Happy Friday!One thing that keeps me going is the feedback I get from clients and co-workers. If you know me in person, you know I can't take a compliment, and when I hear one, I want to run away.People who know me really well use this against me.Whe...
Happy Friday!One of my favorite topics to rant about is meetings. In particular, how bad they usually are and how easy they are to fix. So, I thought I'd scratch that itch and give a few things that I think will improve your meetings almost immediate...
Happy Friday!Somehow, we went from winter to waking up one morning to Spring and all of the allergies that come with it. I almost never get allergies, and I don't know how anyone lives with them.If that weren't bad enough, I also agreed to take some...
Happy Friday!"I need to get a better sense of our group's capacity," is a common request clients have of me. While answering this question is not really very interesting, I think the existence of the request is and the topic of today's email.One reas...
Happy Friday!Yesterday, I went and split my beehives. This was actually the first time I did this, so while the process seemed normal, it was a little challenging since it was my first time.To prepare for this, I re-read some old material and looked...
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...