There once was a company that mowed lawns. The owner had three leaders, and every one of them was excellent. That was the problem. The first was an artist. The lawns they cut were flawless. These could have been at Augusta or at Fenway, the kind of stripes that stop traffic. Customer feedback was perfect […]
I’ve been noticing a pattern at work lately: people getting frustrated with their teammates because “It’s easy, why are we having challenges?” After this happened more than once while discussing a project that was facing implementation challenges, I started thinking about it. Was it easy, what the team was struggling with? If it truly was […]
Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of employees in an organization do 50% of the work. In tech, especially software development, its even more extreme—the top 10-30% of your team might be doing 10x the output of everyone else. But whether you’re painting houses, writing code, or manufacturing cars, this pattern […]
I remember reading in a book one time about coaching football. There was a (probably apocryphal) story about a team playing. Game is tied, 60 seconds left, they have the ball on their own 20, and the starting quarterback gets injured for a few plays. The coach puts in a backup who has barely played. […]
I had some followon thoughts to my last post. I wanted to tie this back from just being a “fun motivational observation” to something more actionable for business leaders. So let’s say you’re in this position, where your portfolio is a plethora of projects or projects, each just a single grain of sand but the […]
If you know me at all, or read enough of my blogs, you’ll see that I have a core set of sayings and memes that I tend to reuse over and over. I’ve realized that not all of them are fully explained, so I wanted to start sharing some of them with you. Today’s post […]
Several years ago (well, more than several), I had a mentor teach me some things about project management. One thing they taught me was the art of risk management. Now I don’t want this blog post to be too much about risk management itself, other that it supposes you understand some of the basics of […]
I’ve done a lot of interviews and hiring in my career, and so like most people who have this experience, I have my own library of questions I tend to ask. I was conducting an interview the other day and I asked a common one, along the lines of “Is it your preference to have […]
I made this comment a few blog posts ago: they are constantly trying to pivot everyone (also valid and true, for a variety of complex reasons). …and I wanted to follow up on it. A super common complaint that I hear from staff developers and engineers is how their manager is constantly changing their priorities […]
I made this statement a few blog posts ago: …they are not properly measuring the correct things in their standardized reporting (very valid and probably true, because figuring out what to measure is incredibly hard) I wanted to talk more about this, because this is key. What SHOULD we be measuring? How can we be […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 