If you have multiple backlogs, which one does your team know to pull through? How do they know which one is prioritized higher than the other? How do they know which items that cross backlogs might be different than the others? Keep your backlogs simple so that when your team starts to pull from them, they know they are pulling from the right place at the right time, working on the right thing. Essentially what…
Specialize, Specialize, Specialize. Own and find your niche, focus on the niche and nothing else. But you can own multiple niches. You can specialize in multiple areas. And what you learn in one will inevitably help you in what you need to do to master the other. The only time it’s scary to be a generalist is when you make assumptions for things you don’t because you have gone as deep as you need.
If you’re looking to learn something new, growth does not matter in your current skillset. If you’re looking to level up your knowledge from junior to senior, growth will come from niche focus. If you’re looking to become a better leader, the answers to growth will not come from your code. If you need to become a better coder, growth might not come from a generalist conference. The key is to find out and ask…
If you want to use someone else’s “thing”, like an API or SDK, you are going to have to learn to use it the way they intended for it to be used. Because it was their idea, their proposal, their purpose and they put it all together in a way that makes sense to them that hopefully others will buy into. It’s their Schema for how to do the work. And if you want to…
The hardest part of any problem-solving exercise is trying to find the right question to ask. The one that goes beyond the symptoms and looks at the root cause of what is happening and what you need to do to go forward to make it work. In some situations, it’s the question we don’t want to ask, the one we don’t want to acknowledge because changing our question to the right one would be an…