The alarm goes off in the morning, and as usual, I begin my day by putting on my clothes. Now, I’ve been putting on my clothes for a long time, and I like to do things efficiently, so I put my clothes on in the following order:

User stories are ubiquitous these days as the method of representing work that development teams need to do. Yet, very few groups ever really understand them well enough to get much value out of them. While I still think user stories are an excellent...

For the better part of eight years, I’ve been consulting for the Fortune 100. I thought I’d share some quirky truths I’ve learned along the way. Before I go into them, some clients don’t exhibit these truths, but they’re an exception.

I wrote an article last week about the Theory of Constraints. In particular, I highlighted how variability is probably the biggest enemy you have to a method like that working. So in this article, I’m going to explain a way to help reduce variability...

It might seem as though I’m late to the show writing about a Lean Canvas, but I’ve been using them for years, and I continually find my clients are unaware of their existence. They’re a wonderful tool for rapidly creating options and representing a p...

Most clients I work with are always interested in the next product or feature. So much so that they don’t often look at if the product should exist or not. I’ve gone through killing two products recently, and I wanted to share that experience.

There is so much heartburn when picking and implementing some metrics. So in this article, I want to give a pretty quick overview of my approach and some ideas to start with. But before I get too far into it, I want to start with a message:

About a decade ago, a book called The Phoenix Project swept through the IT community. It is an incredibly relatable bit of fiction about a software shop that ultimately redeems itself.

A client told me that they had recently tasked one of their subordinates to help someone else in the group. They were a little concerned with my uncharacteristic silence. After they asked why I was quiet, we talked about some of my concerns and what...

We often have to explain an idea in a way that gets people to share the same context quickly. Without that shared context, people spend quite a lot of time asking questions to fill in mental gaps instead of working on the issue.