Happy Friday,I was on a cruise last week, and it was most excellent. People ask, "Where did you cruise do," and I want to say, "Who cares!" It was just great to get away and relax. Unfortunately, that relaxation knocked me out of work mode, so I for...
Happy Monday!Take a look at this photo!Now, this photo is from the 4th of July at my in-laws place. This is a wildfire that started on their property. What isn't pictured here is the black smoldering field that goes to the horizon.My father-in-law wa...
Happy Friday!I think and use a lot of metaphors in my work. None are perfect, but there is one that has been rolling around in my head for years. For those of you who don't know, I like cooking, so I naturally relate a lot of things to food, and this...
Happy Friday!It is interesting to hear the shifts that are happening across clients. No, I'm not talking about every company trying to throw AI at everything. I'm talking about more fundamental changes. One of these changes that I keep bumping into i...
Happy Friday!Back in the 19th century (Which, if your brain is anything like mine, requires that you explicitly remember that means the years starting with 18), people only went to the hospital if they were going to die anyway.At the time, people bel...
At this point, I think almost everyone has heard that research shows that motivated teams perform better than those who aren’t motivated. What is often less obvious, from what I can tell, is how to motivate teams and individuals.
I bet most of you are wondering what the word piseog is and it is pretty tricky to look up. I first encountered it in one of my favorite books, “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White. If you’ve ever watched “The Sword in the Stone” animated movie,...
Imagine you are setting off to win an ambitious car race. You assemble a team of folks with plenty of experience and lay out a plan.
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...
Everyone thinks they have the answer to what will improve things, and technical teams are often very vocal about their ideas. Yet, in my experience, many technical teams advocate for things that can be far more costly than what is happening today, an...
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.
I’ve often felt like one of my natural talents or superpowers is how I prioritize features for products. Now, I know it is easy for anyone to feel that way, but there is a very sharp contrast between the backlogs I create and what most others create.
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...
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...