Choosing Your North Star Metric
Whatever companies choose as their guiding metric, all energy and brainpower will flow in that direction. It will evolve as you learn more about what keeps your team focused, motivated, and building toward the ultimate vision. Your North Star Metric is your strategy, and your strategy is your North Star Metric. (15 min read)
Tech debt is not a burden, it's a strategic lever for success
Just like with debt in real life, if you take on debt right now, you can get something of higher value today and pay it off over time. This means you should view tech debt as a strategic lever for your organization's success over time. (25 min read)
The CSPO Pathology
CSPO is not in any way a substitute for training as a product manager. However, it is still recommended as a simple course to learn the responsibilities as part of an agile team. (5 min read)
A proposed framework for Agile Roadmap Design and Maintenance
Jerome Kehrli introduces fundamental principles behind designing and maintaining a product roadmap tailored to the needs of agile teams. From the early days, they had two quite opposed objectives: on one side the need to be very flexible and change quickly priorities and on the other side, the need to respect commitment taken with the customers regarding functional gaps delivery due dates. (35 min read)
Solve Problems Before They Happen by Developing an “Inner Sense of Captaincy”
Too often we reward people who solve problems while ignoring those who prevent them in the first place. This incentivizes creating problems. (8 min read)
Being Glue
If you do glue work (that is, extremely important technical work that keeps teams and projects on track, like reviewing designs and seeing what’s missing, noticing that another team is working on something similar to your team and coordinating the two teams so they don’t duplicate each other’s work, but isn’t code), read these slides. (20 min read)
Books
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler talks about our brains are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception.