Budding Dark Factories 🏭
Factories, dark factories, and superdark factories. What operating autonomous agents actually requires, and why the answers are the ones that always made teams great.
The Garden
Welcome to the garden. The garden is everything in its current state of growth. Wander at your leisure.
Budding Budding The Software Industry's Dangerous Love Affair With Overproduction
Overproduction is manufacturing's worst waste and software's favorite habit. This talk shows where the hidden costs live and how to measure your way out.
Budding Newsletters
The archive of Ryan Latta's weekly letter. Stories, tips, and techniques from the field for engineering leaders, every Friday.
Evergreen Building an Agenda - The Spine
The essentials of building a collaborative meeting agenda. I call it a "Spine."
Budding Trust the team know the details 🥸
Budding Is Ted Lasso a Player-Coach
Budding Overproduction is waste, and you're probably doing it.
Budding Who Moved My Bottleneck
Everyone says AI moved the development bottleneck. Most teams were never bottlenecked on development. They were overproducing, and takt time is how you tell the difference.
Seedling Saving Time With Testing
When groups need to go faster they often look to hiring people or buying better tools. At this client, they wanted to see if quality would unlock greater speed, and it did.
Budding Dependencies Are Silently Killing Your Productivity
Dependencies quietly decide how fast your teams deliver, and almost nobody manages them. This talk shows where the waiting and failures really come from and what to do about it.
Budding AI Productivity Dies with Dependencies
Budding Example of Horizon Planning
Most plans have a cliff where the plan stops and the unknown begins. I approach this problem by creating planning horizons, and this article has an example of them.
Evergreen Horizon Planning: How to Put Your Entire Strategy on One Page
Horizon planning puts your whole strategy on one page: three horizons, each with a theme, measurable goals, and elements of success. Free template included.
Budding How to Use the Metrics and Signals Worksheet
How to use the Metrics and Signals Worksheet. Develop signals, balanced metrics, and operational thresholds that turn your data into decisions.
Budding Why are metrics so hard 🩻
Seedling North American Honey Bee Expo 2023
Budding How to Measure Developer Productivity
How to measure developer productivity without wrecking your team. Measure the system and team, not the person. What Google's frameworks actually measure, and what changes when AI writes the code.
Budding Why DORA Metrics Are Bad
DORA metrics aren't bad, but the worship is. What the four metrics can and can't tell you, how teams game them, DORA vs SPACE, and what to build instead.
Seedling Constant Wip Limits
Budding Engineering Metrics That Don't Suck
A leader's guide to engineering metrics that actually inform decisions. The four categories of metrics, why they lie, what to report upward, and what works instead of more dashboards.
Budding Knowing the Details Vs Trusting the Team
Leaders ask, "How do I know if my teams are doing well?" The signs you find online describe some team somewhere. The signals you build together describe yours.
Seedling Model Of High Performing Teams
Seedling Quality Last Is A Stupid Strategy
Time and time again people advocate for testing later. Can you really afford the consequences of having the strategy of quality last?
Seedling Test Or Die
Evergreen Use Signal Mapping to Turn Data Into Action
Signal Mapping is how leaders pair data to action, saying "when I see X, I will take Y action." A three-step practice for turning data you drown in into decisions you trust.
Budding Your org structure might be killing your productivity 🔥
Budding How To Introduce TDD Even If You Don't Code
You don't have to write code to bring TDD to your team. This talk shows leaders and coaches how to introduce test-driven development without touching the keyboard.
Seedling Home
Ryan Latta delivers the answer to your impossible ask and the teams that make the next one possible.
Seedling How To Make Software Development Predictable
Improving development processes start by eliminating variability. In this article I’ll show you how to measure it and a simple technique to address variability quickly.
Seedling Six Estimation Techniques
Budding Bad estimates are a missed opportunity 😱
Budding Book Review - Spin Selling
Seedling What Is The Timeline
Seedling Work With Me
Seedling 3 Alternatives To Saying I Dont Know In Interviews
Seedling How to Build a Self-Managed Team Without Losing Control
How to build a self-managed team: set the boundaries, taper your involvement, and keep the signals that tell you it's working. See the worked example.
Budding How to Lead a Self-Managed Team Without Getting in the Way
How to lead a self-managed team after you've built it: hold the boundaries, lean on their expertise, and ask the one question that makes you a trusted partner.
Seedling Powering Up People With Pairing
Seedling Strategy Vs Tactics
Seedling Zone of Acceptance
Ever notice that no matter how hard we try the results stay relatively the same? I call this the zone of acceptance. This article will teach you about it, and how to break free if you're brave enough to try.
Seedling From Strategy to Story
Budding AI Agent Setup
Seedling Reko Day Work
Seedling reko.day
Budding How to fix the stall in your team's improvements
Seedling Is Responsibility the Biggest Lesson in AI
The biggest challenge for AI isn't what we'll use it for, it's how we'll use it. This article discusses the nature of responsibility when creation is nearly free and what the tech industry can learn.
Seedling Leadership
Ryan Latta helps technical leaders build high-performing teams, improve delivery, and develop their leadership skills.
Seedling WIP Into Shape
A crash course on constant WIP limits, their results, and dangers.
Seedling Measures Metrics and Signals Workshop
Seedling The Power Of Personal Responsibility
Budding Get jiggle with it
Seedling Death To Code Reviews
Evergreen When Abandoning Code Reviews Leads To Better Results
Budding Death to Code Reviews 💀
Budding Skills, Context, and Agents. Oh My!
Budding Talks
Budding Devil in the details
Seedling Supers and Ergonomics
Budding Pivots sucks, do them more
Seedling Become a Senior in 2 Years
Budding How to Test a Ball of Mud
A talk given to We Are Devs on using TDD to deal with Legacy Code
Budding Lies Our Engineering Metrics Tell Us
A breakdown of common engineering metrics and why they mislead us and finally what you can do to develop your data and metric skills.
Budding Lies Our Engineering Metrics Tell Us
Seedling New and Upcoming
Budding Idea for Agents in Larger Codebases
Seedling 2026-04-01
Budding A real-world example of using signals 🐝
Seedling All About Queens
Budding Toyota Taught Me A3s and I Almost Forgot
Budding Measures and Signals as Taught By Bees 🐝
Seedling Claude and Obsidian
Seedling Digital Gardens
What am I doing with digital gardens, what are they, and examples.
Budding Announcing - Lies Our Engineering Metrics Tell Us
Budding Louder, for the people in the back ✅
Budding Talks, Podcasts, and Other Appearances
Talks, Podcasts, and other appearances or downloads I have to explore
Seedling Can You Hear Me Now
After agonizing over a plan or strategy, how do you know if there is alignment? Often there isn't. You need a way to triangulate where the gaps are and the reality people are operating with and not the hope you have. This article explains how.
Seedling Trust Triangles
Exceptional leadership depends on trust, even when your job demands otherwise. Trust triangles are a way to build trust beyond traditional one-on-one relationship building.
Evergreen Measures, Metrics, and Signals
My thoughts and approach to developing measures, metrics, and signals for exceptional engineering teams and leaders. If this topic has always felt baffling, this will cover goal setting with metrics, leading and lagging indicators, developing useful leadership signals, and how to avoid chaos with balancing metrics.
Budding How to actually use metrics 😱
Seedling Fieldstones and Ideas
Seedling When Flow State Is Dangerous
Seedling Get Started With Dev And Product Metrics
There is a ton of heartburn about metrics, so in this article I explain how to start with metrics for any development group in a healthy way.
Seedling How I Set Goals
Seedling One Metric To Start
Seedling Building Exceptional Software Teams
What I do to build some of the best software teams in the world.
Budding 1-on-1 Meetings
Budding An Introduction to the Balanced Scorecard
Budding How to accurately forecast a software team's performance
An introduction to using probabilistic forecasting to understand when a team will be done. Also included are notes on adding bugs, dependencies, multiple teams, and scope changes.
Budding Great teams quit good leaders
Evergreen 6-Day Work Week
A QA department that is chronically over-worked and behind schedule believes automation will save them. However, after thorough analysis, removing interruptions gave everyone in the department an extra day of capacity back.
Seedling Result-Oriented Transformation
A Fortune 10 company had been "Transforming" for years but the only thing that changed was vocabulary. Shifting to result-oriented work instead of training and assessments changed everything.
Evergreen Skynet or Bust
A company has one last hail-mary before they run out of money. It has some of the most challenging technical demands of anything built. In this case study, you'll see the techniques used to have a team deliver on time, without bugs, and able to meet every demand.
Seedling The High-Performing Team
Delivery is slow, expensive, buggy, and unpredictable. Yet, most efforts to improve things fail. I was asked to build a team to prove that you can have it all. You can have fast, cheap, good, and predictable.
Seedling Transforming A Team In Three Months
A Fortune 100 company needed to transform a team responsible for the core technology that runs the entire business. It also needed to be done in three months.
Seedling Podcast One-Sheet
Budding How do you save a transformation 🎣
Seedling Case Studies
Seedling Services
Budding Skill Liquidity Assessment
When you're building teams you have to know the right mix of skills for success. The Skill Liquidity assessment that Cat Swetel taught me is perfect for this.
Budding Stability
What does "Stability" have to do with teams? How will changes to the team's composition, processes, and more impact them?
Budding Team Size
I've worked with exceptional teams that had 2 people and all the way up to 13+. These are some thoughts about the considerations that I have when forming a team and wondering how big the team should be.
Budding My AI Agents Don't Think QA is Important. 🪳
Seedling Installing a Package
Seedling When It Hurts To Much Leave
A reminder that you don't have to endure a job that causes pain, doubt, and suffering.
Seedling Agile Transformation In 4 Acts
Agile transformations at large companies are fascinating. Here's a pattern of how they play all too often.
Seedling Book Review The No Asshole Rule
The No Asshole Rule is a great book and here's my thoughts on it.
Seedling Change Is Hard
You have heard, "Change is hard," before. There may even be a personal experience that you have where these words were true. Here are my thoughts on those three words.
Evergreen On The Front Lines
When many companies want to bring about change they primarily train and inform people as to the new behaviors and expectations. What is often unattended is where the lines are where the change is the most disruptive and what needs to happen right on that line.
Seedling Proximity And Change
Some thoughts about the nature of proximity and change.
Budding engineering-manager
Seedling firebase-architect
Seedling ios-swift-developer
Seedling marketing-expert
Seedling qa-strategist
Seedling startup-cofounder
Seedling How I Use Claude Code
Budding firebase-functions
Seedling ios-swift
Seedling ios-testing
Evergreen claude.md
Seedling Demaree Method of Swarm Control
Seedling Double Screen Board Splits
Seedling Cross-Functionality
Cross-functional teams make a serious difference. They remove dependencies which can cripple productivity.
Seedling Skill Composition
When it comes to building high-performing software teams, you need the right composition of skills. This involves several considerations that I describe in detail.
Evergreen Land the Job - Online Class
Master everything from resumes to salary negotiation with my online classes and coaching to your next job in tech.
Seedling Facilitation Guide
My brain, guide, and processes on collaborative facilitation.
Budding Want your teams to take ownership. Here's why they aren't and how you can fix it.
Seedling Careers
Navigate your career so you have the lifestyle you deserve
Seedling Identifying the Purpose
The essentials of developing a meeting's purpose. Without this, your meeting will fail.
Budding Planning the Meeting
The overall process to plan a meeting that doesn't suck is involved, time-consuming, and well worth it. Here are the steps and some rules to follow.
Budding Pre-Meeting Interviews
If you think you can just have a meeting without interviewing folks, think again. You need to know the dynamics, tolerances, and preferences of everyone.
Evergreen Learning Team Capability
While there are lots of ways to understand someone's capabilities within a role, there are far fewer to understand what they are beyond it. I want to share a very simple technique that can help leaders see the potential in the folks around them.
Budding How to build the digital garden
Seedling Product Management
Ryan Latta helps product managers and teams deliver products customers love.
Budding Consultants suck, and I'm one of them. 🤡
Yesterday, someone who almost never posts on LinkedIn posted an article from the CEO of a consultancy that a bunch of their former co-workers wound...
Budding So what went wrong? An honest debrief of reko.day.
This email is a bit different. I'm blending two groups, my consultant and reko.day groups. Let me first play a little catch-up in case you're saying...
Budding Book Review: Profit First Accounting
I'm going to share my thoughts on a book I read a while ago called Profit First "Whoa, you read books? How many pictures do they have?" Well, they're...
Budding Looking ahead to 2026
& Happy New Year! I don't often write predictions but I think a new year is as good a time to do that as many folks wonder what the future holds. I...
Budding Adventures in Agentic Software Development 🏔️
The holidays are approaching, and that means we're all busy with, well, everything. I know I am. I'm working hard on making a serious effort to get...
Budding What Can You Learn from Black Friday? 💰
Black Friday is one of the biggest retail days in the US. This year it also had a valuable lesson.
Budding What surgeons learned from changing tires 🚗
I'm about to go on a week-long road trip for Thanksgiving to visit family. I hate driving, so the 32 hours of driving are the inspiration for this...
Budding A Very Serious Survey of Development Techniques 🤡
Here we go again with another "very serious" survey of development techniques that people definitely understand and use well. 10Test-Driven...
Budding Ready for a Halloween tale of chills and thrills? 👻👻👻
I showed my kids the Addam's Family movies from the 90s for the first time this week. They loved it and asked why they're so weird. I told them that...
Budding A Very Serious Survey of Product Prioritization Techniques 🤡
Last night I took my kids to the nearby theme park for their fall festival. "On a school night?" Stop shouting! Sure, we could have gone this weekend...
Budding Stop taking bad interview advice!
I've been working with a lot of folks wanting a new job lately. I've always had a soft spot for helping out folks with what I term a "soul-crushing"...
Budding What happened to creativity and brainstorming? 🧟
Ever notice how brainstorming or creative problem solving kind of suck? This newsletter will dive in to why and what you can do about it.
Budding When You Have to Lead
I was thinking about some conversations I've had with leaders over the years where they've asked how to get their folks to try something new or look...
Budding Thanks for Attending!
{{contact.first_name}}! Esther and I wanted to say thank you for signing up and attending our webinar on how to find better job satisfaction! In the...
Budding What can you learn from the TTRPG gaming community? 🎲
Recently, I've signed up on some sites that will hopefully let me get back into one of my favorite pastimes, playing TTRPGS think Dungeons and...
Budding Job Satisfaction Webinar is Today at 12PM CST!
Check your calendars, grab lunch, and let's talk about job satisfaction today at noon!
Budding Job satisfaction webinar starting now!
there, Our job satisfaction webinar is kicking off right now. Can't wait to see you! Sincerely, Ryan
Budding 2 Days Until Job Satisfaction Webinar!
Make sure you have it on your calendar!
Budding 1 in 4 Companies Reduced Benefits in 2024
There are so many things we let ourselves believe about our jobs and careers. Some of it is because of what we were taught by our parents and...
Budding The Job Satisfier Webinar is on September 18th!
Mark your calendars, our webinar on job satisfaction is September 18th!
Budding Some of the best advice I can give for your next job interview
For those of you who don't know, I have a knack for getting job offers. I like building resumes, interviewing, and negotiating offers. Don't judge...
Budding Agile doesn't have to suck, and neither does your next job. 🤮
Big news! I'm partnering with Esther Derby to host a webinar on how to ensure your next job is the right fit. It's free and we'd love for you to...
Budding The cost of poor meetings.
There is a funny phenomenon that happens for me, so maybe it does for you too—the busier I get, the more inspired I get. It's like a cruel joke where...
Budding Do you know your rhythm?
Sometimes, someone telling you about a book is better than reading it. Sometimes. In my case, several years ago, a Scrum Master had recently finished...
Budding Little Rituals, Big Results 🐸
I'm a fan of rituals and habits. There is comfort in knowing that you have something reliable that works. The tough thing is building rituals and...
Budding A Leadership Lesson from Beekeeping 🐝
At the bottom of this newsletter is a link to one of my recent YouTube videos where I'm working on some hives. If you go to a channel, you'll see a...
Budding Take the step 👟
My wife is returning to work after a 10-year break. She is a natural worrier and planner, so the task of getting a job was not easy for her mentally...
Budding Writing code isn't very productive
Earlier this week I wrote a post that was seen by over 20,000 people. For me, that is viral. You can check out the original here I basically pointed...
Budding The biggest mistake I see in folks doing Scrum (and a free download).
I posted on LinkedIn the other day that I was interested in writing little booklets on leadership topics, and that my outline grew way too large...
Budding Beware the bikeshed my son 🚴♂️
I'm just old enough now that some things I learned early in my career younger people may not know about. This week's email is about one of those...
Budding AI or not to AI 🥸
I've made the mistake of spending more time on LinkedIn and my feed is full of three basic things. One is people talking about basic programming...
Budding Some thoughts on Build vs. Buy.
This will be a brief update, as I'm currently in the midst of packing for a week-long trip with the family. I've had a whole bunch of conversations...
Budding Your next leap as a leader may be one game away. ♟️
If you've everwatched any of my talks, you'll see that I love games. Not just video games, but card games, board games, and even role-playing games...
Budding Can you hear me now? 👂
Around two or three times a year I'll experience an urge to learn a new programming language. Usually, I resist and wait until the feeling passes and...
Budding What happened when researchers studied how developers use their IDE?
One thing I've been trying to do more of is read research papers on topics that I am passionate about, have data on, or deal with regularly at my...
Budding Missed the talk? Don't worry! 😨
I used to speak at conferences around 6 times a year. That was before COVID. I always enjoyed speaking at conferences, but it certainly had its...
Budding Come to my upcoming talk on April 8th! 🤯
Guess what? I'm doing a talk on April 8th, and I'd love for you to attend! My talk is going to try to tackle how to introduce TDD to a non-technical...
Budding Sensors and Signals 🌡️
I've been busy switching up some of my writing on my site, which is challenging, and I hope it pays off. My previous strategy was to write frequently...
Budding I'm giving a talk and I'd love you to join!
This week you'll get a short and sweet email from me. Every so often I do a talk at a conference or for an online group and one of those dates is...
Budding Are Self-Managing Teams Worth It Or Just Hype?
I mentioned in my previous email that I've been reworking my site in preparing for some larger changes. I posted my first new article that is based...
Budding The Delegation Trap 🐋
I don't know about you, but I'm busy bouncing between lots of different things this month. A lot of my activities are related to beekeeping, so I'll...
Budding 🤯There are two types of coders and neither believes the other is sane.
One of the things I love about consulting is that I get to see so many different approaches to things across my clients. While I don't typically...
Budding Here's where everyone's attempt to be efficient falls apart
I've been working on growing my skillset in marketing lately. Marketing is my biggest weakness by far. In the past two months I've taken 4 online...
Budding Have you tried the Balanced Scorecard?
You know what sucks? Massive powerpoint decks full of updates and nothing informative. It sucks to sit through slide after slide of updates and try...
Budding Why your teams aren't self-managing and what you can do about it 💻
When you're in a leadership position, it can feel like all of your time is used up by having to intervene on one crisis or another. Instead of...
Budding This email is for folks serious about leadership
Change is inevitable. It could affect the direction of work, staff, technologies, laws, ownership, compensation, organization, and more. Great...
Budding 📄 How to create standards people follow instead of subvert
I'm sure you've seen this—a standards document covered in layers of dust with groups operating to the cry of, "No, this is an exception!" I know I...
Budding Take a step even if you aren't sure of the end
Yes, I know you haven't received an email from me in a while. I hope you endured these dark times. I was thinking about a common pattern that I deal...
Budding Safety matters more than ever
As we enter the holiday season, plenty of news stories indicate that many people will experience stress, fear, and outrage. In case you haven't been...
Budding 2024 is almost over and Sprint Goals are still weird.
Back in 2011 the world's most popular agile framework, Scrum, changed. You see prior to that, every time the team planned a sprint they were told...
Budding A set of tools for better meetings 🧙♂️
I'm going to keep this email pretty short and sweet. I hate crappy meetings, and way too many meetings are, in fact, crappy. Lots of people don't...
Budding The Clean House Fallacy
I was thinking the other day about some conversations I've had with former clients and at various jobs, and in my mind, they kept coming back to a...
Budding Pushing for speed is almost always a bad idea. Almost.
I was thinking about a client of mine that is remarkable and abnormal. Something really unique about them is that they are an exception to something...
Budding The shape of tests ✅
Today's email is going to get a bit technical. You see, one of the things I wind up teaching teams as they go from good to great is how to test their...
Budding What is your legacy?
For those of you who don't know, before I became a consultant, I was a job hopper. The longest I spent at any job was two years, and I'd say...
Budding One of my favorite movie quotes starts, "I've been listening to my guts for 11 years..."
The whole quote is, "I've been listening to my guts for 11 years, and they have shit for brains!" This is from the movie High Fidelity, in which the...
Budding Local optimizations are great!
Last night my wife and I went to a concert and while we were walking from our car to the venue we saw a special VIP parking area guarded by a teen...
Budding Fall Prep Isn't Just For the Bees 🐝
I don't know about the rest of you, but I do know I get that weird itch in Spring that I need to clean up and make everything feel fresh again. I...
Budding What I Learned From a Fire
Take a look at this photo! Now, this photo is from the 4th of July at my in-laws place. This is a wildfire that started on their property. What isn't...
Budding Would you eat at a restaurant run by software developers?
I think and use a lot of metaphors in my work. None are perfect, but there is one that has been rolling around in my head for years. For those of you...
Budding Projects and Products
It is interesting to hear the shifts that are happening across clients. No, I'm not talking about every company trying to throw AI at everything. I'm...
Budding What does washing your hands have to do with software? 🙌🫧
Back in the 19th century Which, if your brain is anything like mine, requires that you explicitly remember that means the years starting with 18...
Budding Simulate simulate simulate 💻
I haven't written in a while. I miss you too. Life got very busy for me very quickly. One week, I was ramping up with a new client; the next, I was...
Budding Don't Look Back
One thing that keeps me going is the feedback I get from clients and co-workers. If you know me in person, you know I can't take a compliment, and...
Budding Enough with bad meetings
One of my favorite topics to rant about is meetings. In particular, how bad they usually are and how easy they are to fix. So, I thought I'd scratch...
Budding Doing the Unthinkable
Somehow, we went from winter to waking up one morning to Spring and all of the allergies that come with it. I almost never get allergies, and I don't...
Budding The Model Paradox
Yesterday, I went and split my beehives. This was actually the first time I did this, so while the process seemed normal, it was a little challenging...
Budding Models and Measures
One of the things I've done my whole career is try to quantify the impact of improvements. I distinctly remember obsessing over the size of the...
Budding Boundaries of Change
Why is change so hard? One reason is that it takes time for folks to adjust to a new condition, and that time of adaptation is often unpleasant...
Budding Data Analytics Trap
Earlier this week, a friend showed me a video in which a CIO explained how they view setting up analytics for an organization. In a nutshell, they...
Budding Is assuming positive intent enough?
Today, my son won an award at school for exemplifying one of the character attributes they're trying to teach. The award was for assuming positive...
Budding Team Structures and Efficiency Aren't Intuitive
There's a very long-standing topic that folks have pretty strong opinions on, but rarely have I seen much consensus around, and that is how to...
Budding Know Your Target 🎯
I've been busy applying to conferences, and there is a topic that I feel I'm perfectly suited to speak on, but I always hesitate to submit the talk...
Budding See Ya Later Scrum Master 👻
I heard enough feedback on my last newsletter that I made it a formal post on my blog. You can find the link below if you want to share it with...
Budding Beekeeping and Organizations
Last week, I didn't send my normal newsletter out because I was in Louisville, Kentucky, at the North American Honey Bee Expo. It was pretty wild...
Budding New year, new skills
In my house, the holiday season has been full of family, activities, and food. Not rest, though. Never rest. Still, I thought I'd write a quick...
Budding Ew, your risk is exposed. 🤢
I've got a few things swirling around in my head as I write this email. Last Friday reko.day was approved and put in the Apple App Store. It's a free...
Budding Perect is the enemy of good
This morning at 12:22AM I received an email from Apple approving my reko.day app. My daily routine this past week has been responding to whatever...
Budding The book that impacted me the most.
I recently wrote an article about books that made a difference to me, and I want to mention one that impacted me the most since 2017.
Budding Cautious Optimism About AI
It's almost Thanksgiving here in the US, which means lots of planning for food and cleaning the house for guests. In fact, I'm in a hurry to get this...
Budding What's the Next Big Thing Here? 🤔
Today's email will be a bit different. Typically my emails focus on one topic, but this time I will bring up a few things. High-Performing Teams I...
Budding HBF - Case Study: Team In College? No Problem
I thought it'd be fun to write a little case study from one of the teams I built. This one is unique in that I didn't follow my 3-month roadmap with...
Budding HBT - In the Margins
After looking through my last email, I thought I should maybe provide a little bit of visibility into things that I'm almost always fixing and...
Budding HBT - Celebrate? 🎉
In my last email, I wrote about the point of no return, but what happens after? Sadly, most teams will experience attrition as leaders refuse to...
Budding A Few Thoughts on Teams 🤔
I haven't forgotten about you. I've been busy with my other venture, reko.day, beekeeping, and summer vacation! I saw some excitement on LinkedIn the...
Budding Enough with the crappy tests already
I was on a call with a client recently, and they were showing the tests they wrote for some user stories. I often ask to look at tests with teams new...
Budding When Opportunity Knocks 🚪
Last night I was working on my beehives until 11 PM. It was raining too. Now, us beekeepers are odd folks, but working on hives at night in the rain...
Budding Best Way to Know Your Product is Worth It 💯
On the path to building a product there are lots of things to prove, but the best indicator I know of success is when they buy it before it exists.
Budding Playing Jenga for Change
This will be a quick email this morning since I am rushing to get out the door and go on a field trip with my oldest son. That same son, yesterday...
Budding Let's Learn Something
Yesterday I was at my local Beekeeping Association meeting, and the speaker was going through how he creates Nucs from within a hive. For those of...
Budding The (un)Importance of Measurements ⁉️
Last week I wrote about OKRs, and it got a bit of attention, so I thought I'd write this time about the world of measurements. Overwhelmingly people...
Budding Why I Don't Use OKRs 🥵
Ever had those times when things just keep going wrong? Maybe not catastrophically, but just enough where you can't get back into a rhythm? That's...
Budding What're you building for? 🤨
It's so easy to get tunnel vision on things and let that small area of focus be the gauge of what's going on around you. I've been sad because of one...
Budding Reader Question: "Why did you say to avoid mocking?" ✉️
Last week I wrote about operational excellence and I made a comment that resulted in questions about my stance against using Mocking frameworks. So...
Budding In Pursuit of Operational Excellence 📈
I hope you had a lovely New Year. I stopped making resolutions since I'd always pick something too ambitious and feel stuck because of it. Instead, I...
Budding Happy Holidays
I hope you and yours are bundled up warm. The cold front that is hitting the country hit us yesterday, dropping our temperatures to -6 and -25...
Budding A Deep Dive Into Types of Tests 🌊
I'm recovering from a minor surgery this week and while I thought I'd wind up being really productive with my prescription of bed rest, no such thing...
Budding Elon Is Everywhere
Elon's leadership approach with Twitter is dominating the chatter and its not good. Yet, there are Elons in your company now causing harm. What's going on?
Budding Some Tips for Communication ☎️
Well, we moved into our new home on Tuesday, and my family immediately got sick. I'm choosing to look at the upside here, which is that we got to...
Budding The Importance of Career Liquidity 🌊
Layoffs in the tech industry are all over the news and combining that with the holiday season makes for some bleak times for folks. This is why career liquidity matters.
Budding A Bit About Hurricanes ⚡
Let me begin this email with the hope that if you or your loved ones are affected by hurricane Ian that they get the help, they need quickly. I don't...
Budding What Can I Do For You? 🤔
Last week it was 90 degrees, and this week it's in the 70s with brisk mornings. Almost like someone flipped a switch and said it's Fall now. A quick...
Budding Getting the Bookends of Product Right 📚
Everyone is quick to nail down the core features of a product, but most forget that first impression of onboarding or how to support a customer leaving.
Budding A Tale of Two Leaders ⁉️
A few quick updates here before I get into the main topic of my email. First, I should have the second article in my team-building series up later...
Budding Nobody Told Me That! How To Fix Common Communication Issues ☎️
Most organizations specialize in top-down communication and have poor criteria for what to bubble up. This leads to lots of frustration, rework, and challenges. So how do you address it?
Budding Starting A New Business 👀
This week's newsletter is going to be a bit different. I want to share a bit about something I haven't discussed: the new business my wife and I...
Budding A Quick Question 🤔
There are times when I've had to accept that my aptitude isn't always what I wish it was. Sort of like, I know there are a few things I'm good at...
Budding The Tooling Trap 👀
When companies and teams are confronted by a problem, they search for a tool. The problem is that tools only work if the underlying behavior exists. So start with the behavior first.
Budding The Wonder of No-Code 🏝️
Nothing like meetings before 9 AM to throw off your day. I always have some idea I want to try out for a business or product. Sometimes I take it...
Budding The Power of the Written Word ⚡
Copywriting is the profession of using the written word for effective marketing. It's a fascinating subject to me that can make a huge impact on my effectiveness and yours.
Budding The Trick Frameworks Play on Us 👻
I couldn't sleep last night. That gave me some time to think about what I'd write in this little newsletter. I thought I'd write about a topic I can...
Budding Seek Mentors 🥰
Our industry needs to take mentoring more seriously if it is ever going to grow. Here's a series of steps to formalize and begin a mentoring relationship.
Budding When There is Too Much of a Good Thing
Also, happy July 4th weekend! I thought I'd share an update on my bees. I set up my first two bee-hives at the end of March, and I've been checking...
Budding Challenge: The TWiG Game
It seems that no matter how many times I work with groups or even the same ones there's a question that will always come up that has to do with...
Budding An Attempt at Engineering Benchmarks
LinearB has created a set of engineering benchmarks that I think you need to see. They aren't perfect, but they are absolutely useful for inspiring change.
Budding Putting the Reps in for Change 🏋️♀️
Lots of people are paralyzed when it comes to taking action doing something new. By encouraging repetitions, you can get past the paralysis and get to improvement.
Budding Form an Alliance with Legal
It seems like for the past few weeks it has been raining non-stop where I am. I don't mind the rain, but it keeps me from checking on my bees which I...
Budding Is Security the Next Strategic Differentiator?
Better design, more features, and connecting different concepts are the core of most products, but I think security and privacy are going to be the next big differentiator.
Budding Picking Your Problems 🌵
I sat down at my computer this morning wondering what I'd write about today and a conversation I had with a senior leader came into my head that I'm...
Budding Getting Past a Performance Plateau 🗻
I was working with a client and over the few months we worked together the teams went through a fairly rapid set of changes. When the dust settled...
Budding The Language of Stuck 🔐
At one point or another every team gets stuck in a rut where they can't improve, and I want to share what to listen for to detect when its happened, and what you can do about it.
Budding Do You Code Review Your Tests 🎢
Why do we mostly code review only our code and not the tests that protect us? Here are some things to look for in tests.
Budding How Does Engineering Get Time For Tech Debt? 👻
Product wants to keep adding features, but engineering needs time to clean up tech debt. What are your options?
Budding A Couple Quick Links 😁
Some interesting links and resources for you to check out this fine Friday.
Budding The Power of Why ❓
Last week I took a small snapshot into the practicality and economics of testing, and thank you to everyone who responded and even shared it. Moments...
Budding A Case for Tests
I know all of you wake up each Friday in anticipation for my emails, and last week I missed and this week its coming late. I apologize for that, and...
Budding I'd Like to Share a Success 🥰
I would like to start this email out with a bit of a confession. I don't handle compliments well. One of the things I've been trying to work on for a...
Budding Onboarding and CCPA 😴
I was sitting down this morning to work on this newsletter when my inbox had an email from someone requesting I delete all the information I have...
Budding Collect Options 🍭
Well, a few days ago I got hit with the snowstorm that I'm sure has affected many of you. So I'm writing from a drafty room by a window at my in-laws...
Budding How Much Are You Worth? 💵
I work with a lot of people who are trying to get a new job and get hung up on the compensation. They inevitably experience a dilemma of seeing how...
Budding Why I don't mock in tests 🤔
I am taking a break from reading building codes to send you an email about another pretty dull seeming topic--test mocking. The building codes are...
Budding Rituals and Piseogs ✨
I bet several of you are looking at the word piseog for the first time. I bumped into it in one of my favorite books, "The Once and Future King."...
Budding A Magic Phrase that Inspires Change 🎆
Hope your holidays went well and that your new year is starting off well. I personally find myself adjusting rather slowly back to a normal-ish...
Budding Why Running Into Failure is Better than Running Away From It 🏎💥
I took a short break from my newsletter without announcing it, and I apologize for that. My clients have called me back out to some limited travel...
Budding Why I Love Sprint Reviews 🎭
There is a lot on my mind lately with holidays and work. I'll confess now I haven't been writing as much as I should, so as I write this I was going...
Budding Runbooks and RICE 🍙🍛
This week's email will be a little bit of a grab bag of stuff, so bear with me. There was a discussion in an engineering leadership community about...
Budding Mastering a Technical Interview 💻
I hope you all had a great Halloween weekend. In our house, it was the best one yet. My oldest son is really just now old enough to get into the...
Budding Another Small Way to Strengthen a Team 💪
You probably noticed that this email is coming to you later than normal. I've been helping someone get ready for a Scrum Master certification and...
Budding Apologies for the Broken Link
there, The email you just got from me has a broken link to the article. Here's the correct one It's almost like I could've tested this before I sent...
Budding Don't Punish the Punctual 👂
I got some interesting responses from my last email where I described the two-breath rule to help make stand-ups end on time for once, and I thought...
Budding Getting Standups to Finish in 15 Minutes ⌚
Everyone I've ever worked with thinks their stand-ups is a pointless status meeting. They're not, but I don't fault people for feeling that way...
Budding A Story of Pair Programming 💻💻
I was thinking this morning back to things I attribute to excellence in my career, and I found myself remembering a story about when I was...
Budding Putting Wind in Team's Sails ⛵
I've found there are a few topics that many clients of mine that will create a fervent agreement to until the moment I suggest doing the work...
Budding Learning on the Edge 💻
This morning I was thinking back on the importance of learning and how much of an accelerant it has been for me. Currently, I'm learning about...
Budding The Single Best Technique I Know To Grow Technical Skill ✨
I've been thinking a bit about a few things, and I would love your help. You see, I live in two worlds professionally. By day I help companies build...
Budding Eliminating Product-Market Risk 📈
You'll notice I have a whole lot of articles below. I'm going back and editing them a bit more for syndication on a development website. They're...
Budding Looking At Horizons 🌅
I was thinking this morning as I looked at my current situation about the nature of change and the view I have to keep bringing myself back to. There...
Budding What is the Right Mix of Skills? 🍰
Today I woke up thinking about skill liquidity. Seriously, I'm weird. Before I get into that and how you can use it, I thought I'd let you know that...
Budding How I Generated Revenue Before Production 💰
As the week closes I was thinking about a business I started with my wife in 2015 that we ultimately put on hold, until recently. A few years prior...
Budding Reflecting On Career Coaching 🤔
In the past few of my emails, I've mentioned my first ever online course to help tech folk get the jobs they want and negotiate better. I've got...
Budding Testing a Ball of Mud 🚛
I gave a talk for a conference late last month and there were 195 attendees! I gave a talk on a topic I bump into all the time which is when there is...
Budding Team Metrics I Use 📈
You might notice this email is coming to you a little later than normal. Its just one of those days. I'm taking my son camping this weekend so I've...
Budding A Small Secret That Motivates Teams 🤐
I have finally completed something that I've wanted to do for a few months, but with selling the house and moving I had to put it on hold. I'll share...
Budding The Small Question for Big Results 🐜
I was thinking about some of the cycles that I see and experience when I work with clients. One of those cycles involves feeling paralyzed. For the...
Budding A Terrible Interview Question and What to Do About It 🎬
there! Things are almost unpacked in the new house and that means I'm about to go full-steam ahead on a new venture. I'll write about that at the end...
Budding Does your framework own you? 🧟♂️
The great unpacking continues in our new home. It is a miracle that our kids haven't torn apart every box and scattered their contents everywhere...
Budding Customer Service 😵💫
This email will be pretty short today. I'm sitting in my office on my laptop in a house that is basically empty. Tomorrow I drive our moving truck to...
Budding Taking a Stand 🦶🦶
I've been preparing for our move to Arkansas next week, and the people I tell about this move always have one question, "Why Arkansas?" The answer is...
Budding Example of Subtle Strategy 🐱👤🐱👤
I've been working on some product strategy for a client and while I was mapping and creating options I felt a sense of defeat. You see, what I was...
Budding Not All Founders Are Leaders 😫
So much to talk about today! The option period on our home is done and there were no repair requests. Now we're in the home stretch of closing on...
Budding The Importance of Downtime
Hi, Well, it took a few nights of staying up until midnight, but we got the house ready for showings in ten days. I should buy stock in Bayer. There...
Budding The Clean House Paradox
there! Last week my wife and I decided to sell our home. Then, foolishly, we said we'd try to have it ready for showing in 10 days. Now, there's a...
Budding How Do You Know? 📏
This week I was inspired to write based on some other people's conversation. First up is about code reviews. While I do think code reviews are really...
Budding Who Loves Estimation? 🥵
For some reason I've been on a kick writing about estimation and things like that lately. Below you'll find an article that introduces six different...
Budding The Cost of Great ☠
I've been thinking quite a bit of how teams break up. This is probably pretty clear from my recent newsletters. Along those lines, I've updated a lot...
Budding Estimate Anything 🎂
This week I have a mix of things to write about. I'll start by talking a little bit about estimation. I wrote an article about the way I use a...
Budding Growth Mindset, SolarWinds, and Knowledge Transfer. Oh My 🌴
I recently picked up the book Mindset Dr. Carol Dweck. I think this book is on a lot of people's lists as a great book to read, and so I finally...
Budding Impact Map for Fun and Profit 🌎
I hope your week has gone well and is coming to close on a high-note. I want to share two things in this email. I'm currently helping a team...
Budding Eating an Ice Cream Cone 🍦
Today I'll be keeping this email a bit short. I live in Texas and it's been a crazy week with all the weather. Yesterday marked the last day of...
Budding Dependency Confusion 🤔
there, Today I'm going to mix things up a bit. I've been consumed with a bunch of riveting things like tax season and moving to a new bank after...
Budding Know vs Trust 🎭
Hope you're doing well this Friday! I've been giving a lot of thought to some of the more extreme or stressful moments of my career. I wrote several...
Budding GameStop and the Final Fantasy of Products
So I think pretty much everyone knows something about the GameStop stock thing. I have to say it was an obsession all week of mine and how timely...
Budding Code and Money
The first month of 2021 is coming to a close, and it has been a crazy start to the new year! As tax season winds up I've been giving thought a lot...
Budding Who Are You Really? 👀
The whole idea of a new year full of potential is top of mind for me. I wrote earlier about taking time to know more about who you are. I think this...
Budding Happy New Year 🍾
Seasons Greetings, 2020 had it all. I think for a lot of us, it was a pretty uneven mix of good and bad. I wanted to write a little bit about what...
Budding System Design Interview Tutorial 📽
I've been consumed with all the rush in the holidays, but I didn't forget about you! We're coming to the end of the year, and that means new...
Budding Goal Setting and Schools
I hope you all had a good and safe Thanksgiving. I attempted to smoke a turkey for the first time, and I have to say it came out pretty darn good!...
Budding When to Break the Rules 🔨
Things are pretty quiet this week as we get ready for the holidays. I've been thinking more about my offerings to people both as a consultant and as...
Budding Stand-Ups, Meetings, Procrastination and More 👀
I realized I wrote a lot about career stuff lately, so I switched gears a little to write about what I do as a consultant a little more. Now, in...
Budding Happy Halloween! 🎃
A little bit ago I did a panel discussion with the Agile Alliance to help people navigate their technical careers. It was my first panel discussion...
Budding I'm Hosting an AMA For Career Questions ✨
there! Today at 2PM CST I'm going to try out my streaming setup to get ready to offer more webinars and support my new class - Your $10k Resume. So I...
Budding The Ups and Downs of Recruiters ☎️
Today's the day. I'm going to start promoting my first online class Your $10k Resume I did a trial the other day and someone pointed out that a lot...
Budding 💍 One Resume to Rule Them All
Last week I offered a 1-hour resume consultation to 5 people. Four scheduled time with me in less than 24 hours. While these aren't impressive...
Budding 💣💣Who Wants a 1-Hour Resume Consultation?
Hi gang, I thought its time for me to get a little serious about the career mentoring I do. Some of you know me because of that, some of you don't...
Budding Apply to Jobs You Don't Want 🐱🏍
🗒️ Apply to Jobs You Don’t Want When I mentor people trying to land their first few jobs in development, I often encourage them to apply to multiple...
Budding What’s My Value
🗒️ How I Stopped On Call Support For the first few jobs in my career, I lived with what many did, the dreaded on-call rotation. That is, for the...
Budding When is Done, Done? ⏲
🗒️ When is Done, Done? ⏲ You’re probably noticing my emails are a bit different. I’m trying out a new provider. Let me know what you think about the...
Seedling 2026 Goals
Budding Beekeeping Lesson - Cub Scouts
Seedling Beekeeping
Seedling Hives
Budding Queen Rearing with Corey Stevens
Seedling Acing Remote Interviews
Seedling Apply to Jobs You Don’t Want
Seedling Habit: Asking For Help
Seedling Avoiding a Common Mistake Searching for Jobs
Seedling The Basics of Salary Negotiation
Seedling Behind the Scenes of a Technical Interview
Seedling Blame the Intern
Seedling Crystal Clear
Budding Details and Options
One of the best interview techniques I've developed is called "Details and Options." It helps you navigate interviewers who ask questions with no right answer. Mastering this technique will greatly improve your chances of getting an offer.
Seedling Enough Tutorials Already!
Seedling 4 Reasons You Didn’t Get The Job
Seedling Habit: Checking-In
Seedling Habit: Update your Resume
Seedling How I’m Building My First Online Class
Seedling I’ll Never Be Good Enough
Seedling How I’m Creating an Online Class So You Can Too
Seedling The Importance of Breaks
Seedling Imposter Syndrome After a Decade
Seedling One Resume to Rule Them All
Seedling Practice Those Interviews
Seedling Resume Double Duty - Getting a Raise
Seedling Should I Go Back to School?
Seedling What’s My Value
Seedling Six-Figure Resume: Build a Resume With This Successful Format
Seedling Six-Figure Resume: Avoid These Resume Mistakes That Are Keeping You From Getting Interviewed
Seedling Six-Figure Resume: Building a Resume With No Dev Experience? No Problem!
Seedling Six-Figure Resume: How To Put Your Resume To Work And Get Interviewed and Promoted
Seedling Six-Figure Resume: Hey Devs! Your Portfolio Won’t Get You a Job, But Your Resume Will!
Seedling The Cold Interview
Seedling The Impossible Bar of a Professional
Seedling The Interviewing Cast
Seedling The Ups and Downs of Recruiters
Seedling Thinking About a Portfolio Site?
Seedling Time To Go
Seedling Want to Get More Interviews?
Ever wondered why you don’t get an interview at some companies? The answer is that your resume wasn’t good enough. In this article, I will take a few moments to explain why that is and a few things you can do to stand out more.
Seedling What Lifestyle Do You Want?
Seedling What Recruiters Don’t Tell You
Seedling When Keywords Unlock Your Resume
Seedling Write a Resume that Doesn’t Suck
Seedling Case Study: 10 Years of Scope in 6 Months
A nonprofit wanted to build a mobile app and signed with a boutique consultancy to make it happen. After analyzing the promised scope it became clear that it would take 10-years to accomplish. This case study breaks down how I turned 10 years into 6 months.
Seedling Case Study: Building a SaaS Business From the Ground Up
A Fortune 10 company with decades of traditional IT thinking asked me to build them their first profitable software product. We had customers ready to pay within the first three months.
Seedling Mind Map of Building Teams
Seedling Facilitation Mind Map
Seedling 3 Questions to Better Actions
Seedling 3 Tips for Guerrilla Facilitation
Seedling 4 Steps to Better Action
Seedling A Blind Retrospective
Seedling A Comment on Commenting
Seedling A Vignette of Kaizen
Budding AI: Use With Care
Everyone is excited about AI and what it can do to automate our lives, but I want to caution everyone about believing the hype. I will break down the strenghts and critical weaknesses of LLMs and how to make the most of them so you don't get burned.
Seedling Agile Isn't Dead, But Your Career Might Be
Folks on social media are claiming agile is dead, but I don't agree. I think people's careers are. Too many people have been yelling agile for too long and there's nothing to show for it. We have to connect what we do to what is valuable or get a new job.
Seedling An Open Letter to the Agile Industry
Seedling Are Scrum Masters Worth It?
In a short-answer, no. Most Scrum Masters are certified, but don't even know the rules of Scrum. Does that mean the role is dead? No! It means we need to raise the bar in how we find the folks who make a difference in companies and live up to the role of Scrum Master.
Seedling The Best Money I Spent in 2018
Evergreen Better Communication for Busy Leaders
Miscommunication cripples productivity in groups. In this article you'll learn the root causes of miscommunication and effective countermeasures to stay productuve.
Seedling A List of Books that Made a Difference
We're shaped by so many things over the years, and in this article I want to share a list of books that had a huge impact on my professionally.
Seedling Bounded and Centered
Seedling Bringing Conversation to a Point Using ORID
Evergreen Make Your Next Build vs. Buy Decision Like Fight Club
Build vs buy is a challenging decision, but when we want to build because an incident left a bad taste we need to do a risk assessment. Thankfully the movie Fight Club teaches this accurately and you can learn too and avoid costly mistakes.
Seedling Can AI Replace a Scrum Master?
Can AI replace one of the oddest roles in agility? In this post I review a script to facilitate sprint planning to see how it compares.
Seedling Can You Hard-Boil an Egg?
Seedling Choosing a Tech Stack
Seedling Cost Is A Constraint, Not A Concern
Seedling Crash Course in Constraints
Seedling Dear Architects, Do Better
Software architects need to do better. When I work with an architect I want to see the math, choose designs appropriate to the competencies, have evolutionary design, and take security and privacy seriously.
Seedling Deciding Fast and Deciding Slow
Organizations would love to make decisions faster, but simply speeding up is ruinous. Instead focus on some minimal guardrails for decisions and you'll speed up and have better decisions too.
Seedling A Developer’s Guide To a Stand-Up That Doesn’t Suck
Seedling Developers Working Late
Budding Does Theory of Constraints Make Sense for Software?
Theory of Constraints promises to help improve systems, and books like The Phoenix Project tell a story of how it can happen. Though, for most groups, the Theory of Constraints is a bad fit, and I'll explain why.
Seedling Dos and Don’ts for Decision Making
Budding The Dos and Don'ts of Refactoring
Refactoring to many teams means clean up the code, but they've also been burned by long refactoring projects that didn't improve much. In this article I'll share the basic dos and don'ts about refactoring to consistently improve code with low risk.
Seedling The Emperor’s New Clothes
Seedling Exploiting Opportunity
Seedling Fake Deadlines
Seedling Freelancers, Contractors, and Agencies, Oh My!
Seedling Getting Started With Pomodoro
Seedling The Good, Bad, and Ugly of the Popular Agile Frameworks
So much noise online about agile frameworks and which is best. The arguments and debate leave leaders uninformed as they need to make a choice. In this article I break down the good, bad, and ugly of Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe.
Seedling Hacking My Productivity
Seedling Hacking Procrastination
Seedling How I Conquered My Inbox
Seedling How I Define a Team
Seedling How Long Should We Meet?
Seedling How To Delegate
Seedling How to Estimate Anything Quickly
Seedling How to Introduce an Activity as a Facilitator
Seedling HPF - Good vs. Bad Teams
Another in my high-performing team series covering some examples of good and bad teams. See how your team stacks up.
Seedling High-Performing Team Series - Why Fuss over Teams?
The first in a series about building high-performing teams and why it matters. Teams can have higher satisfaction, improve rapidly, and more stability than traditional individual performance management.
Seedling I Hate Efficiency
Seedling I Never Said That!
Budding The Innovation Paradox: The Many Minds of A Leader
Does innovation come at the cost of stability? How do you manage performance when you're doing something new? Welcome to the innovation paradox and what you can do about it.
Seedling Invisible Member
Budding Its a Secret
In many organizations information is power. In this article I explain what information brokerage is, hoarding information, signaling to gain power, and leveraging taboos. By the end you'll have some helpful tips to navigate organizations and groups better by how you leverage information.
Seedling It’s Always My Last Day
Seedling Learning Under Pressure
Seedling Making A Case to Your Manager
Seedling Maximize Your Time With Pomodoro
Seedling Missing Skill: Facilitation
Seedling Running the Name Game
Seedling Normalization of Deviance
Seedling On Being Better Gardners
Seedling One Tip to Make Feedback Less Terrible
Seedling People and System Thinking
Seedling Permission to Choose
Agency is all about making meaningful choices. Yet, many organizations strip this away in favor of tight controls. Yet, the best teams I've ever seen operate with a lot of agency, and so make agency a focal point in creating teams as well. A good place to start is meetings.
Seedling Piercing The Veil With Failure
Evergreen Poorly Built Racecars Don't Win
If racecars were built the way most organizations build software, they'd never finish a race. Organization's singular focus on speed creates ruinous levels of quality. Shifting to focus on quality first, on the other hand, creates huge time savings and having a car that finishes the race.
Seedling Problem, Observation, Solution
Seedling Quick and Effective Delegation for Busy Leaders
Learning to delegate can be one of the most significant factors in how much time leaders have to focus on strategic initiatives, the growth and development of their people, and devoting crucial time to emerging crises. This article breaks down how to delegate effectively, when to delegate, and how to grow your capabilities.
Seedling Refactoring Makes You Happy! Do it!
Seedling Release First, Develop Second
Waiting until development is done to deploy is a mistake, and reversing that reltionship builds operational excellence early.
Seedling Scrum Masters Make People Out of Employees
Seedling Seven Weird Lessons From the Fortune 100
It sometimes feels like nothing makes sense when you work for a large company. In this article I’m going to share seven unspoken and odd truths that if you master, you can get anything done.
Seedling Sex, STDs, and Software
Seedling A Short List of Unhealthy Beliefs
A brief list of various unhealthy beliefs I've encountered in organizations that impede progress and often hurt people.
Seedling So You Want to be an Architect?
Seedling Start Less, Finish More
Starting less means finishing more. This goes against every intuition we have, yet is backed by Little’s Law. Focus on finishing before starting something new.
Budding Stop Doing Things the Hard Way
I spent my early years believing a lie that what I learned struggling alone was more valuable than what I learned with help. I meet too many developers and leaders walking that same path. Stop spending years of your career standing still, get help, and accelerate your growth.
Seedling Taking a Stance
Seedling Taking Two Bites Of an Ice Cream Cone
Seedling Tales of Efficiency
Most groups pride themselves on what they believe is efficient, but is it? Here’s a satirical example of a typical developer’s life and their view on efficiency.
Seedling The Addictiveness of Failure
Seedling Book Review - The Checklist Manifesto
The Checklist Manifesto is a fascinating book about the effects of checklists done well. This review covers a few key takeaways and an example we can use in the software industry.
Seedling The Life-Changing Magic of Flat Code
Seedling The One Remote Person
Budding The Red Bead Experiment
What does a bin full of beads tell us about quality and improving systems? In this article I explain a bit about a small activity created by Deming that helps managers see the importance of building systems and processes that create quality instead of problems.
Seedling There Is No Best
Seedling Thinking on Theory of Constraints
Most people have read The Phoenix Project, but not many understand the Theory of Constraints it talks about. I want to tell you how to get started and a few tips to help your transformation.
Seedling Three Column Retrospectives Are Killing Your Teams
Everyone knows the start, stop, and continue retrospective. That retrospective is terrible for helping teams improve because it leads to poor decisions, lots of assumptions, and lacks connection to the real world.
Seedling Three Costly Mistakes of Technical Teams
Technical teams often shout for improvments. More design, less testing, and new tools are common requests. However, these requests are often far more costly than the problems that exist today. This article explains the root of the issues here and how to address them.
Seedling Three Reasons Scrum May Not Be Working Out For You
Hurrying into development, a project manager pretending as a Scrum Master, and lame Sprint Reviews are three reasons your experience with Scrum sucks. In this article I explore each of these and ways to address them.
Seedling Three Things I Wish I Knew as a Developer
Out of a million things I learned in my career in software, there are three uncommon lessons I learned: Slow down, sleep well, and experiment.
Budding Tick-Tock of the Agile Clock
Almost every agile approach focuses on teams and short sprints. Unfortunately businesses need to think on longer time horizons and so we need better tools to help leaders respond better. In this article I show a simple way to set goals and measure them at any time scale.
Seedling A Tidy Home - A slicing and planning game
Seedling Tidying Up Agile
A tongue-in-cheek look at how the KonMari method of tidying applies to agile teams.
Evergreen Two Types of Motivation Every Leader Should Know
Motivating teams is as much an art as it is science. Knowing about extrinsic and intrinsic motivators can help leaders in their approach of building the best performing groups possible, and avoid poisoning morale.
Evergreen Two Underdeveloped Leadership Skills
The two most important skills that leaders need to grow are their facilitation and delegation skills. Mastery of both improves decision-making, frees up time, and builds better organizations.
Seedling Unleashing Constraints
Seedling We Ain’t Got Time for That
“I just need more time,” is something we hear all the time from various developers. Yet, that often means they aren’t seeking the help of other experts. This is a costly mistake from junior developers all the way to architects.
Seedling We Are All Balloons in Boxes
Seedling Tell Me About Yourself
Seedling What Happens After Standup?
Seedling What Makes Good Teams Great
Making great teams takes a lot, but in this article I want to dive into three ingredients. A great team knows they have an impact on decisions, a strong sense of team, and they are relentless in pursuing mastery.
Seedling What Might We Learn From Parler?
Budding What is my software team's capacity
How do you know what your team's capacity is and if they have enough for the project or work ahead? It doesn't matter how you estimate, you can get a very clear and consistent picture of capacity with my method.
Budding What the Greeks and Romans Can Teach Us About Design
The ancient Greeks developed so many concepts we use today, and they were able to do this largely by thinking alone. Romans, on the other hand, were practical and preferred to build their ideas. What do these two competing philosophies have to do with software?
Seedling When is Done, Done? ⏲
Seedling When It Comes to Knowledge Transfer
Seedling When Performance Matters
Seedling When to Break the Rules
Seedling When to Stop Work
Seedling When You're Asked to Help Someone
If you get asked to help some other group, what should you think about before you start? Know the situation, risks, and their interest before you start.
Seedling My Love Affair With “Tell, Don’t Ask”
Seedling Work Early to Work Remote
Seedling Some Work From Home Tips
Seedling WTF Meeting
Budding You're Agile, Now What?
Scrum and agile dominate the development world, but most folks are frustrated with how little things improved. In this article I share 3 common problems people face post-agile, and small adjustments to remedy them.
Budding I got dirt under my nails from my digital garden
Budding The 5-Minute Rule ⏰
Budding The story of the Mai Tai 🍹
Seedling Can You Go Too Far With Your Product?
Seedling Estimate Value Not Complexity
Story Points are in every agile shop, but often fall short of any expected use. So lets explore estimating stories by value instead.
Seedling Features and Gambling
Is adding that next feature the right move, or a foolish bet? Building software products has a lot in common with gambling in a casino, so play your cards right.
Seedling Feature Soup
Seedling For Sale: Software, Never Used
Budding Get People on the Same Page in Under a Minute
Quickly sharing an idea, so people get on the same page quickly is essential in a fast-paced environment. Here's a technique where you speak at 3 levels of detail that get people on the same page in less than a minute.
Seedling Getting Started Using the RICE Prioritization Method
Seedling Getting Started With the Lean Canvas
The Lean Canvas has been around for years, but I find many people aren’t familiar with it. In this article I tell you how to get started and use it to gain interest and de-risk that next product idea.
Seedling The Hardest Question
Building a successful software product requires answering thousands of important questions throughout its lifecycle. Yet, there is one question that if you can master, will make every other answer even better.
Seedling How To Break Work Down
Breaking work down correctly can be the difference of taking 2-3x longer or not. This article explains how to break work down correctly for iteration and de-risking things compared to the wrong way that everyone does.
Budding Magic Quadrants in Product Development
Magic quadrants are a useful tool for groups to sort through ideas. I want to show two ways you can use this activity in the early stages of product development to both find new product ideas and quickly eliminate their risks of failure.
Seedling Make One Small Adjustment to Your Roadmaps
Most roadmaps are just a pile of features and dates, but if you add the outcomes you’re expecting along the way you can have better conversations about alternatives and direction.
Budding On the Half-life of Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm for a new idea can be a wonderful time of exploring and building new things, but it can also undermine everything. This is called the half-life of enthusiasm, and there's an art to harnessing it.
Seedling Prioritizing for Feedback
Prioritization is complicated, but one simple way to do it is to deprioritize everything that isn’t essential, and then seek feedback on those unessential items to pull a few back in.
Budding The Quick and the Dead of Prioritization
There are so many ways of prioritizing product work ranging from subjective to quantitative. Almost none justify themselves with results. In this post I will share how I prioritize product work with clients by using four simple categories of core, quality of life, retention, and other.
Seedling Scoping Technique - Impact Mapping
There are so many great scoping techniques for products and projects but Impact Mapping is one of my favorites. It is fast, easy, and asks the right questions.
Seedling So You Want To Launch a Product
A successful product launch involves a lot more than getting the core product ready. Here’s a list of things that people forget or come too late.
Budding Stop Planning and Start Learning
Seedling The Biggest Reason Product Owners Fail
Product Owners have a really hard job, but one of the biggest causes for failure is not knowing their customers.
Seedling The Shapes of User Stories
User stories are ubiquitous in agile teams, but they wind up taking lots of different shapes depending on the maturity of the team and company. Here are common shapes that stories take and what to watch out for.
Seedling What Almost Every Example of User Stories Gets Wrong
Almost everyone writes user stories for products, but never really know how to get their value. I’m going to point out some issues that everyone gets wrong that every example user story and training has and what to do instead.
Seedling Why I Killed Two Products
There are lots of reasons to kill a product. It may not have enough ROI or it may find itself in sketchy territory legally. I want to share some examples of these and when I’ve killed products.
Budding Podcasts
Budding Dev Journey - From One Extreme to the Next
Seedling Develomentor Podcast - Agile Coach and Freelance Consultant
Seedling Lean Change - Living Through a Safe Rollout
Budding This is Retrospective Facilitation - Becoming a Retrospective Facilitator
Evergreen Don't Start Work, Start Teams
A crash-course on how I start or re-start teams.
Budding Learning Under Pressure - Scala in a Hurry
A talk where I gave for JC-JUG on learning Scala with TDD as a learning loop.
Evergreen Tune Up Your Stand-Up
My most popular talk that makes your Daily Scrum not suck.
Seedling What is this
A bit about how this site works, its structure, and my methods (and madness)
Seedling