As an agile team, we don’t want the delivery of our work on story X to be held up by story Y or condition Z. User Story As an agile team, we don’t want delivery of our work on story X to be held up by story Y or condition Z. Description Hi, and welcome…
Tag: Lean Startup
Why it pays to INVEST in user stories
TL;DR — Love’m or Hate’m, it’s hard to deliver software that matters without user stories that are independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, & testable. Here is one way you might want to make this magic happen. Love’m or Hate’m, you need to INVEST your user stories if you want software success As you may be aware from some…
Am I the very model of a modern product manager?
With apologies and gratitude to both Sirs Gilbert and Sullivan, I have shamelessly appropriated their famous Major-General’s Song from their popular 1879 comic opera ‘The Pirates of Penzance.’ Based on the raucous reception to my singing the first 2 verses at the end of my presentation “Five Things I Learned About Lean MVP as a…
Some methods in persona creation I learned from singing opera
Stuck writing a persona? Are your character archetypes really just surrogate synonyms for roles? Acting! It can help! One of my favorite recurring characters from Saturday Night Live was that of ‘Master Thespian’ as played by Jon Lovitz, a hilarious play on the overblown pontificating that plagued theaters up into the 19th century. It slays me…
10 things singing opera taught me about product demo prep
TL;DR — Enjoy these 10 handy tips on preparing for software product demos I learned during my short career as a professional opera singer. At about the 1:30 minute mark of the video drama titled ‘Apple Keynote Failures’ we witness yet another reminder that even the best-laid plans of mice and men tend to blow up badly…
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….
How I spent a Memorial Day weekend chasing a mobile ghost
TL;DR — How I lost a 3 day weekend but won a stronger team overlooking an atomic feed write delivered to an early MVP served by an eager CDN. It’s been a few years, and a different place of employment, yet I remember the conversation and the events that followed as if it were yesterday … … it…
Software delivery is a lot like Pizza Delivery
TL;DR — How I pulled an F up to a B+ in grad school with only a pizza box, a prayer, and an assertion that customers don’t give a crap about ‘how’ apps are delivered. Let me tell you a story about how I almost failed grad school by failing to communicate how software delivery is a…
A little about DeanOnDelivery & the nut behind the keyboard.
TL;DR — Who is Dean Peters? Let’s start with experienced agile product manager, recovering programmer, servant leader, mountain biker, grill master, husband, & Dad with a secret past life as a professional opera singer. A grizzled veteran of nearly three decades of delivering valuable software, Dean Peters is a product manager and recovering software engineer working across…