Blog

Your Company Culture Starts with Recruiting. Don’t F*ck It Up. A lot of companies of late have been touting their incredible company culture. They extoll how their culture has enabled them to succeed and how people can have a lot of fun while co-creating products and services that their customers...

Let Them Eat Cake How do you proceed to eat an entire elephant? One bite at a time. Wait – I thought this was a post on cake? Why are you talking about eating an elephant? Let me get to that in a moment. (Unless you made an elephant cake...

An Alternative Way to Teach, and Estimate with, Story Points I recently gave a lightning talk a few weeks ago at the Cambridge Agile Exchange MeetUp. The topic I covered was about an alternative way to teach and do story pointing. This alternative technique was something I came up with...

Was your business agile enough to respond to 2020? Hello again!  I can’t believe it’s October – the beginning of the fall season here in the northern hemisphere. I can’t believe time went by so quickly. It feels as if it were only yesterday when we had to go into...

A Lightweight Performance Review Template for Monthly Discussions In my series of newsletters on preparing for your performance review, I mentioned a template you can use when talking with your manager during your one-on-one meetings (1:1s). A colleague and I have also mentioned this template in our talks on performance...

Phrases to Say to Demotivate Your Teams There is this one phrase that can quickly demotivate people. I’ve seen a number of executives use this phrase in several conversations I’ve had. It doesn’t matter whether I’m an engineer, a manager, or a director. Neither does location matter – I’ve heard...