Your Best Engineer Should Not Be Your Recovery Plan.
Feel alone trying to push the car and drive it at the same time? You hired good people who work hard, but it's just not enough. You're firefighting, juggling too many priorities, and hoping this time will be different, all while trying to keep delivery on track.
It doesn't have to stay that way. Imagine your team handling whatever comes next without your push. Surprises show up sooner, smaller, and less often. The improvement is obvious to everyone, and the change holds when the next crisis starts. You can leave your phone off on the next vacation you take. You have teams you can trust, and the organization trusts you too.
I Bet You've Seen This Before
- Bringing in extra capacity with contractors or consultants left you with a pile of billable hours and a little bit of software that might work.
- You asked your people to get better, but they can't get better fast enough while still hitting their deadlines.
- You lean on your best individuals, but they already have too much on their plate, and things fall through the cracks.
- The big consultancies promise a radical future, but leave behind slide decks of recommendations you still have to deal with.
- The last big transformation felt like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic with all of the training, maturity models, meetings, and roles. In the end, not much stuck but new vocabulary.
When these options don't work, it puts everyone in the position to find the silver lining of what little they got, but the reality is that it wasn't enough.
Why My Changes Last: The Watershed Method
Most change is temporary. It slides back as soon as things get hard or priorities shift. The Watershed Method works because it targets where the old and new meet. You and your teams receive skilled coaching and hands-on support right where the change matters most. This creates the right environment for you and your folks to attempt change in earnest, and because they chose it, that change sticks even when another crisis appears.
Most consultants can only work on process, so all they can do is mandate and hope. I work where human and team dynamics overlap with process, which is exactly where change either sticks or reverts.
Read how an engagement works, start to finish.
What Working With Me Is Like
- One price. Period. Pay for the results, not the time it takes. I'm there until it's done.
- A money-back guarantee on the quality of my work.
- A baseline and metrics, so everyone can see the improvement, including your boss and your peers. The team I built delivered 450% faster, with zero bugs.
- A person you can call, not an account manager.
If I'm not the right fit, I'll say so and point you somewhere better.
Where Do You Want to Start?
New vocabulary, old behaviors. Read what two years of doing it by the book looks like after the consultants leave: Result-Oriented Transformation
Your dashboards say green and your gut says otherwise. Start with Lies Our Engineering Metrics Tell Us and the signals worksheet.
You are more productive than ever and nothing feels better. That's overproduction: watch the talk
The impossible ask with a timeline nobody believes. That's the engagement: Work With Me
Case Studies
Featured Articles
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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
- 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.
- 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.