“Camps,” if you’ve missed their advent entirely, are one- or two-day conferences that cost little or nothing, with content presented by the attendees. You might think content is “lesser”, given it’s typically attendee-provided, but that hasn’t been my experience. In …
In Praise of “Camps” (you’re going, right?) Read More »
As a consulting CTO, I’m on the lookout for the knots in clients’ software development; untangling them has been the key to transforming chaos to clarity and making product delivery hum. As an advocate for best practices, amplified by publication …
Good Product Management Matters! Read More »
No one on software teams believes in waterfall any longer. That’s what The 2013 Study of Product Team Performance revealed. As the correlation chart shows at a glance, agile, blended and lean teams each correlate their own method with increased …
Agile: Not a Magic Pill Read More »
It wasn’t a surprise to me to find, for two years in a row, that our Study of Product Team Performance identified that onboarding new team members highly correlates to high product team performance. Last year’s study revealed five factors …
Onboarding: Critical Success Factor (and mostly overlooked!) Read More »
Given virtually no one on product teams believes in waterfall – even those using waterfall (see my last post on The 2013 Study of Product Team Performance) – what to do about managers who insist upon seeing a waterfall project …
The most convincing reason to change from waterfall to agile Read More »
The most startling result coming out of this year’s just-released Study of Product Team Performance came in response to two questions we asked: what methodology does your team use? what method do you associate with increased profits? The cross-correlation of …
No One Believes in Waterfall Read More »
The 2013 Study of Product Team Performance is out! The results are not quite as across-the-board extraordinary as last year’s study – that would have been hard to match – but it offers individual results that are every bit as …
The 2013 Study of Product Team Performance Read More »
Which is more effective to improve team performance: positive feedback or constructive criticism? a positive culture or a negative one? The answer: both. The real question: in what proportion? The answer to the proportion question, from new research by Michigan …
Keep Your Culture Positive! Read More »
We’re at an inflection point. Agile practices transitioned over the last couple years from “emerging” to “predominant”. Companies are sampling if not wholesale adopting agile, from scrum and extreme programming to lean and kanban. Our study of product team productivity …
Colleges: Teach the “How”! Read More »
I’ve been enamored of remote pair programming since briefly leading development at Socialtext, where no three developers were in the same locale. Socialtext was committed to agile approaches including pair programming (but not including colocation, I might note!). Being distributed, …
Remote Pair Programming Read More »
What makes product teams great? What if you were able to name just five things that: if you don’t do them, you have just a 2% chance of high level team performance if you do all of them, you have …
What makes product teams great? Read More »
In 2012’s Study of Product Team Performance, respondents were asked what they would change about the core product team. “Better cross-functional collaboration, trust and communication” was their number-one response. (You can participate in this year’s study. See below.) I was …
Better cross-functional collaboration, trust and communication Read More »
One of the great “aha”s for me as a manager was realizing that motivating people – and not de-motivating them – are two different things. It was years ago – I think I was at Apple. One of my colleagues …
Motivating (and not de-motivating) Programmers Read More »
I am repeatedly in conversations with someone who refers to “PMs”. And I have to figure out which kind of PM they’re talking about. Take this sentence from a recent email: “…designed for executives, managers, PMs, BAs, developers, testers – …
Programming managers have typically had years of training in programming… And no training in management. I’ve been taking a fascinating census of programming managers this fall that has shown me just how true that is. As I talk about our …
Could we make managing programmers a little easier? Read More »
For years, I’ve been pointing development and project managers to the full-length documentary, Tom Dowd & the Language of Music. (It’s rentable via Netflix, purchasable via Amazon.) Every time I watch Tom Dowd, I’m struck by how closely producing music …
Orchestrating Software Development Read More »
