Pragmatic leadership
for software product teams
Delivering quality software products isn’t magic. It’s all about setting your teams up for success and focusing on what matters.
Technical leadership
Building software is hard, but don’t let that stop you.
Telling developers what to code is the most expensive way of building a software product.
Mapping estimates on a timeline is the best way to create the most brittle plans.
Yet it’s precisely what most of us do.
There’s a lot of talk about self-organizing teams and long-term roadmaps. But we don’t talk enough about how to get there.
Focus and plans
Plans are the lifeblood of software development.
A good plan puts teams in a position where they can make and keep promises.
A plan is not an upfront attempt at predicting the future but an iterative feedback system that helps us optimally allocate the team’s limited resources.
Without a plan, we’re just building stuff.
Planned Attention Newsletter
Every week I send out a free newsletter with practical ways to build actionable plans.
How I can help
Coaching call
I specialize in helping tech managers like you create effective and practical plans. We start from where you are and take our time to answer your questions about planning and shipping products
I’ll point you in the right direction.
Hands-on Consulting
I’ll get part-time embedded in your team. We’ll discover what’s preventing you from shipping and work together to get you in a position to deliver high-quality software products daily.
I’ll jump start your software delivery.
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Empathy for the devil
Technical leadership is a weird field to work in. It’s a formidable combination of deep technical insights and a wild variety of people. The managers who roll into tech have a hard time grasping the overwhelming landscape of frameworks and architectures. Coming from a non-technical background is the hardest path to technical leadership. But the…
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Prioritization theatre is an anti-pattern.
Building a product is an exercise in managing expectations. We gather ideas and turn them into a gadget that solves problems. These ideas can come from everywhere. — team members, customers, competitors — you name it. Even a small team with a single customer can generate an infinite stream of new ideas. Ideas are the cheapest renewable resource on…
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Five kinds of dependencies
Dependencies are evil. They lead to domino effects and brittle plans. Instead of getting work done, they are the reason you can’t start just yet. In project management, a dependency is defined as a relationship between two tasks. When Task A needs to be completed before Task B can start, we say B depends on…
Are you building a software product?
Do you feel software development is getting slower?
Do you struggle to scale your team and stay productive?
Do you find it hard to stick to the roadmaps you make?