Effectiveness, efficiency, and predictability
I heard someone describe effectiveness and efficiency as two ends of a spectrum. More of one means less of the other. It’s a tidy soundbite. It’s also wrong, and it quietly leads teams to optimize for the wrong thing.
Put your own mask on first: Learning to self-regulate
I was asked twice this week how I handle conflict when I know it’s coming.
Deceiving ourselves
I recall once doing workflow mapping with a team, where they insisted that three steps in their process were done sequentially, whereas I was pretty confident that they actually did them all in parallel. We discussed this back and forth for a bit and then I just accepted what they said and documented these steps as sequential.
User wants to log-in
When I’m teaching user story writing, inevitably someone will write a story like “User wants to log-in”, and this is actually a horrible story.
The difference between fear and excitement
Tomorrow, I’ll be in Canada’s Glacier National Park, hoping to see grizzly bears in the wild. Grizzlies are a legitimate threat and for most people will trigger a fear response. My companions and I, on the other hand, are very excited.
From Hero to Leader
Do you feel that every hard problem lands on you? When something is urgent, or nobody else can figure it out, it comes to you and you get it done? There’s a real pride in that. There’s also a quiet exhaustion, and underneath it a frustration you probably don’t say out loud: “why isn’t anyone else stepping up?”
What the “hug of death” actually looks like
For the first time, this site was on the receiving end of what I know as the Slashdot Effect and is today more commonly known as the Hug of Death. This is when some bit of your content becomes wildly popular and all of a sudden you get hit with a volume of traffic that you’d never seen before. Let’s unpack what happened.
The bottleneck might be the air in the room
You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.
Retrospectives without improvement
I frequently hear teams say: “We talk about the same things over and over and nothing changes.” Every time, it tells me they’ve missed the point of the retrospective.
Done Done Done
Every team has some definition of done, whether it’s been explicitly documented or it’s just a verbal understanding. Some agreement that when the work gets to this point, we’re not coming back to it. For most teams, there’s a designated spot on the board that reflects that state of done.