In my previous life as a developer, I would get asked to stay late and work. This happened for only two reasons: There is a production issue. Deadlines Now, I want the projects I work on to succeed. I want the products I build to live up to the hyp...

If great teams deliver great products, what do poor teams deliver? At some point, a team will identify a need to refactor, fix, clean up, re-write, or otherwise undergo a highly-technical bit of rework. Without fail, this will be converted into a wor...

Fancy title, but it is a simple idea. Here’s a publication from NASA on the topic as it relates to the Challenger disaster. In a nutshell, the concept might be explained by a pothole. Imagine a pothole in your parking lot. It has been there for years...

On Friday, I led two back-to-back workshops about building resumes that lead to getting interviews, nearly 100% of the time. One of the things I was most worried about teaching people was how to write their experience in a way that shows value. Somet...

There exists a trait common to most developers and development groups that causes lots of delays and costly mistakes. That trait is when you believe you can figure it out if you have more time. Junior developers get stuck on problems that a more seni...

I was talking with some friends the other day about the state of our industry, as we often do, and someone mentioned various problematic metaphors that people use. In particular, the metaphor that software teams should work like a surgical team led b...

A recurring theme for my clients is knowledge transfer from one group to another. With these transfers’ regularity, one might expect a certain level of expertise in these transitions, but more often than not, they are full of challenges and surprises...

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...

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...

I often think about where large transformations go wrong in organizations. I've been through several "agile" flavored ones, and at this point, I think they're mostly doomed to fail. That doesn't mean that pursuing agility is a waste of time, but ther...