TL;DR — Everyone is fine with deferring technical debt, that is until ‘Tony from Support’ shows up w/a bug that breaks your app’s kneecaps. If mob movies were framed as software development, imagine how many story lines would read as follows … … Pamela the Product Owner, desirous of saving “Saint Jerome’s Home for Abandoned Bambinos” from foreclosure,…
Month: June 2017
5 Thing Product Managers can learn from Twitter’s latest UX Do-Over
TL;DR — Behold! A handful of free & valuable lessons product managers can glean from Twitter’s latest changes to their user experience. Thank goodness for ‘Jeff Bezos and Alexa buying Whole Foods by Accident’ memes. Without them, we might still have to endure the weeping and gnashing of teeth both from, and about the world’s grumpiest social…
The Convergence of Search & Machine Learning is already here.
TL;DR — In making search results more relevant & in detecting anomalies, ElasticSearch & Solr have baked-in machine learning features. The week before last I made a mistake … … I was attending a not-so hush-hush meetup of 25 Raleigh product managers, where no secret handshakes were exchanged, nor did there occur covert conversations about overthrowing our scrum…
Of course it’s okay to selectively incorporate SAFe® practices
TL;DR — As waterfall survivor I understand concerns over SAFe®. That said, I don’t think it’s necessary to toss the baby with the bathwater. I came up with the term ‘HyperScrumDamentalist’ a few years back in response to an overly-zealous scrum master who was more concerned over the letter of the law than the ‘Heart of Agile.’…
Of course it’s okay to split unfinished Product Backlog Items
TL;DR — The best refined stories of mice and men sometimes go awry. This includes dealing with stories sized with the best of intentions. I’m often intrigued — and sometimes amused — by broad and definitive proclamations made on behalf of the Agile manifesto. The following blog post showing up in my LinkedIn news feed being an example I’d like to…
Sometimes, a feature toggle may not be enough …
TL;DR — For immense apps with an equally girthy user base, you may want to support early adoption via a feature toggle + group rights combo. Let me state up-front and for the record, I am fully aware that feature toggles are primarily a developer tool to ease the pains of merge madness caused by branch extravaganzas….