In video games, there are many side-quests to getting to your primary quest. They might give you XP (experience) to help in your primary quest (i.e., unit testing, additional coding, etc, etc). We sometimes discard them because – “Bah, when am I going to use this” – but then when we complete the primary quest, we begin the work to go back and clean up our side quests and think – “huh, this would have…
They want to know how they are doing. They want to know what they are doing wrong. They want to know where they need to get better. They want to know what to fix. So they crave it, in any form, they want it, all the time – feedback, not validation, not comments, but feedback – how do I get better? Tell me.
Do you ship by date? By state of quality? By bugs left on the table? By customer adoption rates? By pre-order? Do you grind late into the night on the last few weeks to get it all done? Do you lay out your sprints so you have time to work on the unknown as it arises? Do you pushback on new requirements? Everything has to be cut in stone? Often times our delivery profile is…
If all around you is stress, chances are you aren’t shipping much. Chances are you’re behind, you’re not on time and nothing is helping you move forward. It’s not for lack of effort, but rather because you’re focused on leading only one thing – stress. But, you can’t lead stress. You can manage stress – you can mitigate it, break it down, isolate its touch points, figure out what is causing it, and adjust from…
If you can’t code 8 hours a day. Can you jump in, on small tasks, and hammer out 1 hour a day? If you can’t do 5 hours a week can you find time to do 3? Bit by bit is the origin story of many overnight successes.