Hard work is killing people. Literally!
Burnout is a serious issue for several countries, industries and people, even if we don't acknowledge in as many words. In our industry, where heroism, cowboy programming and all-nighters are considered cool and an integral part of the software subculture, there has been a (really) small effort to address work-life balance....
Let’s free up agile teams…
Why are we so parochial in software industry about not recognizing the bigger economic sense rather than limiting ourselves to a singular idea that collocated teams are the best option?...
How do you design agile feedback?
Feedback is perhaps the most important aspect of the overall agile lifecycle - without a proper, honest and timely feedback, there is no ‘adapt’ step in the inspect-adapt cycle. However designing a proper feedback instrument for a human-human interaction, like a training program, is a totally different thing because it entails imprecise measurements that are often influenced by people’s mental models, skills and experiences, and not to mention - their calendars! Needless to say, these feedbacks could mean anything to different people on different days....
Dude, where’s my customer?
Startups that operate under a stealth mode achieve over 90% failure rates. While they might have bright ideas, access to top talent, adequate funding, etc., they typically fail to accomplish their original objectives. A key reason behind such spectacular failure rates is premature scaling at each stage of the startup. In this talk, we will examine the mistakes that startups make, and what we can learn from the Customer Development model proposed by Steve Blank to improve better chances of survival and growth....
Why is your agile still a lot like dogma on steroids?
I still continue to be amazed (thought ‘shocked’ and 'dumbfounded' will be a more appropriate words here) by the amount of dogma in agile circles. Do this! Don’t do this! Wasn’t agile meant to liberate us from the tyrannies of the so-called big monolithic non-agile white elephant processes, and create a more nimble mindset, flexible culture and adaptive process framework where ‘inspect and adapt’ was valued more than ‘dogma and prescription’?...
Why user stories make sense?
User stories are meant to be a placeholder to initiate an early conversation between the product owner and the team on key hypotheses so that a quick validation of them could be done to refine/confirm/reject our understanding of what the customer really wants....
The Joys of Designing Agile Solutions for New-Age Problems
Pune is hosting India's first Scrum Gathering this year in July with the theme of "Scrum - Kal, Aaj aur Kal", meaning the past, present and future of Scrum. I appreciate all efforts by Madhur Khaturia and his team in making it happen. I hope and believe it will be yet another milestone in India's journey towards agility, and will stimulate a whole lot of new ideas and conversations thus ultimately leading to increased awareness, higher adoption and more breakthrough products from India....
So, does agile really kill innovation?
In continuation of my earlier blog post on ‘Does Agile Kill Innovation?’, I had a great time moderating the panel discussion at Agile India 2013 with Henrik Kniberg, Owen Rogers, Sujatha Balakrishnan, Udayan Banerjee, Praful Pillay and Sudipta Lahiri. The panel discussion was literally the last program at the end of two long days of management conference – but despite that, we had 60-70 folks throughout the session....
Role of Integrative Thinking in Project Management
The conventional wisdom is to try to find a via media but that is perhaps meekly surrendering to complexity by taking a short-cut to a suboptimal solution. He argues that the some of the most exceptional leaders do not succumb to the obvious “either/or” thinking but rather work patiently towards synthesizing the best from both of these opposing views to create a best-of-breed solution that is far superior to either of these. He calls it “integrative thinking”....
Seeking submissions on New Product Development and Product Management in Agile world for #AgileIndia2012
We are seeking perspectives, experiences, insights and groundbreaking ideas from practitioners and thinkers on how they have applied the spirit of agility to create new products that have led to unprecedented and extraordinary market success compared to their previous conventional practices. Specifically, we are looking for proofpoints from the marketplace to demonstrate how software team’s agility was directly visible in business results....