How Gemba Walks and Mobbing Reveal the Truth About Your Engineering Org with Phil Borlin

🎙️ What’s really happening inside your engineering org? In this episode of the Mob Mentality Show, we sit down with Philip Borlin, Director of Engineering and advocate for lean thinking, mobbing, and team capability building, to uncover how Gemba Walks, smaller batch sizes, and healthy team nudges reveal the actual state of your tech organization—not just what reports say.

We explore how leaders can stop flying blind and start leading based on facts from the field.

🔍 Topics Covered:

✅ Gemba Walks (Japanese term meaning “go to the real place”):

• Why your assumptions about how work gets done are probably wrong

• How spending even one hour a week in the mob or at the code level changes everything

• The myth of managing solely through middle managers

• Why high-fidelity information beats filtered reporting

• Remote-friendly adaptations: mobbing, Lean coffees, and async insight gathering

✅ Mobbing (also known as ensemble programming):

• How mobbing surfaces capability gaps and builds shared understanding

• Growing capabilities without enforcing rigid standards

• Real stories of capability fire drills, single points of failure, and org fragility

• “Low and slow” growth as the only sustainable path to true skill development?

✅ Fixing Batch Size and WIP (Work In Progress):

• How large batches lead to delivery waste, delays, and bugs

• The surprising power of reducing ticket size to unlock flow

• Socratic coaching at stand-ups to improve team work slicing

• Giving permission to drop non-priority work and focus only on what matters

✅ Building a Learning Culture:

• Why capability resilience > retaining every team member forever

• Using “nudges” and peer pressure the right way

• Investing in bright spots without ignoring skeptics

• Cultivating environments where psychological safety and growth feed off each other

💡 Whether you’re a Director of Engineering, Tech Lead, Agile Coach, or Software Engineer, this episode gives you practical ways to lead with clarity, scale team capability, and build resilience into your org’s DNA. 🎧 Subscribe now so you don’t miss the drop: 👉 https://www.mobmentalityshow.com/ Video and Show Notes: https://youtu.be/bFMD0AsVDUA