I’m a huge believer in learning from the past; as Yogi Berra might have said some of my best mistakes are in the past. There’s a lot we can learn by reflecting on both what went well and what didn’t work out at the end of a project, an Agile sprint, a meeting, or a… Continue reading Reflections on retrospectives
Originally posted on InTruthItsNotThatSimple:
I wrote earlier that one of the key ways to think about the role of product owners is to say that we stand on a bridge connecting the voice of the market with the world of the developers. My goal is not to serve as a barrier between the business side…
I wrote a blog post earlier this month (which you can find here) about focusing on people, process, and products. Here I want to add some brief comments about the fact that different types of leaders are motivated by these three different focus areas. Some leaders are passionate about products. I see many of these… Continue reading Types of leaders
I read a lot of blog posts and articles about product development and recently came across a really insight one from the folks at Intercom. Here’s a link: https://blog.intercom.io/first-rule-prioritization-no-snacking/. The premise of the blog post is that development teams can easily be distracted by low effort/low impact work (the “snacking” in the title); they can also… Continue reading Where to focus development effort
Originally posted on InTruthItsNotThatSimple:
In a well-functioning Agile development team, the members of the team collaborate in multiple ways during a given development cycle or Sprint. Coders, testers, designers, and product owners work closely with each other to ensure that the most important features and fixes are worked on in the right way at the…
You’ve likely heard many of the jokes before. There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count and those who can’t. Or there are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t. Or maybe even there are two kinds of people in the world:… Continue reading People > Process > Product
As a product owner working with a growing suite of products in an active market, I am frequently asked to “do a demo” of our product for a new prospect. Our development team, support team, and consulting team all work closely with each other and with the business development team and the marketing team to… Continue reading What’s in a demo?
By temperament I am somewhat of an intellectual. I enjoy abstract conversations and discussions about the “right” way to do things. My personality type – according to tests like the Myers Briggs Temperament Indicator or the Enneagram – tends to the idealistic, meaning I place a high value on integrity and push myself and the… Continue reading Agile theory and messy reality
In the coming weeks I plan to post a series of blogs on how the wonderful theory of Agile software development intersects with (or sometimes crashes into) the messy reality of developing products in the real world. The company I work for adopted Agile almost 10 years ago (shortly after I started working there) yet… Continue reading New series on messy reality
Originally posted on InTruthItsNotThatSimple:
Recently I spent ninety minutes with our full development and product teams listening to a series of two minute pitches on ideas for our quarterly ‘hack week’ event. As a company we’ve been doing this for the past few years – setting aside one week every quarter for our development team…
InTruthItsNotThatSimple 