• You already know how our team looked like and what concerns I had with implementing plain old Scrum. You also know we chose “take this from here and take that from there” kind of approach to running our projects. Our base method was Scrum but we were far, far away from accepting it the orthodox way. What we finally agreed…

  • So I found myself in this small team, part of a bigger company but working pretty independent of the rest of people here. Kind of start-upish environment. I knew every single person I worked with. Well, actually I’d chosen most of them and hired them here. The team was great (if you guys are reading this: no, it is not…

  • My current team works with Kanban for some time already. For all of us this is a kind of experiment on live organism. Ongoing experiment. That’s what led me to an idea of The Kanban Story – a set of posts which are a logbook of our cruise with Kanban. The story has its beginning and several chapters since some…

  • The other day I had a discussion about leadership and management. When we came to an argument that there’s no chance to advance to a position where you can facilitate leadership and management skills in discussed organization several people (from present and from past) automatically came to my mind. They all have the same problem which they may overlook. They…

  • A lot of discussion on estimation recently. A lot of great arguments but a lot of good old mistakes we’ve already went through. This brought me to a few random thoughts on estimating techniques. Estimation technique which involves discussion between different people is better than one which just simply uses their estimates as input. Using factual recorded historical data is…

  • There was a company, which was doing reasonably well. When times were good they were growing stronger. Some people were leaving, as it always happen, but more were coming on board. Since things were rolling fast no one really had time to stop and verify whether all new faces are doing fine. Some time passed. Newbies were no longer newbies…

  • While explaining another thing which I thought was obvious for everyone in the team but appeared as not clearly communicated the question came back to me: is it possible to over-communicate in project? I dropped the question on Twitter and expected answers like “Hell no!” Or “Maybe it is possible but no one seen that yet.” Responses surprised me though.…

  • That’s the old story: we suck at estimating. Our schedules tend to be wrong not only because there are unexpected issues but mostly because we underestimate effort needed to complete tasks. There’s one simple trick which allows improving quality of estimates. It’s simple. It’s reliable. It’s good. On the minus side you need some time to execute it. Split your…

  • Somehow my recent discussions are mostly about estimating. Last discussion on PM Clinic happens to be on the very same subject. It reminded me about great technique which can improve your software estimates. It is called Evidence Based Scheduling and I’ve learned this from Joel Spolsky’s article. The basic concept is pretty simple. Jack the Developer gets the task. Actually…

  • Who should be a leader of a startup? An easy question. One of founders. Or even better each of them. They are naturally predestined to leading role. They got the idea. They own the company. They keep all things running. Now the more important question: what kind of leaders are they? Why is it so important you ask? Well, having…

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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