Why do we do this again...?
If you ask me where I want to be twenty years from now, I can give you some ideas. Maybe. But a plan? Not a chance. Twenty years ago, if you had asked me whether I would be doing what I do now, I would have laughed. I had no idea. So why do so many goal-setting frameworks insist that I start with a crystal-clear twenty-year vision? It sounds responsible. It sounds purposeful. It also sounds…
I was watching a sprint planning session when I first noticed the spreadsheet. The product owners (yes, two) scrolled through an Excel sheet where each row was a story: a long cell for the description, and an even longer cell for the acceptance criteria. I had joined this team as an agile coach to be a fly on the wall first, sitting in on their planning, reviews, and retros. What I saw in that…
Matthew starts this episode with a confession. He has been journaling a great deal lately. Not the sit-at-the-desk kind. After a late-night Peloton ride, he reclines in a zero-gravity chair, phone in hand, eyes closed, and talks into a voice journal until the app shuts him down. By that point he is too tired to hide anything from himself, and the entries come out differently. I do something…
Event sourcing makes the current state easy to ask for. The more useful question is what the state looked like at a specific moment. I ran into this recently in an Accounts Receivable module. A customer invoice is born when a sales order ships. At that moment, every line cost is an estimate pulled from the lots on the order. Later, the vendor invoice arrives, we record the actual cost for those…
A recent Improving Professional Scrum Product Backlog Management class brought up the old warning about measuring activity by story points. It reminded me of a meeting years ago where a manager made an offer that still makes me shake my head. The offer I was on a team that was running what we called “Scrum”, though the quotes got heavier as the meeting went on. The managers wanted us to work…
I took Improving ’s Professional Scrum Product Backlog Management class recently, and it landed like a natural sequel to the product owner courses I’ve taken before. The timing felt right. For many years, backlog management has been a regular part of my work: writing stories, prioritizing them, slicing them, refining them, and finding different ways to visualize them. Story mapping has long been…
A few minutes into the second AI self-assessment lunch-and-learn, I told the group this session was one of the committed actions in my year-long goal. I set the goal because AI maturity is not something I can cram. It is a muscle I have to train deliberately, with evidence, in public. The lunch-and-learn is where I do that training out loud. I bring a few Improvers together, we run our…
After more than two decades of replacing legacy systems, I care less about the language and more about whether you talk to the people who use the software. Technology is a detail. I have seen beautiful FoxPro code and terrible .NET code. I have seen Ruby on Rails systems that were a pleasure to maintain and JavaScript systems I wanted to abandon. The stack matters less than the decisions. Legacy…
For a year and a half, we had a working application with clickable screens, real processes, and no persistent storage. We were learning what to store before deciding how to store it. The client had a legacy FoxPro application. Most rewrites start by designing the database, building tables, writing stored procedures, and then building screens on top. We did the opposite. We built the screens and…
A client once rewrote a Java client-server application as a web application. After a long effort, it still had not launched. Java was fine. The team had built Excel in the browser. “I want Excel in the browser” The product owner was honest. “What I want,” he said, “is Excel in the browser.” He was describing how he explored data: open a sheet, filter columns, move things around, compare numbers,…