There are so many frameworks, tools and techniques for prioritising out there, that it’s tricky to know which one to pick (I see the irony here). As far as I’m concerned, whatever you are prioritising, whether it’s what feature to build for a product, what project to undertake, or what you should st...

During the year of 2017 I broke five bones (3 ribs, my collarbone and my wrist) all on separate occasions. I ride mountain bikes often (or at least I did until I recently had twins) and I love riding the steep, technical and rooty trails that Wellington NZ has in abundance....

In 2000, Southwest Airlines Flight 1455 was transporting 142 passengers and crew from Las Vegas to Burbank airport in California. The pilot was a man named Howard Peterson. During landing, the plane approached the runway at too steep an angle and was travelling too quickly to be able to come to a ha...

I’ve updated the Opportunity Canvas by tightening up some of the language and descriptions and renaming the ‘Budget’ section to ‘Constraints’. Budget is a key constraint (how much is this opportunity worth realising or problem worth solving?) but I also find it’s worth explicitly considering others....

When we create a remote IC Agile course, a key objective is not to compromise on the interactive experience. This can be pretty tricky with some of the hands-on learning exercises we use, but thanks to the recent ‘make everything remote’ situation, we’ve adapted pretty fast! One of the exercises we...

Measures and metrics can be confusing; what do terms such as Leading, Lagging, Qualitative, and Quantitative even mean? when should you use them and why? It’s very hard to be ‘Data-informed’ in your decision making, if you are not informed yourself, on what these terms mean and how to apply them. I...

Design Sprints are a great way for a team to solve a big problem and test a solution with real users in a structured way. Some of the activities, language and concepts can be new to people, so I created this ‘Design Sprint Dinner’ exercise, as a fun way to introduce people to some of the concepts of...

When you picture a truly amazing team in your head, what does it look like? Now consider your teammates. Do they have the same picture? Really - all of them? The things people have experienced and read massively shape what ‘great’ looks like for them. The differences can lead to frustrations or peo...

Product Development is a mash up of three mindsets; ‘Design Thinking’, ‘Agile’ and ‘Lean’, at the heart of which is empiricism. Continuous product improvement is a cycle of Build-Measure-Learn, where experiments define how rapidly we can get feedback on whether we are making progress. The problem I...

I got 'canvas envy' after seeing Jeff Patton's excellent Opportunity Canvas in late 2016, and have been using it in the field ever since. I've made a few changes to it, as people seem to like more structure, especially when it's run in a group. This version tells a 'story' to gain a shared understan...

There is a lot of talk right now about how agile product delivery teams should take ownership of customer discovery work, alongside their development activities. This is otherwise known as ‘dual-track development’ and is described in Jeff Patton’s excellent article In this blog I want to talk throug...

Recently a friend of mine formed a startup with a goal of making the One-On-One Meeting an easier and more valuable process. Their aim was to help managers and their direct reports easier handle the goals and issues that arise from these sessions. The assumption they made was that their customers (p...

Hi, my name is Simon and I am a Project Manager at Trade Me. Sandy kindly asked me to contribute to her blog, and I consider it a great honour. Below is my story about how we embraced Agile to inject magic into our project. As a Project Manager I am keenly aware that most projects fail and that’s a...

Working Agile in the client-vendor context is not always an experience filled with joy and achievement. It can be daunting, frustrating, expensive and unrewarding - as much as it can be productive, useful, involving and successful. Working with Agile with internal teams can be challenging enough, bu...

Many novice teams find it difficult to strike the balance between too much and too little detail when writing user stories. User stories often start their lives as big statements of intent with lots of unknowns and that’s okay. For something that’s not going to be developed in the near future it mak...

I can't say enough about how useful story maps are and how essential they are on any Agile project. Jeff Pattonis the undisputed (certainly in my mind) master of the story map and it's well worth looking at the materials on his site. Jeff summarises a story map as, "A prioritized user story backlog...