planning
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🚣 Rowing the race you need at the end
Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat follows the University of Washington eight-oar crew that won gold in Berlin in 1936. The part that stays with me is how they rowed the middle of a race. Washington was a come-from-behind crew. Othe…
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📈 Do schedule estimates get more or less confident over time?
There are two trajectories for schedule confidence. A schedule feels safest when it is nailed down up front, often built around what management wants to hear. Detailed Gantt charts add to that feeling. The modeling has value, but it rarely …
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🤔 Two types of unknowns
There are two types of unknowns: Things we don’t know. Things we think are true, but are not. 1 Both can inflict havoc on our plans, but the second is the most damaging. Why? The first is more associated with doing nothing. Bugs not known…
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🚢 What is the #1 problem in product development?
I’ll go first … a very common challenge is shipping on time and the resulting uncertainty to the business. We often add a 2-3x factor on any estimates, but sometimes even that is not enough. Shipping (delivering value) is the bottom line — …
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🔮 Can we predict product development schedules?
Estimating or predicting product development is difficult. Teams often end up adding a 2-3x padding to any estimate, because bitter experience has taught them not to depend on their own estimates. There will always be a high degree of varia…
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📖 When should you write the user manual?
Most of the time, teams write the user manual at the end of a product development cycle right before the Big 1.0 Release. It is one of those things that is not much fun, and teams subconsciously put it off while fighting bigger fires. But w…
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🔄 Breaking the AI slop cycle
“AI Slop” is a common expression describing a familiar phenomenon. It refers to sloppy code (or other assets) generated by AI that mostly works, lacks proper review, and may be poorly architected or implemented. The primary characteristic o…