Co-creator of CAPED (Complexity-Aware Planning, Estimation & Delivery). I help leaders deliver high-stakes initiatives without late surprises. @HumanizingWork
Hotchkiss, CO
Joined January 2009
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15 years of experimenting, writing, and teaching on user story splitting, consolidated and updated in one comprehensive guide: humanizingwork.com/the-human…
“Most project plans fail because they assume everything can be predicted and planned upfront. But the most valuable work in a project—the part that makes it innovative, competitive, or game-changing—is usually complex, not just complicated.”
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Ask a beginner in any field if they need a coach, and they'll say yes. Ask an elite performer, and they'll tell you about their coaching team. But ask someone in the middle, and they'll often say they've got it handled.
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We believe the actual work of leadership is creating the conditions for people to accomplish meaningful results together. A leader’s contribution should improve the work of many people, including work the leader will never personally touch.
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There's nothing wrong with capturing ideas, possibilities, and options. They just shouldn't go on the backlog. The product backlog is for things you actually intend to build.
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“It’s tempting to wish you didn’t have so many stakeholders to deal with. But all those stakeholders are an indication of the importance of the work. Initiatives that don't matter don't have stakeholders. No one cares.”
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Value isn’t a number. It’s a function of time. To prioritize correctly, you need to know not just cost and an expected financial benefit. You need to know when that benefit can be realized.
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“The time box (the sprint in Scrum, the iteration in other iterative methods) is one of the most powerful tools in agile software development for revealing problems in a team or organization. Notice I said reveal, not fix.”
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US employee engagement dropped below 30% for the first time in 15 years. Gallup cites two factors: knowing what’s expected of them and feeling cared about as a person.
Feeling cared about as a person needs to be connected to the work.
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“It’s easy to think, ‘We should have planned better.’ But some things just don’t emerge until you get into the real work.”
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“Green at the start of a project—when you’re carrying around all the things that could go wrong—looks a lot like denial. Or at least unfounded optimism.”
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“Very different organizations, but the same pattern: 5-8x faster, just from getting the right people on the same team. We've seen this over and over again.”
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“Story splitting is a very learnable skill. With about three hours of deliberate practice, you can go from ‘that's not splittable’ to ‘oh, it's another one of those, I know how to split it.’”
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“The Product Owner is not a rebranded requirements writer, a backlog tool clerk, or a proxy project manager.”
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“The problem isn't that the agile values and principles are wrong. It's that too often, typical agile practices assume a context that doesn't match where most people actually work.”
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“There’s nothing magical about story points. But if you’re not treating them as reference class forecasts, you’re just adding an extra layer of waste and frustration.”
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Too often, quarterly planning tries to impose certainty on work that’s naturally going to change as the team does the work.
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“Delegating a decision and then pulling back the decision when you disagree is what we call ‘delegation theater.’ Delegation theater breaks trust and leads to a culture of cynicism and disengagement.”
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“Items on a backlog function as implicit commitments to do the work at some point. Your stakeholders read them that way. So does your own subconscious. And we should avoid making commitments we don't intend to keep.”
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“It takes way less effort to think of something you could build than to actually build the thing. As a result, there will always be more ideas than capacity to implement them. Thus, you can’t sustainably buy your way out of the prioritization problem.”
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“The problem with framing it as Scrum versus Kanban is it misses what makes each approach valuable. It's like asking whether you should use a calendar or a to-do list. Yes, you should. You probably need both, just for different things.”
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