Everyone knows about the Big List. The Top 10 Most Requested Features by Customers. The Top 5 Biggest Pain Points in our Software. The 7 Bugs that keep recurring. The 9 Test Cases that always Fail. The 4 Requirements that must be part of every story. Pick your list, but it’s a list, it might be big because of how many things are on it or big because of how important they are. Whatever the…
Cycles are great to get into, they are predetermined, we know the outcome, and we can see the start, middle, and end – they are awesome at helping generate predictability and visibility into what we are doing. But they can go bad, they can wear you down, and they can take you down the wrong path simply out of habit. When we transition from intent and action to auto-pilot in our systems we fall into…
Incremental training investments will ALWAYS beat out the week-long conference, the half-day marathon leadership session, the full-day retreat – those are still good “things” to train at, but they are not the training that will push you forward. Kobe Bryant gives a great talk on this (less than 2 mins). I’m not advocating for getting up at 3am to train, but the message is pure and simple – you put in 30 minutes today, that’s…
You can’t learn them all. You might be able to learn a bunch, but you would never be able to learn all of them and be good at all of them. Specialize in some, don’t master all.
The biggest remote challenge isn’t about what your office setup is, what your meetings look like, the lunchtime pub sessions, how many coffee meetings you have in a day, or what entrance music you are playing. It’s about turning up every day and making sure it’s the best day for everyone on your team. Things go wrong because of Apathy, we let them drag out more when we are remote, when we are in person,…