I was looking out my front window the other day and my neighbor across the street is having a new retaining wall built in their garden, around a cluster of trees. It looks beautiful, and I was watching the workers carefully measure and cut the stones to follow these intricate custom curves around the boundary […]
One time, a friend of mine was dealing with some significant health issues so they ended up traveling to receive treatment at one of the top healthcare providers in the country. After the experience was over, they shared a valuable sentiment; that it is incredibly easy and straightforward to receive care at this location because […]
In my role I spend a huge amount of time on peer reviews and design reviews. Recently I had the privilege of being able to do design reviews for some interns who are here for summer internship. It was a ton of fun because here are people with fresh new ideas and fresh new perspectives, […]
So if you’ve ever worked with me, or you’ve read enough of this blog, you’ve no doubt seen that I base many of my ideas on quotes and memes. Well, here’s a new one that I’ve started using a lot lately. “Given enough constraints, the solution space goes to zero.” What does this mean? Let’s […]
Formal Agile and Scrum training uses things like Story Points or T-Shirt Sizes for user story estimation. Although I have done lots of reading and training, I still have a hard time understanding how this would work in real life, given that it is very intentionally stated in the formal academic training that the Points […]
I was originally going to talk about organizational change management, and about the challenges faced and how to break down barriers and help organizations mature and innovate. But everything I was writing came across so dry and textbook-like, that instead I sat back and thought of a story to tell. So here it is. There’s […]
The chore I hate the most in my house is definitely laundry. It’s just never-ending, especially now that I have a couple of kids. It’s better now but it took some mental improvements to myself to get there. Mainly because I had to change my psychological approach. I used to see laundry as a TODO […]
So I’m reading The Slight Edge, a pretty awesome book by Jeff Olson, and it is dawning on me how his basic principles apply to Agile. One anecdote that he mentions several times is that when a rocket is flying to the Moon it is actually off-course for over 90% of the time. Now that […]
There is a strategic problem I’ve been wrestling with lately. It’s really just a question, albeit a complicated one. But I have really looked far and wide and been unable to find any good answers to the question, or even many people addressing it or even thinking about it. So to understand the question, let’s […]
Who really likes meetings? I mean, I’m sure some people do, somewhere. But it seems like a lot of people don’t. So many don’t, in fact, that Scrum and Sprints are designed to minimize meetings. But let’s look at the Agile Manifesto. It says, “We favor…” Individuals and interactions Customer collaboration Responding to change In […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 