An out of control backlog is a drain on a team: work gets lost, time’s wasted, everyone's anxious, and morale drops as it never seems to stop growing. The problem with the accepted practices of backlog management is that they require a lot of overhead to keep things organized. Here are a few simple rules I took from my time working in warehouses that will help keep your backlog under control with less work.
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I came across an interview with Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella. He described one of their purposes as a company to meet the “unarticulated needs” of their users. This was a phrase I’d never heard in a design context before and it caught my attention.
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There’s a Goldilocks aspect to creating processes for teams. How much is just right?
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No matter where you are though, there are probably things you want to make better or change, and regardless of what resources you have (money, time, or even the optimism of your headspace), changing your life is really hard. No change worth making is easy.
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Having a pen you love is one of those small pleasures you can enjoy every day. After using a rollerball for the last few years, I decided to try a fountain pen again. I didn’t ever found them good for daily use until trying this new one.
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If you’ve ever made a feature request for a product and it never got built, this flowchart will help explain why. It shows the questions asked by a product manager when deciding if something should be worked on, passed on, or revisited later.
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Not having experience is the biggest obstacle to transitioning into a new career. This post has some tactics I used to transition into my new career as a product manager, but will be useful to anyone thinking of a major career transition.
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On June 11, 2013 I heard about product management for the first time but knew it was for me. It took some work to get my first job with zero experience – these are some of the unremarkable steps I took to get it.
Read More“When you think you’ve done more than enough you have to do 10 times more" – I don’t know if I would’ve been ready to hear that when I started out building my own thing. Actually, I probably would’ve just ignored it.
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People pay good money for experts and little to no money to amateurs. Becoming an expert is the only way to doing what you love for a living.
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It feels good to say you should "Never settle". It means you have high standards and live with principles. However, Ive learned over the years that it can cause you to focus on the wrong things and waste valuable time. The solution is settling.
Read MoreThis idea that you can achieve anything if you work hard enough is bad. Not only is it wrong, but it puts the focus on the outcome, when happiness comes from the attempt. The way to be happy is to live in a way that you have no regrets.
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It wasn’t until encountering the problems and challenges of building something, did I realize the real reasons I needed to do it. And they were very different from the ones I started out with.
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Looking back through 2000+ journals to figure out what’s involved in taking an app from zero to featured in the App Store.
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It’s 9:30am and you already have 100 birthday wishes in your timeline, but which ones are from real friends? When Facebook removed the effort they removed the meaning.
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A good memory has always has always been put on a pedestal, but in today's world, a bad one might actually be better.
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After years of setting and failing to achieve my goals, I discovered I was doing it wrong (i.e. making ambitious todo lists). This is a template of a new approach that led to my best year ever.
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What we learned from the fast food epidemic might provide a blueprint for a healthier relationship with social media.
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Last night I went to a birthday get together for a good friend of mine. It was different from most get-togethers because there were only seven of us, total. It reaffirmed to me that you don't need hundreds of friends to feel connected.
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