Stop Planning and Start Learning

The book “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries swept through the product and business world in 2011, and it had a simple message: Organizations that learn the fastest win. He also brought the concept of Minimum Viable Product to life.

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Jan 29, 2024
The Quick and the Dead of Prioritization

There are so many ways of prioritizing product work ranging from subjective to quantitative. Almost none justify themselves with results. In this post I will share how I prioritize product work with clients by using four simple categories of core, qu...

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Jan 23, 2024
Agile Isn’t Dead, But Your Career Might Be

All over LinkedIn, my feed is full of people saying Agile is dead or that Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches aren’t needed. I understand both the sentiment and the clickbait nature of this kind of headlines. Though if it were clickbait, people would say...

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Jan 18, 2024
What the Greeks and Romans Can Teach Us About Design

In my last years of college, I took a lot of history classes, and I wound up loving them. So much so that I thought I should have pursued a minor. While this doesn’t make me an expert, I learned some things that stick out to me, and there is one I’m...

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Jan 15, 2024
Stop Doing Things the Hard Way

For the first few years of my career, I wasted a lot of my time and energy doing things the hard way. I should be honest and admit that a big part of me still does things the hardest way possible. A part of me believes that if I can succeed in unfavo...

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Jan 04, 2024
Magic Quadrants in Product Development

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the software world, you bump into what is sometimes called the magic quadrants. You’ll most often see this as an effort/impact activity. I want to share two ways I use this little technique when helping groups be...

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Dec 28, 2023
Its a Secret

I was sitting down having my coffee this morning and thinking of all the stuff that goes on in most companies that I simply don’t have to deal with, and one thing came to the forefront of my mind. Today, I want to write about one of those lessons lea...

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Dec 26, 2023
Does Theory of Constraints Make Sense for Software?

Two well-known books where leadership and software intersect are The Phoenix Project and The Goal. These books are novelizations of a company that redeems itself by leveraging the Theory of Constraints. While The Phoenix Project is very much a take o...

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Dec 13, 2023
Are Scrum Masters Worth It?

In my last article, I went through a few frameworks and mentioned how there are plenty of Scrum Masters eager to prove themselves. They are a peculiar role in most companies, and many Scrum Masters struggle to answer the question, “What is it you do...

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Dec 08, 2023
The Good, Bad, and Ugly of the Popular Agile Frameworks

If I were to ever write an article that would prompt an argument online, this is the one. There is so much noise and hand-wringing about the one true agile framework that it is impossible to make sense of things. Sadly that puts our community in a po...

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Dec 06, 2023