Posted on April 24, 2012 – 11:12 pm by Mattias Skarin
I got the chance to meet Luke, the founder of innovation games this week. I find his view refreshing – humans are basically creative. We need to provide the platform for ideas to emerge. Some of my reflections after listening to the stories:
It’s serious play, these games shape the outcome of of real products for companies like Cisco today
I was a bit skeptical about trying them online, but I find they can provide alternatives to retrospectives for distributed teams.
It is as much about the reasons we reveal for our choices, as the games itself.
I find the games can help developers (and product owners) learn about the (unspoken) needs of market segments and user groups. Understanding the rationale of their choices is key to designing a good solution.
If I was a sales person, I’d jump on them right away. Way more fun than death by power point.
Posted on April 19, 2012 – 10:20 pm by Alexander Tarnowski
I gave a presentation called ”Being good at waiting – Using Selenium to test Ajax-intensive pages” in an unconf session at the Selenium Conference in London.
The audience was great! Thanks everybody! I certainly didn’t know everything there’s to know about the subject, and that resulted in an interactive session where people from the audience would share their experience and answer some questions. That was so cool read more »
Posted on April 16, 2012 – 2:02 pm by Mattias Skarin
Just finished my session at SDC 2012 where I’m arguing for less hierarchy and economically aligned decision rules that enables local teams to do tradeoffs. Mary Poppendieck commented it as “traditional product management”. Maybe that’s where we are heading
Posted on April 13, 2012 – 9:57 am by Anders Laestadius
Today at Crisp, we had a short discussion about effective meetings where I described what I think are needed in order to have successful meetings. Meetings, like work meetings, are used to produce some kind of result, achieve a agreed on decision or solve a problem. The discussion got me thinking about how often we are overloaded with meetings where many of them give little value back to the project and organization.
Paul Graham describes two different schedules, the manager and the makers schedule, where the former is run by managers working through the day participating in a lot of different meetings, and the latter is run by the workers, the developers and project participants, working through the day developing new versions of the product they are accountable for producing. These two schedules have their place in an organization, but we may get in trouble when the two schedules meet each other, which they do now and then during a normal working day.
Meetings cost quite a lot, and it is often not obvious for the managers working under the manager schedule how big that cost really is. I believe we need some kind of structure, an agreement between the meeting participants and the organizer of what they need to prepare and do before the meeting, in order to guarantee that it will be as efficient as possible. This to ensure that the organization get some kind of ROI from having the meeting.
Posted on April 11, 2012 – 2:07 pm by Mattias Skarin
Not long ago I met with a manager who during a discussion ruled out the possibility of success of a solution. I was a bit surprised and afterwards asked why that was not doable. It turned out one of the reasons was the manager was afraid the team would kick off with unrealistic expectations and leave disappointed. I pointed out that we won’t ever get there unless we try.
There is an easy way of getting both: change your statement into a question. This will trigger an intellectual challenge and proof that people have a viable idea. In short: It enables more options.
Turn:
“It can’t be done” – into – “why is that hard”?
The solution we have are only limited by the questions we are asking.
