Writing Agile Stories, Part 1 – Breaking a UI into a Set of Features/Stories

It’s time to begin the development phase of a project. The needs have been identified, and the workflow design is complete. Now it’s time to create the initial set of stories for your backlog. Where do you start? How do you write individual stories? How do you even decide what those stories should be? I’ll […]

Surf With Your Knees Bent – Four Ways to Expect the Unexpected

Software makers, like surfers, need to be ready for unexpected problems. We need to “surf with our knees bent,” using a stance that takes the unexpected into account. Here are four ways you should adjust your stance to avoid being thrown into the water… metaphorically.

Three Ways to “Own It” on a Large, Distributed Team

When I came to Atomic nearly five years ago, I joined the largest development team I had ever known. We had four developers from Atomic and two from the client working directly with us, as well as the client’s QA staff, an operations engineer assigned to our team, and the client’s software architect checking in.

Intro to Incident Communication for Product Managers

One sure test of any product manager’s resiliency is how she manages unplanned service outages and other types of incidents. I’m referring to events that can risk a company’s reputation, increase costs, and erode client confidence.

Agile Misconception #2: We Don’t Need Documentation

Documentation means a lot of different things to different people. I’ve also found it’s one of the top five topics to cause a developer to cringe. If you’ve used a waterfall software development process, you’re all too familiar with documentation. From requirements to systems architecture to design, you’re creating documentation at every step of the […]

Agile Misconception #1: Deadlines Don’t Exist

I recently worked with a client who was extremely frustrated with deadlines that seemed to come from nowhere, made no sense to him, and didn’t fit with his idea of Scrum as a methodology. He believed that according to Agile/Scrum, “the business” was not allowed to give deadlines to development teams. Scrum, he believed, allowed […]

4 Simple Questions to Get Your Team Started on the Right Foot

Starting a project with a new team and a new client can be challenging. Everyone is dedicated to understanding the problem space and the project needs. At the same time, we’re learning how to work with each other, sometimes for the first time. We’ve found 4 questions that bring the team together in alignment and […]

A Structure for Collecting Useful Customer Feedback

Every product team strives to create a strong connection with the customers they serve. Keeping a finger on the pulse of what customers find valuable increases your chances of building products that they will buy and use loyally. As a software product owner, I’ve been directly involved with various initiatives to gather customer feedback. One […]

Four Ways to Bring Your Team Together with a Mid-Project Kickoff

There are many books, articles, and blog posts that describe how to plan and run an effective kickoff. Unfortunately, most of these resources talk about the kickoff as a one-time event. I believe there’s value in having a kickoff-like meeting at least twice a year so that the project team can pause, reflect, discuss, and plan […]

Five Things I’ve Learned about Working on Distributed Dev Teams

Working on a distributed development team is challenging. You need to deal with the normal difficulties of software development, as well as managing different time zones and the fact that you can’t just roll your chair over to someone and talk through a feature. In this post, I’ll go over a few ways I’ve found […]

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Project & Team Management