I’m not generally a fan of New Year’s resolutions. If there is something I want to change in my life – a new discipline to acquire or an old habit to break – then why wait until the new year to start pursuing that goal. Nonetheless I do take time every January to review the different areas of my life and set some goals that I hope to achieve in the coming year. That applies to this blog as well.

In both 2015 and 2016 I experimented with new approaches to this blog. I started trying to write posts on a broader array of topics and to write shorter pieces more frequently. I added regular ‘book reviews’ on things I was reading and did more re-blogging of good things I read from other authors. My efforts met with mixed results. Part of this was due to how busy my life has been and part of it flowed from a somewhat paradoxical experience: the less focused my blog became on the narrow topics I started writing about the harder it felt to come up with anything meaningful for me to say.

So in 2017 I’m getting back to basics. I started this blog in order to (hopefully) participate in a wider conversation around two primary topics: Agile product development and leadership. While I have wide ranging interests that I also enjoy sharing, I’m going to return the focus of this blog to where it started. I will continue posting at a planned rate of 1-2 entries each week, and these posts will center on topics related to leadership and  product development. I reserve the right to occasionally share about other things I find compelling, and I may also start a second blog that focuses on some of my other interests, but this blog will give me a forum to share ideas, questions, insights and observations about leadership and product development coming out of the context in which I work. I continue to hope that my blog posts can be part of a wider conversation so I will still welcome comments and thoughts from readers either on the blog or via Twitter (@asbiv). And I hope that refining my focus will help rekindle my passion for writing. I already have a few draft posts in the works so stay tuned for these thoughts. And follow me on Twitter if you like my more random observations on life. I hope to write consistently this year but in truth it’s not that simple.