Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

  • Why People Don’t Learn

    Josh Bradley in a comment under one of my older posts made me realize an interesting thing. Let me do the weirdest thing ever and quote myself a few times. “In general, people don’t care if you want to (and can) teach them something. They don’t want to learn.” Pawel Brodzinski, 2010 “People are lazy. […]

  • Why Bonus Systems Don’t Work

    The last time I shared my advice on how to fix a bonus system it was something along the lines “get rid of that crap altogether; it is beyond any repair.” The system I’ve just mentioned wasn’t extraordinarily flawed – an incentive money system in the company next door can work exactly like that one. […]

  • Multitasking Teams

    There’s one question I ask pretty frequently during my presentations or trainings: do you think that context switching comes for free? I’m yet to see a single hand up after the question. Not that I believe that this is universally accepted point of view. In fact, there is a follow-up question which is: who has […]

  • Estimation Quality

    OK, so I am on yet another agile event. I’m sitting there in the last row and a guy on the stage starts covering estimation. That’s interesting, I think, maybe I’ll learn something. After all estimation is something that bothers me these days. Planning poker, here it comes. Yawn. People would pull the card with […]

  • 5-Minute Board Test

    I discuss different Kanban boards or task boards with their teams pretty often. It’s not uncommon for me to see a board of a team that I know nothing of. I like these moments. I typically challenge myself to make sense out the visualization as I stare at it. Some parts are rather obvious. Typically […]

  • What Does Project Management Mean to Me

    I was poked to answer the question on meaning of project management by Shim Marom. Since my work, and this blog, evolved away from covering what can be called traditional project management approach long ago I thought it may be a good occasion to restate the purpose of the blog as well. Se here it […]

  • Options, Options, Options

    I think the first time I’ve heard that we should consider that a project backlog is simply a set of (unexercised) options it’s been from Ellen Gottesdiener It took me some time though to translate this, otherwise attractive, concept to something more down-to-earth in my own context. The catalyst in this case was one of Kanban […]

  • Hiring for Cultural Fit

    I definitely don’t keep the count but I believe that throughout my career I run more than a thousand interviews and hired way more than a hundred people. I have a confession to make: vast majority of these interviews were run poorly and many of those hires, even the right ones, were made on wrong […]

  • Teams

    What is a team? A group of people sitting in the same room? No. Folks having the same boss? Um, really? Those who work on the same project? Again, negative. No matter how badly we’d like one of above to be true, it isn’t. OK, maybe we should start somewhere else. What are crucial ingredients […]

  • Portfolio Visualization

    I’ve been lucky enough that throughout my career I’ve had occasions to work on different levels: from personal (that’s pretty much everyone’s experience, isn’t it?), though team and project to program / PMO / portfolio level. Not only that. In most of my jobs I’ve been involved in all levels of work concurrently. This means […]

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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