How can your early stage startup use technical debt to survive and thrive? How does technical debt in young startups look and where does it come from?
It’s hard to avoid technical debt completely but you can manage it and use it to your advantage. Let us have a look how technical debt is created in startups and how you can keep it in check even when your company is in hyper growth.
Continue readingIt was a year of many firsts. I started this blog, spoke at a conference, started a podcast amongst other things.
This is my year in review including the most interesting statistics of this blog itself.
Continue readingLooking back over the last 8 years I almost exclusively worked on legacy code and technical debt.
The difference between technical debt and clean software is a difference in degree, not in kind. Only when circumstances change does our interpretation of the code flip from good enough to technical debt.
Continue readingOver half of all software projects are late or over budget. But isn’t late only a failed expectation, an expectation solely based on a team’s estimate? Is your team confronted with the questions of when will it be done or how much will it cost? We tend to respond to these uncomfortable inquiries by sticking our heads together and coming up with an educated guess.
Maybe there are easier, more transparent ways to make predictions about our software releases?
Continue readingIn our complex world KPIs can give us a false sense of control. They ignore the chaotic nature of our lives and reduce humans to numbers.
What could we achieve if we acknowledged all sides of our humanness?
Continue readingTraditional roadmaps make too many assumptions which causes miscommunication, wastes time and effort and renders you unresponsive to changing circumstances.
The idea behind Lean is to reduce waste. Let’s make our roadmaps less wasteful and create a lean roadmap!
Continue readingWhat makes a good roadmap? More is always better! More milestones, more details, more predictions. That was my naive approach to creating roadmaps for a while. I didn’t realise how counterproductive most of that was.
A tweet from Janna Bastow last year inspired me to question my simplistic concepts.
Continue readingOver the last year I learned to recognise and work on my own anxiety. It also lead me to recognise anxiety in others.
Soon I realised this does not only affect other people but also organisations and processes. Let me introduce you to anxiety driven development.
Continue readingIn my years as a software engineer I was always drawn to the shiny new things. But time and time again I got confronted with code ridden with technical debt. If you are working in tech you probably heard of technical debt.
For product managers it is the sword of Damocles alluding delayed projects and rejected feature requests. For engineers it can be a tremendous source of frustration and reason to quit jobs and move on. Why is technical debt so widespread and why is it so hard to beat?
Continue readingProduct owners need a diverse skill set to be successful. Your past experience, your current organisation and the specific industry make the requirements to your job unique. Nevertheless there are some common pitfalls and anti-patterns which many product owners unwillingly fall into. This short list of product owner anti-patterns hopefully helps you to avoid these common errors.
Continue readingA sure way to improve your product is to involve the whole team in product ownership. This third and final part focuses on practical steps you can take to accomplish shared ownership in your daily work life.
Continue readingThis is a summary of my “Today I Learned” moments of the calendar week 13 and 14. Topics are product inceptions, the DIBB framework and audio editing.
Continue readingIn agile teams the use of both Scrum and Kanban is widespread. What is the difference between Scrum and Kanban? At what point does it make sense to use Kanban over Scrum?
This article helps you identify the limitations of Scrum and when it is time to break with the rules. It outlines how Kanban can be a natural evolution for Scrum teams.
Continue readingThis is a summary of my “Today I Learned” moments of the calendar week 12. Topics are working remotely, maturity models and a quick summary of the book Radical Focus.
Continue readingThe product owner role is overburdened with too many responsibilities. Therefore a product owner can become a bottle neck and knowledge silo. Both of these traits lead to a cascade of issues.
This second part focusses on the benefits of a more collaborative but unfortunately less common approach to product ownership. It will highlight the principles, advantages and risks of collaborative product ownership.
Continue reading