Project & Team Management Your Best Prompt Is a Well-Defined User Story The best results with agentic development come from well-structured prompts that clearly describe the problem - essentially a good user story.
Effective communication Stop Hedging: Why Directness and Clear Objectives Matter More Than Polish Directness isn't blunt — it's respect. Learn why executives value transparency about what you're optimizing for hedged recommendations.
Effective communication Know Your Audience and Cut the Noise: Executive Storytelling That Actually Works Executives don't need more slides. They need signal through noise. Learn pattern matching and the inverted pyramid approach to storytelling.
Project & Team Management Why I Still Time‑Box Every Story I Touch I block out a chunk of time and jot down a cost for the story in front of me. That small ritual reminds me that my time is finite.
Development Practices Software Developers, Have a Feature? Resist This Urge It's easy to get bogged down in detail, but we need to take a big picture approach when defining the requirements of feature work.
Product Development Scrum Ceremonies to Add to Your Sprint: Pre-Refinement Product owners often don’t know the technical complexities of the work they want completed. This is where pre-refinement comes in.
Project & Team Management How to Keep Your Jira Project From Becoming a Dumpster Fire Jira's breadth of customizations and features can also be a downside. Let's take a look at a few common pitfalls in a typical Jira project.
Personal Optimization Harness the Power of Narrative Patterns Learn a simple narrative pattern to help you tell effective, complete, and impactful stories in many professional situations.
Growing as Makers Stay Motivated When Working on a Difficult Story Say you're working on a story that should be a breeze, but you quickly get a dose of reality. Try these tips to stay motivated.
Development Practices Useful Tools for Facilitating Planning Poker Estimation Planning Poker provides an engaging way for the team to discuss implementation approaches and build consensus around the effort involved.
UX/Design Techniques Lead with “Why”: A Storytelling Shortcut for Ideas and Products Here's a storytelling shortcut for better describing an idea, service, or product. Who's it for, what do they need, and what can we do?
Project & Team Management What are the Benefits of a Design Backlog? Managing design work is typically less straightforward than development work and not always done as a traditional design backlog.
