

In this talk, we will explore five essential habits that can significantly accelerate product development cycles. Drawing from transformative prior work as a senior executive at Fortune 500 firm Agilent Technologies, John Sadler emphasizes the importance of continuous customer contact, prioritizing quality and cadence over scope, maintaining integration throughout the development process, fostering psychological safety and a growth mindset, and leveraging evidence-based decision-making.
You will learn how to execute these five habits:
Habit 1: Releasing at a high quality, fixed cadence by means of a variable rather than fixed scope
Habit 2: Engaging customers directly and developing data sources on customer behavior
Habit 3: Starting integrated and staying integrated
Habit 4: Developing psychological safety in your team
Habit 5: Becoming evidence-guided, developing sources of evidence
Together, these practices enhance effectiveness, innovation, and cross-functional collaboration, leading to faster and more reliable product development.
About The Speaker:
John Sadler focuses on helping executive leaders create the conditions for their teams to deliver value and get to market more rapidly, especially where software is involved. Most recently, John was VP/GM of the enterprise software division of Agilent Technologies. In that role he sponsored and led a delivery turnaround resulting in annual revenue growth over 2X that of the market, a consistent on-time release cadence with outstanding field quality, a thriving acquisition growing at 35%, and a clear and customer-validated digital lab strategy embraced across the company. Critical to this success was the development and effective use of scaled agile practices across multiple sites globally, including outsourcing partners, along with a strong culture of continuous improvement.
John earned his MS in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, and BS in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He is an inventor with over 20 patent families and is the author of Ficl, a widely adopted open source software package for embedded systems scripting.