Product Owner: Not a Hippo

Many teams nominate the boss as the Product Owner, but that isn’t always the right choice. Sure, we need a visionary, a communicator and someone with great relationships. We don’t need a HIPPO.

Small Iterations: The essence of agile

To be agile is to be able to move quickly and adapt. If you work in small iterations, you can do this because you have lower risk and lower cost of change. But how does this work in practice?

Retro: My favourite meeting

Can you imagine turning the daily gripes and groans from your team into something that transforms your business and delivers value? That’s why Retro is my favourite meeting.

What I’ve learned about: Stand-ups

I’ve taken part in over 1,500 stand-ups in my career – the good, the bad and the ugly. I’ve learned a lot – and I’d like to share five things I’ve learned that turn banal update meetings into team-energising value-generating self-organising super-tools.

Bad Developer, Good Developer

How do you know if you’re a bad developer or a good developer? Well, first you need to see a picture of each.

Monkeys, Eisenhower, and why I need to stop doing things myself

One of the most valuable skills as a leader is delegation. Without delegation, you may be the boss, but you’re not a leader. In many ways, effective delegation is the surest measurement of the quality of a leader. Trusting your team to do a job really well, giving them the freedom to do so, and […]

Five things I’ve learned about leadership

I’ve led people for over fifteen years, and I’ve learned a few things along the way. My education continues, but here are some things I’ve learned so far.

How the cloud helps our business fly

Enterprise-grade IT infrastructure and systems used to be prohibitively expensive for small businesses like ours. With the cloud, we have very grown-up tools at our fingertips at an incredible price.

We have a responsibility to create opportunities

What do Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Nick Cousins have in common? Not a lot… but we all capitalised on opportunities we had.

Professionalism in Software

A professional software engineer does much more than write code. Being professional is a career-long pursuit and, in my humble opinion, it boils down to a number of principles.