About Me
Philippe Bourgau, Flow, DDD, Craft, and Agile Coach, solving technical and product challenges through people collaboration.
I want to innovate a more sustainable software industry!
Join me on the path to higher consciousness so we all become change agents!
I value:
- Peace rather than emulation
- Freedom rather than safety
- Disruption rather than tradition
- Deliberate Growth rather than comfort
- Learning while doing and making mistakes!
I blog about:
- How to work, think, and coach the eXtreme Programming way
- How to run practical sessions, like workshops and courses, to trigger productive collaboration and grow people
- How to change organizations for a more sustainable pace, even when we are at the bottom of the hierarchy
- How to navigate the intersection of product management and delivery flow in the era of generative AI
Bio
An early adopter of eXtreme Programming, I have been practicing since 2003 and mentoring teams since 2006. Thanks to XP, Lean, and continuous refactoring, I have spent two decades helping groups deliver high-quality, fit-to-purpose, and future-proof software with less stress and overtime.
Throughout my career, I have worked on almost every aspect of software: technical, product, people, process, and quality. I have contributed to tiny 2-person setups as well as massive multi-team environments, designing greenfield systems and incrementally refactoring legacy codebases.
I believe the two most essential skills for anyone working in our industry are:
- Working in baby steps. It’s always possible to split the work into smaller pieces! Craftsmanship, Lean Product Development, and Continuous Delivery all fall into this category. Today, this is more critical than ever: coding faster with AI means nothing if features simply pile up in invisible queues waiting for human decisions.
- People collaboration. To quote G. Weinberg: “No matter what the problem is, it’s always a people problem.” Pair and Mob Programming, Liberating Structures, Event Storming, Verbal Aikido, and Non-Violent Communication are the real keys to unlocking systemic flow.
Combined, these two skills transform work, making it safer, more sustainable, productive, and valuable.
Today, I am the Head of Product & Flow Offering at Shodo Paris, where I help organizations look past the local productivity illusions of AI and fix the end-to-end flow from idea to production. Prior to this role, I spent several years embedding these sustainable engineering practices as an internal coach at Murex.
I can help your organization with consulting, training, or running strategic workshops (like Event Storming, Quality View, or Slow Coding) or speaking.
Finally, I love doing side projects, from wannabe businesses to open source tools.
Side projects
Here are the main side projects I’ve been working on throughout the years:
- webmix: A tool to convert entire websites into a single, LLM-friendly Markdown file.
- TCR: A Golang (Test && Commit || Revert) utility that my former Murex colleagues and I built as a pedagogical tool.
- Event Storming Journal: My friend and colleague Matthieu Tournemire and I are “blogging” The 1 hour Event Storming Book, chapter by chapter.
- Built In Quality Game: A table-top game that teaches teams why built-in quality directly drives long-term productivity.
- Philou’s Planning Poker: Better poker estimates for remote teams!
- ComplexityAssert: Assert your algorithm time complexity in RSpec (experimental)!
- Storexplore: Transform online stores into APIs!
- RSpecProxies: Simplify RSpec mocking with test proxies!
- AgileAvatars.com: An abandoned side-business about creating custom magnets for agile boards.
- mes-courses.com: An abandoned side project for a rapid online grocery shopping front-end.