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The Dashboard Nerd Guide

Dashboards are like teeth. Strong, white teeth indicate overall health and viability of an animal. And beautiful, useful dashboards indicate the health and viability of an organisation's information systems, which these days is the health of the whole org.

Herding Cats

One of the defining characteristics of a well functioning product org is discipline. And discipline necessarily entails getting people to do things one way and not another, which as we all know, can be famously difficult when dealing with programmers. Some have likened the organisation of the efforts of programmers

The Annual / Quarterly Plan

Months of hard work can save you days of planning.

Information Wants to be Free

There is something magical that happens when project management dashboards start to show the way to the goal. The teams become self-directing and in complex and chaotic situations, self directing teams are a super-power. But you can't get there without a correct information architecture.

Architecting Beyond Code

It isn't just code that needs architecting. Every piece of text produced by your org executes on human wetware. It is code. And it needs to be treated like code.

Teams Without Managers

A team without managers sounds like a ridiculous idea, but it's actually worth trying out just to see how much of management is 'real' and how much is just fear of shadows. In this post, Swanand Pagnis, CTO of co-learn, explores what it might take to get there.

Managing Without Managers

Anarchy - I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Hammer Time!

The Quality Muscle

Use it or lose it Who is responsible for the quality of the output of your engineering org? If you answered "QA" then you're either a QA or you really need to read the rest of this article. Quality, like reliability, is such a cross-cutting concern that it has to

Narratives - Part 1

Stories are extremely influential, they are innate to humans and humans derive their model of the world from stories. And this is true of orgs as well — your organisation is telling itself stories in order to make sense of itself.

The Power of Stories

The Ladder of Power

This is going to be a short post because the concept is quite simple, and yet quite powerful. When it comes to Politics, simple paying attention to the subtle forces that shape our world can be a game changer If you haven’t already, please read my post on managing

Devs don't care about business!!

Talking to an entrepreneur friend of mine last night and he was complaining about the fact that given a choice, devs will choose to work on the more technically challenging thing than on the thing that makes the most business impact. Here’s what I told him.

PMs are from Saturn, EMs are from Jupiter

the uncrossable chasms - Part 1

Agile for Real People

Why be Political?

Politics For Nerds - Episode 2

What is Politics?

Politics for Nerds - Episode 1

Politics for Nerds

Oh, you're not political are you?

Interesting Times

Welcome to the Global Financial System, young Paduan

The Clean Up Sprint

How to ship broken stuff with confidence

How to hire a kickass team

May the vibe be with you!

Everything I know about introducing TDD in an org

Hopefully you’ve read part one of this series where I talk about why one should do TDD. Teaching TDD is kind of out of scope here but at some point I will compile a list of the best resources on the web to come up the curve. The rest

Everything I know about TDD

Part 1

Be Careful Of Your Issue Tracker

It becomes your code.

Engineering Management Metrics

Everything that can be measured is not worth measuring.

Don't Get Eaten

Managing your career in software product development

Risk Management

All management is the management of risk

Outside-in Thinking

Or 'How to Actually Finish Projects'

How to Not Be A Micro-Manager - Part 2

Blast Radius FTW

How To Not Be A Micro Manager - Part 1

These 2 weird tricks will set you and your team free!

Building a Learning Organisation

Question from a Product Engineering leader at a fast growing start up How do you provide learning and growth for engineers in the absence of a solid technical leader in the org? First of all, congratulations on asking the question. This is a step many never take and the fact

The Engineering Organisation

Welcome to The Engineering Organisation by me, svs. The whole concept of how engineering organisations work has been a fascinating revelation for me. The way information flows from being an idea in someone’s head to getting delivered to users in a real live product is as fascinating as it