• The other day I had a discussion over a Kanban board design. A team has realized the board doesn’t reflect the way they work ideally. We started analyzing what happened. What did actually introduce a disconnection between the reality and the board? We ended up with quite an interesting conclusion. It appeared that the board […]

  • I promised to share more thoughts on my Kanban presentation from AgileByExample. Actually during abe2011 there were 3 sessions which touched Kanban in one way or another. And then, well, and then there was a heated discussion, mercilessly cut off by the conference hosts. Even though we didn’t convince each other to our points (after […]

  • Kanban is a pull system. Period. In Kanban everyone pulls the task from the previous stage to another. Developers pull tasks which are ready, quality engineers pull tasks which are built, release managers pull those which are tested, and so on, and so forth. Basically every operation on the board happens that way. Well, almost. […]

  • If you asked me to point a single thing, which I hate most in senior management role, I wouldn’t have any problems with the answer. It would be firing people. On my personal hate scale there’s firing, then huge, huge void and only then other unpleasant things and tasks to do. Each time I fire […]

  • I was asked for an advice the other day: “We have a problem with mapping testing stage into our Kanban board. In ideal world we would test a feature once it is developed, and deploy it on client’s testing environment if and only if every bug we find in the feature is fixed and verified. […]

  • Occasionally I receive some flak because of one of decisions I make. Almost always it is one of those decisions which changes status quo. Let’s take an example: an employee has an offer from a competitor. You care about her so you try to keep her offering different things, e.g. transition to a better project, […]

  • Every time I’m on some kind of management training I have this vague feeling of disconnection. I mean I do assume a trainer is a competent person who saw way more different work environments than I ever would. They also are trained trainers meaning they know all the tricks how work with a group, what […]

  • The more complex your process, and your Kanban board, becomes the more likely it is you’re familiar with the following situation: you work on a task which doesn’t go through each and every stage of the process so you’d like to skip one of two of them. Consider a very simple board. What happens when […]

  • I believe in transparency and openness. I believe a manager should share almost as much information as possible with their teams. I believe the manager should always explain their motives and drivers of decisions they make. In short I believe in much talking. Sometimes when a meeting is finished I don’t feel as if I […]

  • If we are in Kanban world when we think visualization we see a Kanban board. We see a process mapped into columns with limits attached to them. We see sticky notes, which represent minimal marketable features. We see additional visuals which help to show priorities, blockers, people who are responsible for a task etc. We […]

Hi, I’m Pawel and I’m your host.

Leadership in Technology is a blog dedicated to wide variety of topics related to running a technology business.

Among others you will find here: product management, agile and lean, leadership, organizational design and more.


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