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
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
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
Originally posted on Applied Product Management Leadership:
I’ve been sitting on this idea for a post for some time now. From time to time throughout my career, this topic materializes out of nowhere and is worthy of discussion. And when it comes to ‘ownership’, I have experienced differences of opinion that could easily rival the argument about which…
Originally posted on Applied Product Management Leadership:
Just getting back into the swing of things after re-charging the batteries a bit on vacation, and came across an article from CMO.com titled Why CMOs Should Care About The Rise Of Product Management that struck a chord and challenged me this morning. It’s an interesting read, although a bit more oriented…
Originally posted on Applied Product Management Leadership:
“Is purpose more important than profit?” This question was posed by Alan Murray, editor of Fortune Magazine, and referenced in this post by Mark Weinberger, CEO of EY. It’s an intriguing thought because even from a young age with school and grades, we are taught results matter. This certainly…
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
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
Today’s question can be asked in a negative way: What am I doing wrong? But I prefer the more positive spin: What can I do to get better? Heading into a new year it is not surprising to think about areas of personal and professional growth I would like to pursue in 2015. From my… Continue reading How can I improve?
InTruthItsNotThatSimple 