Every January, organizations invest weeks in planning a future that no longer exists. This post challenges the ritual of annual planning and argues for a different approach: designing for reality instead of predicting it.
Your technical debt is product debt and product debt is business debt! Start giving your technical debt the attention it deserves or it will punish you later. Technical debt is business debt, the funds are just not borrowed from a bank but taken from engineers. This sounds provokative? Read further because tech debt is business debt! What is technical debt? The term was coined by Ward Cunningham, who said “If we failed to make our program align with what we then understood to be the proper way to think about our financial objects, then we were going to continue to stumble on that disagreement which is like paying interest on a loan.”. Further he added “Shipping first-time code is like …
Measuring and using velocity of an agile team can be helpful in forecasting output of the near future. You need a certain stability in your team and enough data points / iterations. However, there are also things that could go wrong using velocity. Therefore I want to shed some light on pitfalls using velocity in agile planning. Velocity is not a measure for productivity! Velocity is only an indicator of how much work was done in the past, not how much work will be done in the future. It’s like measuring your running speed with a stopwatch and then using this value to predict how fast you can run tomorrow or next week. We would be able to predict who will …
Wardley maps rotate around strategy. They involve coming up with a shareable understanding and intuitive of your context. They allow you to provide awareness, crucial for building a reliable strategy. Wardley maps play a critical role, especially when starting a non-profit or business. Also, you need these maps when anticipating the future or inspecting the competition. Other than this, you can use Wardley maps to analyze industries for opportunities.
Product Owner vs Project Manager, what’s the difference? Seems there is none, as many orgnizations just rename roles from one to the other. The cases of renaming that I’ve seen, were one way from Project Manager to Product Owner. That’s a pity as both are distinct roles which require different profile to fill the roles with quality.