Book
Daring Greatly
How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.
Josh Haines
VP Digital Products , Rolls-Royce Defense
I am a software engineering and platform transformation executive with 17+ years of experience leading modernization efforts inside complex and regulated industrial enterprises. My work centers on building scalable operating models for secure software delivery aligning engineering, governance, and business outcomes in environments where compliance, risk management, and global coordination are critical.
At Rolls-Royce, I founded and scaled a Software Factory that institutionalized a secure-by-design DevSecOps model across multiple divisions and geographies. What began as a startup-style initiative in a Defense accelerator evolved into an enterprise platform capability supporting 300+ developers and applications serving 20,000+ users across regulated cloud and high-assurance environments. I currently serve as Vice President of Digital Products and Head of Group Software Factory, responsible for engineering strategy, cross-division adoption, and delivery governance across global teams.
My background in engineering and manufacturing provides a systems-level perspective on digital transformation bridging operational realities with modern cloud-native delivery practices.
I live with my wife Chris and daughters Jenny and Nora. I hold a BS in Materials Engineering and an MS in Engineering from Purdue University.
Book
Traction
Get a Grip on Your Business.
Book
Dare to Lead
Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.
Book
Strong Ground
The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human Spirit.
Book
High Growth Handbook
The playbook for growing your startup into a global brand.
Book
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers - Straight Talk on the Challenges of Entrepreneurship.
Book
Reset
How to Change What's Not Working.
Book
So Good They Can't Ignore You
Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love.
Talk
Submarines DevCon 2025 Keynote Speech
I was asked to give a keynote speech at the Rolls-Royce Submarines Developer Conference in February 2025. The post below contains some sanitized details of the talk for both attendees to reference and others to learn from.
Book
Right Kind of Wrong
The Science of Failing Well.
Article
PGP, GPG, Yubikeys, Oh My!
A cheatsheet for setting up and managing PGP/GPG keys on a Yubikey, including SSH key generation, GPG backup and restore, and updating expiring subkeys.
Book
First, Break All the Rules
What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently.
Book
Escaping the Build Trap
How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value.
Book
A World Without Email
Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload.
Book
Turn the Ship Around
A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders.
Book
Zero to One
Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
Book
No Rules Rules
Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention.
Book
Switch
How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.
Book
Building a Storybrand
Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen.
Book
Supercommunicators
How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.
Book
Anxious Generation
How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
Podcast
Behind the Product Podcast
I was recently a guest on the Behind the Product podcast. We discussed my career, digital transformation, and the Rolls-Royce Software Factory.
Book
Nudge
Small nudges, big changes: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness.
Book
Your Next Five Moves
Master the Art of Business Strategy.
Book
Nonviolent Communication
A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships.
Book
Quit
The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.
Book
Wiring the Winning Organization
Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification.
Book
Made to Stick
Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.
Book
Range
Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.
Book
Thinking Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think.
Book
Only the Paranoid Survive
How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.
Book
Make Space to Lead
Break Patterns to Find Flow and Focus on What Matters.
Book
The Icarus Deception
How High Will You Fly?
Book
The Fiefdom Syndrome
The Turf Battles That Undermine Careers and Companies - And How to Overcome Them.
Book
Fear of Missing Out
Practical Decision-Making in a World of Overwhelming Choice.
Book
Tribes
We Need You to Lead Us.
Book
Making Work Visible
Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow.
Book
Finite and Infinite Games
A Vision of Life As Play and Possibility.
Book
Change
How Organizations Achieve Hard-to-Imagine Results in Uncertain and Volatile Times.
Book
Software Architect Elevator
Redefining the Architect's Role in the Digital Enterprise.
Book
The Culture Code
The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups.
Book
Decision Quality
Value Creation from Better Business Decisions.
Book
The Digital Mindset
What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI.
Book
Essentialism
The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.
Book
Multipliers
How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter.
Book
Sharks in the Moat
How to Create Truly Secure Software.
Book
The Clean Coder
A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers.
Book
Think Again
The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know.
Book
Clean Architecture
A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design.
Book
The Dip
A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick).
Book
Upstream
The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen.
Book
The Value Flywheel Effect
Power the Future and Accelerate Your Organization to the Modern Cloud.
Book
XLR8
Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World.
Book
Talking to Strangers
What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know.
Book
Breath
The New Science of a Lost Art.
Book
Mindset
The New Psychology of Success.
Book
Container Security
Fundamental Technology Concepts that Protect Containerized Applications.
Book
Working Backwards
Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon.
Book
The Servant
A Simple Story About the True Essence of Leadership.
Book
Build
An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making.
Book
How to Have Impossible Conversations
A Very Practical Guide.
Book
Understanding Software
Max Kanat-Alexander on simplicity, coding, and how to suck less as a programmer.
Book
DevOps for the Modern Enterprise
Winning Practices to Transform Legacy IT Organizations.
Book
The Art of Business Value
This book explores what business value means, why it matters, and how it should affect your software development and delivery practices.
Book
Indistractable
How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.
Book
The Startup Way
How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth.
Book
The Fearless Organization
Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth.
Book
Hyperfocus
How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction.
Book
Deep Work
Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.
Book
Accelerate
The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations.
Book
The Lean Startup
How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.
Book
The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy
Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler.
Book
A Seat at the Table
IT Leadership in the Age of Agility.
Book
Ask Your Developer
How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century.
Book
Linchpin
Are You Indispensable?
Book
Measure What Matters
How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs.
Book
Team Topologies
Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow.
Book
The DevOps Handbook
How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations.
Book
The Innovator's Dilemma
When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change).
Book
Clean Code
A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship.
Book
Sooner Safer Happier
Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility.
Book
Project to Product
How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework.
Book
War and Peace and IT
Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age.
Book
The Unicorn Project
A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data.
Book
The Phoenix Project
A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win.
Book
Radical Candor
Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity.
Talk
The Chemistry of Innovation
I was asked to give a keynote speech at the TechPoint Community Connect event July 2026. The post below contains an expanded readable version of what I discussed including some graphics and the actual slide-deck embedded. If you missed the talk, this post is a great way to catch up on what was discussed.