I’ve written before about how online, text-based conversations can easily get tense, stressful, and often escalate into unpleasantness—Slack, Teams, and so on are great in some ways, and terrible in … Continue reading Dealing with difficult conversations
It’s an unavoidable reality that bad things happen. I work a lot with software engineering and systems operations teams, and there have been too many times when someone had detected … Continue reading “How can we stop this happening again?”
Most teams I’ve ever worked with are full of individuals who are intelligent and dedicated. But sometimes there is a concern from (often senior) people outside the team that there … Continue reading Motivation through user appreciation
My wife occasionally talks about a manager she once had. Once in a while she would approach him with a problem—a paper needed to be written, a process needed to … Continue reading Having solutions ready to go
One Friday, many years ago when I was working with a web agency, one of our designers sent round a company-wide email. This was before the days of Slack, and … Continue reading Toeing the line in public
Over many years I’ve had the good fortune to work with a number of very experienced people, and more recently I’ve been working with senior leaders, each with a stong … Continue reading Using experience
Sometimes I find myself joining a team and introducing the idea of user research, a part of product discovery. I urge my teams to speak to users in carefully-planned interviews, … Continue reading Interviewing users you know
Recently I’ve been thinking about choices in planning—what options do we have around how to structure the delivery of a piece of work, and which should we choose? Often when … Continue reading Earn more by delivering earlier
When software teams start thinking about delivering faster one of the techniques they often try is limiting work in progress (WIP). The idea is that for each stage the work … Continue reading Limiting WIP is supposed to be painful
Earlier this year someone used a lovely phrase in conversation which was new to me, even though I should have known it, and even though I am a long-time advocate … Continue reading Stop starting and start finishing
