My wife and I sometimes joke that 2019 is the year of Ryan. My career seems to be accelerating very rapidly, and I’m exploring new ideas and activities with success. I think one of the reasons that are happening is because of a few key things that I...

Well, it’s 2022, and I took a break from writing for the past few months. It was a mistake, but I’m trying to correct that with this first article of the year. There are a lot of techniques that exist to help folks make prioritization decisions. They...

Have you ever left a meeting feeling like you made yourself clear, only to find out weeks or months later that you were seriously mistaken? What about sending an email you assessed as concise, direct, and clear only to find it completely ignored or m...

There is a lot that I can say about the magic of breaking work down into workable chunks, but I want to focus on one particular lens in this article. Imagine there is a product that needs to add a feature. This feature will require changes to the fro...

I’ve been in the process of getting our house ready to sell, so while I was in the garage painting doors, I queued up the audiobook for Robert Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule. Read on, for a synopsis and my very thoughtful opinion. Big Idea For the most...

In 2014 I started finally breaking away from my career as a developer and exploring more of what it would be like to take on a Leadership position in my team and in the company. I was voracious to learn more about concepts like agility and lean. That...

The title of this post is a parody on the infamous For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn. It is an example of what is sometimes called, "Flash Fiction." While the title of this is a parody, it has remained a work of non-fiction in many of the organization...

One of the most important skills for any organization to develop is meeting facilitation. Ever see an invitation pop up on your calendar without a clear statement as to what the meeting will be about? Ever walk into a meeting where discussions happen...

Steve is new to software, they spend a lot of time reading documentation, writing code, commenting it out, and trying again. Laura works a little differently. She doesn’t comment out blocks of code, but she uses branches and stashes to preserve her t...

No sprints, releases, recent significant events, or even a common thread of problems with a group I’ve never met is the backdrop for a recent retrospective that I facilitated. I refer to a scenario like this as facilitating a blind retrospective. Did...