Leadership

Of the words that get misused or oversimplified, “product” is one of my favorites. It creates such an easy image in people’s heads that often is completely inaccurate, especially in the high-tech domain. When we hear the word “product,” we tend to think of this widget that passes hands from one of our salespeople to … Read more

If there’s one person I’d love to meet, it’s this “customer” virtually all the companies I work with refer to. In many businesses, the customer is this mythical individual who has all the answers, who is the only reason why we can’t or must do certain things and whom everyone must appease for the company … Read more

There’s a powerful story in the narrative of Western civilization around the team. It comes up in the context of the military, especially special operations, in the startup community, especially in the early phases of a company, in sports as well as in the leadership literature. The idea is that a group of people can … Read more

Although the Agile aficionados tried really hard to kill the notion of process in their efforts to remove the heritage of the capability maturity model, the fact is that every team, company and business ecosystem uses processes. These can be formally defined, to the point of individuals or companies being legally liable if the process … Read more

It’s highly controversial to claim that there’s no such thing as “the architecture” of a system. On the one hand, folks in R&D use the term to indicate that the technical debt in the system has reached a point where more resources need to be dedicated to architecture refactoring. On the other hand, those on … Read more