Your Best Engineer Should Not Be Your Recovery Plan.

What I Offer

Turn struggling teams into high-performers in 90 days.

Every organization and leader gets stuck somewhere and it can feel like it'll never improve fast enough. That's where I come in.
Read a case study of transforming 500 teams

Kickoffs and Liftoffs

Great teams build great products but I can skip a few months of "Storming"

Workshops and Trainings

Interactive workshops for your organization to grow their knowledge and skills fast.

Case Studies

These are a selection of results I've achieved. They range from technical work all the way up to transformation of Fortune 10 companies.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Featured Articles

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.
Building Self Managed Teams: 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.
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.
Constant Wip Limits: -
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.
Does Toc 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.
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.
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.
Innovators Paradox: 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.
Poorly Built Racecars Dont 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.
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?
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.
Six Estimation Techniques: -
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.
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.
Three Reasons Scrum May Not Work: 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.
Ultimate Guide to Horizon Planning: Horizon planning puts your whole strategy on one page: three horizons, each with a theme, measurable goals, and elements of success. Free template included.
What Do You Stand For: -
When Abandoning Code Reviews Leads To Better Results: -
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.

Recent Writings

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.
Ultimate Guide to Horizon Planning: Horizon planning puts your whole strategy on one page: three horizons, each with a theme, measurable goals, and elements of success. Free template included.
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.
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.
Constant Wip Limits: -

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