• I was never a fan of recipes. Even less so when I heard that I have to apply them by the book. What I found over years was that books rarely, if ever, describe a context that is close enough to mine. This means that specific solutions wouldn’t be applicable in the same way as […]

  • I like the way Jerry Weinberg defines leadership. Leadership is a process of creating an environment where people become empowered. Empowerment I don’t really like the word empowerment as it is frequently used in the context of making people empowered. The way I understand empowerment such thing can’t even be done. You can’t empower me to […]

  • There is one thing that seems to be present in pretty much every company strategy these days. Given the opportunity, they want to grow. Obviously not every organization is successful at that but scaling up is treated as a default option and a universally desired goal. In fact, it is sometimes assumed so obvious that […]

  • My focus for past months drifted a bit away from the core of Kanban. I either focused on more enterprisey applications of Kanban in the context of portfolio management or on what’s blood of every company, which is organizational culture. Every year though I use Kanban Leadership Retreat as a perfect occasion to reset my […]

  • Whenever I end up discussing project portfolios with people representing or knowing specific organizations out of curiosity I ask a couple of questions. How many projects? How many people running those projects? Note, most of the time I don’t ask these questions in the context of completely random organizations. The most common case would be […]

  • One of the least useful pieces of advice you may ever get on management would go along the lines: “we’ve done such and such and it worked freaking miracles for us, thus you should do the same.” In fact, all the ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ are sort of a warning signal for me, whenever I learn […]

  • There’s a fundamental flaw in how we manage project portfolios. What typically happens is we focus on estimated cost of work and expected profit. After all these are parameters that decide whether a project is successful or not. Estimated Cost and Expected Profit There’s whole ongoing discussion on how to estimate, when estimates give us […]

  • When I first discovered how Kanban in general, and Work In Progress limits specifically, worked as a catalyst for deep systemic improvements it was like an epiphany. Kanban, which at the beginning seemed like a neat and light-weight process management tool, proved to be far more than that. Not only was it helping to clean […]

  • If you are in broadly understood context of Agile you eventually has had to hear about being hyperproductive. Sources reporting a few hundred, or even as much as more than a thousand, percent productivity improvement aren’t unusual. In fact, 200% improvement seems to be “guaranteed” by some. That’s great! Good for them! They’re going to […]

  • If I got a dollar each time I heard someone mentioning that they’d like to get more feedback I would be filthy rich by now. Heck, if I got a dollar each time I personally said that I would still got a decent sum. Most of us do want and like to get feedback. Most […]

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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