Archivo del Autor: Antonio Martel

How can we avoid featuritis and concentrate just on the tasks that will make us more efficient? Many years ago, approximately a century ago, someone called Pareto realised that 20% of the pea pods in his garden amounted for 80% … Sigue leyendo →

As per D. McGreal and R. Jochan in their book The Professional Product Owner, the Usage Index determines how a product and its features are difficult to use, difficult to find in a messy User Interface, or if we are … Sigue leyendo →

As per James Clear, in Atomic Habits, referring an article published in the New Yorker: “Japanese firms emphasized what came to be known as ‘lean production’, relentlessly looking to remove waste of all kinds from the production process, down to … Sigue leyendo →

Owning a product, leading a team, hiring a professional, designing an architecture with colleagues, and almost everything in life is a negotiation. Serial trade-offs, intercessions, conciliations or dialogues. A great way of learning how to negotiate is through the George … Sigue leyendo →

You can see everywhere that more and more companies are not including a Scrum Master in their teams. Others renamed the Product Owner role as Product Managers or Product Marketing Managers, and these don’t play the same rules as the … Sigue leyendo →

We tend to believe that creating comprehensive Gantt diagrams, precise roadmap documents, and making the customer sign the meeting minutes will make us and our projects more trustworthy.We need to plan, and try to foresee what is coming, but you … Sigue leyendo →

What to do if it takes me ages to get to production? Have a look to this article if your cycle time is huge: https://www.antoniomartel.com/2023/10/theory-of-constraints-toc.html What to do if your to-do list and backlog is growing endlessly: https://www.antoniomartel.com/2023/09/when-everything-is-a-priority-nothing-is-a-priority.html https://www.antoniomartel.com/2023/11/dont-even-write-it-down.html And … Sigue leyendo →

From The Professional Product Owner book: Growth of technical debt by poorly designed software where budget is progressively consumed as the old software is kept alive. If you fail to address technical debt now, you will end up paying more … Sigue leyendo →

You can get some relief by moving forward the hot issues to the next team, but two things are going to happen: the problem will never get solved, and it will get back to you faster than you think. If … Sigue leyendo →

From the Personal MBA book: Recruit a small group of people capable of achieving what they have set out to do quickly and with the highest possible quality. Make sure the team is not too large. Communicate clearly what the … Sigue leyendo →

Some time ago, when digital transformation was in its infancy, I migrated my backlog document to an online spreadsheet using the brand new Office tool. Every single new request was logged there and an inscription number was assigned to it. … Sigue leyendo →

I have been sending different flavours of the Agile A4 Sprint Report at the end of each sprint for more than 5 years since I read from it in The Professional Product Owner book. In each email I also add … Sigue leyendo →

Gerald Weinberg in his book Quality Software Management, long before that Product Managers came around, explained an anecdote on the way a number of programmers he interviewed used to set the priorities for their work: one programmer declared: “This customer … Sigue leyendo →

Many teams are constantly struggling to keep a clean and focused 15 minute daily stand-up meeting, but we cannot help asking our questions to the tech lead or senior members when an issue has been bugging us for the whole … Sigue leyendo →

The Bystander effect or Bystander apathy is a well known social psychological theory that indicates that people are less likely to intervene in a crime or in a crisis if there are more witnesses of the crime. All of them … Sigue leyendo →

Mercedes Benz made some surveys among their potential customers and they said they wanted smaller cars with less gas consumption per mile. They created the Smart. Meanwhile, cities were crowded with 4×4 vehicles as big as an airplane. You don’t … Sigue leyendo →

You have been working in chronograms, Gantt diagrams, risks and resource management, more graphics specifying who reports to whom, dreamed plans, and the name of the people who should be blamed in case of not meeting a deadline. You are … Sigue leyendo →

It’s based on the search of bottlenecks and critical paths in your operations, so you can improve the process as a whole as any improvement in that point will enhance the total outcome. The idea comes from factory lines where … Sigue leyendo →