Writing on agile practices, team dynamics, flow, and the psychology and neuroscience behind why teams succeed or struggle.
While recently working on JiraMetrics, I ran into an interesting situation with Claude (the AI tool). Twice in the same session, it wrote a command that ran the linter, printed a list of offences, and then committed the code anyway. This shouldn’t have happened because there are rules in place to prevent linter warnings being committed.
For years I assumed that many of the things I was good at were nothing special. When I was complimented on what I was doing, I assumed that anyone could have done it and that eventually people would discover that fact. This is the essence of impostor syndrome, a problem that is rampant in our field and probably in others.
When we’re visualizing data, the point isn’t just to make a pretty picture. It’s to help us understand what the data is saying so we can make more effective decisions.
I heard someone describe effectiveness and efficiency as two ends of a spectrum. More of one means less of the other. It’s a tidy soundbite. It’s also wrong, and it quietly leads teams to optimize for the wrong thing.
I was asked twice this week how I handle conflict when I know it’s coming.
I recall once doing workflow mapping with a team, where they insisted that three steps in their process were done sequentially, whereas I was pretty confident that they actually did them all in parallel. We discussed this back and forth for a bit and then I just accepted what they said and documented these steps as sequential.
When I’m teaching user story writing, inevitably someone will write a story like “User wants to log-in”, and this is actually a horrible story.
Tomorrow, I’ll be in Canada’s Glacier National Park, hoping to see grizzly bears in the wild. Grizzlies are a legitimate threat and for most people will trigger a fear response. My companions and I, on the other hand, are very excited.
Do you feel that every hard problem lands on you? When something is urgent, or nobody else can figure it out, it comes to you and you get it done? There’s a real pride in that. There’s also a quiet exhaustion, and underneath it a frustration you probably don’t say out loud: “why isn’t anyone else stepping up?”
For the first time, this site was on the receiving end of what I know as the Slashdot Effect and is today more commonly known as the Hug of Death. This is when some bit of your content becomes wildly popular and all of a sudden you get hit with a volume of traffic that you’d never seen before. Let’s unpack what happened.
You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.
I frequently hear teams say: “We talk about the same things over and over and nothing changes.” Every time, it tells me they’ve missed the point of the retrospective.
Every team has some definition of done, whether it’s been explicitly documented or it’s just a verbal understanding. Some agreement that when the work gets to this point, we’re not coming back to it. For most teams, there’s a designated spot on the board that reflects that state of done.
In a Slack conversation recently, someone asked “Isn’t it a big assumption that breaching WIP is always bad?” It’s a great question, and the answer is more interesting than it first looks.
Companies sometimes bring me in with the mandate: “fix my teams”. Other times it’s not said quite that directly, but the message is clear. Leadership has decided that something is wrong with the people doing the work, and I’ve been hired to correct it.
When COVID hit and we all switched to video calls overnight, everyone started reporting how tired they were at the end of a day of meetings. Part of that was obviously that we were in a pandemic and stress levels were high, and yet there was something in the video meetings themselves that made it so much worse.
I recall introducing pair programming to a team years ago. During the first round of pairing it just so happened the the most senior person on the team (20 years working on the same code base) got paired with the most junior (recent graduate from school on her first job). Mostly likely everyone assumed that the senior would be hand-holding the junior through the exercises, and yet when we got to…
Yesterday, I kept seeing this story repeated about Stripe and the new AI model from Anthropic. The claim is the AI was able to do in one day what it would have taken months for the existing teams to do.
When I first arrive in a new engagement, it’s not uncommon to be warned about specific people. “Bob will push back on everything you say” or “Janet just won’t play along”. The warnings are usually well-intentioned, with helpful colleagues trying to prepare me for what’s ahead.
I once had a client that decided to cancel a project before they had anything prepared for the team to work on next. This was actually a great opportunity; the team could have spent that time improving their own skills, paying back some technical debt, or catching up on the thousands of things that normally don’t get attention.