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...

I’m not a fan of most roadmaps or their usage, but so what? They are a near-universal tool in many companies that awkwardly try to communicate what is going on and their timelines. Despite them turning into vague work-breakdown schedules, there is so...

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.