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All sort of no management approaches are hot these days. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Self-organization, empowerment and autonomy are inherent parts of Agile and Lean approaches. If you distill the essence of these and bring them up in the hierarchy it means quite a challenge for traditional ways of managing teams. Of course, few organizations are that far…
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An argument over the best team size is as active as ever. As long as we are in broadly understood context of agile the starting point usually is 7 plus or minus 2 people, which was widely popularized along with Scrum. This, by the way, leaves pretty wide margin for the optimal team size. You can find more precise answers…
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A theme that pops up every now and then is a leadership gap. An organization or its part finds itself in a situation where they need more leaders that there potentially are available. They might outgrow the old model and the existing leaders just don’t scale up. They might be facing challenges when someone had left the organization. It might…
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One of arguments that I repeat in different contexts is that our ultimate goal should be delivering value to our customers. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how many lines of code or features we’ve built. What matters is how much value has been delivered. The concept seems to be pretty challenging in software development communities. In…
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I am talking about the cost of multitasking pretty frequently. This discussion gets even more interesting when we are in portfolio management context. Why? It is so because we are dealing with extremes more frequently on that level. Cost of Multitasking Let’s imagine a situation when a software developer is dealing with three tasks concurrently. We know that it isn’t…
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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. They don’t learn because it’s…
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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. Still, get rid of that…
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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 a boss who thinks that…
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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 their estimate, yadda, yadda, yadda,…
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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 the process isn’t that difficult…
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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