You Can’t Sharpen a Saw You Don’t Have

As a consultant, I get to experience onboarding into organizations more times in a year than most people will do in their whole careers. Without fail, this process provides me with added insights into the organizations and their underlying issues. If every new hire is required to wait about a week before getting access to […]

Dead-Letter Meetings

Imagine a “sprint demo,” that meeting that’s intended to review what the team has completed and get acceptance. What the players are doing is rushing through it, asking if any glitch or mismatch is cause enough to reject the task as completed. Now picture a planning session where estimations are done after the fact to […]

The Debate Club

We all have opinions, especially technical people. But just because we are opinionated it doesn’t mean that you should have an opinion about everything. And even if you do have opinions about every single thing, it doesn’t mean that you should be debating it when it doesn’t matter! Now, this is rarely the issue for […]

Not All Seniors Are Created Equal

Senior, Staff, Principal, Sergeant, Lead, any many more are common in our industry, as everyone are getting words added to their titles. What too often goes unnoticed is that words have meanings. At least, they should. I always say that these titles should come hand in hand with the responsibility to be active and present […]

Know Your Place

No matter how awesome you used to be at your previous roles, doing technical work, pushing out code or adjusting pixels, you should always remember that that’s not what you should be focusing on as your position changes. Drive-by-architecting can be even worse than drive-by-management. It’s one thing to be told to change priorities because […]