Product owners are the key liaison between users, business stakeholders, and the development team. This is a mission critical role that is central to a product’s strategy, roadmap, and success. Unfortunately, the product owner role is often confused...
For Agile teams and companies, scaling can often feel at odds with Agile’s core ethos of focusing on individuals, collaborating with customers, and responding to changes. Scaling is so daunting that the number of companies actively expanding their...
In business, it’s easy to become obsessed with an idea. Founders, leaders, and managers become convinced that they know exactly who wants their product and what they need from it. But the hard truth? They’re often wrong. Too many teams try to...
No one wants to plan for failure. But even with the most detailed plans, the best people, and a healthy budget, projects can (and do) go wrong. And that’s not to mention outside factors you don’t have any control over. With projects increasingly...
Being a project manager can often feel like you’re fighting the mythical many-headed Hydra — every time you manage to finish a project, two (or more) pop up in its place. One survey found that 85% of project managers work on at least two projects...
Building high-performing teams is hard work. Many leaders think you can just bring random people together, sit them in a room, and set them a task — but that rarely, if ever works. It takes time for a team to bond, set boundaries, establish norms...
According to a 2024 survey of project managers, just 40% of teams capture post-project lessons learned. While some people might think this number seems high (who has time to reflect when you’ve got a never ending list of tasks and projects to...
When battling the triple constraint of time, cost, and quality, projects often opt for faster or more cost-effective solutions to get things done. One of the consequences of this choice is technical debt — issues or suboptimal code that needs to...
Social loafing is the perceived psychological phenomenon that people do less work when they’re in a group setting. Think of the classic “school project”, where one or two high-achievers do 80% of the work while the rest of the team “loaf around...
Despite what we think, we’re actually terrible at estimating projects. Studies show that 91.5% of big projects go over budget, over schedule, or both. There needs to be a better way to estimate the work ahead of us. Story Points are a powerful...