Articles - page 4

What the Greeks and Romans Can Teach Us About Design

15 Jan 2024 | Leadership

In my last years of college, I took a lot of history classes, and I wound up loving them. So much so that I thought I should have pursued a minor. While this doesn’t make me an expert, I learned some things that stick out to me, and there is one I’m going to share about and draw a parallel to the software world’s approaches to design.

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Stop Doing Things the Hard Way

04 Jan 2024 | Leadership

For the first few years of my career, I wasted a lot of my time and energy doing things the hard way. I should be honest and admit that a big part of me still does things the hardest way possible. A part of me believes that if I can succeed in unfavorable environments, I will succeed anywhere. This is stupid. Don’t be like me.

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Magic Quadrants in Product Development

28 Dec 2023 | Leadership

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the software world, you bump into what is sometimes called the magic quadrants. You’ll most often see this as an effort/impact activity. I want to share two ways I use this little technique when helping groups begin product development.

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Its a Secret

26 Dec 2023 | Leadership

I was sitting down having my coffee this morning and thinking of all the stuff that goes on in most companies that I simply don’t have to deal with, and one thing came to the forefront of my mind. Today, I want to write about one of those lessons leaders learn, often the hard way, which is not always healthy, and what I do about it: Information brokerage.

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Does Theory of Constraints Make Sense for Software?

13 Dec 2023 | Leadership

Two well-known books where leadership and software intersect are The Phoenix Project and The Goal. These books are novelizations of a company that redeems itself by leveraging the Theory of Constraints. While The Phoenix Project is very much a take on The Goal with a software angle, the lesson is the same. So here’s the question: does the Theory of Constraints apply to software development?

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Are Scrum Masters Worth It?

08 Dec 2023 | Leadership

In my last article, I went through a few frameworks and mentioned how there are plenty of Scrum Masters eager to prove themselves. They are a peculiar role in most companies, and many Scrum Masters struggle to answer the question, “What is it you do exactly?”

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