It’s mastery, so don’t expect it to be easy. As both a serial entrepreneur and agile coach to teams of all sizes, I have come to understand that mastering complex product development converges into three competencies. (1) Content competency: the … Read More
What do you do? The dreaded elevator pitch question. I fumble on it every time. Some days I will say that I activate people. One conversation at a time, I activate leaders, teams, organizations. Other days I say I specialize … Read More
What is agile? Why agile? How do we do agile? What’s the difference between Agile, Scrum, Lean, Design Thinking? Tell me about Scrum. Is agile a fad? What’s the difference between Agile and agility? All answered, in a 33 minute … Read More
A tribute post to Professor Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma” (1997), who passed away after a long illness. I am a big fan of Organizational Ambidexterity, made famous by Charles O’Reilly (Stanford) and Michael Tushman’s (Harvard) 2004 HBR … Read More
The Irony of Delivering Agile Transformation with Waterfall Agile and digital transformation projects are abundant today. The irony is that too frequently, they are planned and delivered in essentially waterfall project management style. Waterfall is a linear, plan-all-the-way, phased execution … Read More
#1 Cause of Startup Death? Premature Scaling This is what INSEAD professor Nathan Furr said in a 2011 Forbes article. I can attest it still holds so true: premature scaling is startup death. Steve Blank says the same; in his … Read More
Relentless pursuit of product market fit is customer obsession. Reality is, so many distractions in the office… It would be Nirvana for product developers and customer professionals if we can only think about the customer. Why do we have so … Read More
The importance is to experiment and iterate. What approach you take is of secondary importance. Chose whatever approach that best fits the situation, and eventually you’ll get there. Time after time, trial and error has been proven most effective.
Either it’s the artist in us or the perfectionist taking control, but many of us have a tendency to start creating quality body parts ahead of putting together a skeleton. Remember, it would be a tragedy if we spend an … Read More
Classic Scrum’s Achilles’ heel One of the weak areas of classic Scrum, in my opinion, is the relative simplicity of the ideation phase. “What to build” is sometimes an arbitrary discussion during the Scrum Backlog building and Sprint Planning exercises, … Read More