I recently read an essay entitled Moments of Greatness: Entering the Fundamental State of Leadership from the Harvard Business Review. The author encouraged all leaders to ask themselves four questions about areas of their leadership – key projects or groups they are leading – that I found particularly compelling. Since reading the article I’ve spent… Continue reading Four key questions leaders ask themselves
Conducting a retrospective at the end of a sprint is a core Agile practice. It constitutes one of the key ‘meetings’ for Scrum (along with sprint planning, sprint review, and the daily scrum meeting itself) and when done well it provides a valuable lever for the continuous improvement of the development team. The main scrum… Continue reading Looking back on retrospectives
I’ve picked again recently on the theme of Agile planning in this blog and thought I would continue with a few brief thoughts about the context for planning. I talked earlier in this series (way back in January of 2014) about portfolio planning and product roadmaps that set plans for individual sprints and releases into… Continue reading Tell me a (short) story
Writing my latest blog post on daily planning as part of the broader Agile product development plan got me reflecting on some of my own planning tools and techniques. I wanted to share some of those thoughts here. First of all I should acknowledge that I am a huge fan of planning. I’ve found both… Continue reading Personal planning: reflections on my own daily planning post
Many months ago I started writing a 10-part series on Agile planning (you can read the first post here if you want to catch up; then keep going forward from there to find the other pieces, most of which are tagged as “Planning”). Since that ambitious beginning I got frequently sidetracked and so I never… Continue reading Daily planning
The topic of technical debt came up in a couple of settings this week at work. I’ve written about this topic before here (among other places) but two different situations raised this issue in the past week and a third provoked an interesting set of questions. First was a response from one of my readers. … Continue reading Technical debt
I came across this quote in a book several of us are reading in my firm: The job [of the product manager/product owner] is to maintain and promote the product vision. In practice, this means documenting the vision, sharing it with stakeholders, incorporating feedback, generating features and stories, setting priorities for release planning, providing direction… Continue reading The role of strategic thinking
The past few months have continued the trend in my life of finding very little time and energy for blogging. Those of you who follow me on Twitter (@asbiv) may even have noticed that in the past month I’ve been way down on my tweeting as well. Lots of factors have contributed to this: Work… Continue reading State of the blog
Between battling a strong winter cold, digging out from a few snow storms, lots of activity in my family and personal life, and several frantic projects at work I have been incredibly busy lately – too busy for blogging and some days even too busy for tweeting. When I tell people that I am busy… Continue reading Why not to be busy
How can I find more time? There are “too many” things I want or need to get done both personally and professionally – too much on my plate both by responsibility and by choice. People tell me it’s good to be busy but I disagree. How can i find more time?
InTruthItsNotThatSimple 