Go to school. Prove your worth by getting your diploma. Find a job. Work hard. Don’t break the rules. Cash in your pay-check every month. Enjoy your life after work. The end.
This is the life pattern most of us grew up with and one that still reverberates strongly today as most of the social institutions are set up for this modus operandi. But lots of us can fell the wind of change. We may not be fully capable to put it into words but “times they are a changing”. It is something I have been thinking for a while. I think your Spider senses are tingling too.
Read MoreWe all deal with priorities and goal setting in our personal or professional life. And I recently realized that if you have problems in picking and sticking with a list of priorities you don't have a priorities or a goal-setting problem. Most probably you have a strategy problem. Strategy details how a team will use the power available to the them to exercise control over sets of circumstances to achieve certain objectives. Once that is decided the priorities become pretty clear.
Read MoreThanks to Ward Cunningham, the metaphor technical debt is quite a well-understood concept. It means you are borrowing time by writing messy code, not worrying about scaling, documentation or other items required for a quality release. You go quick and dirty to release early but all that bad code will incur debt. And there will be a time when you need to pay that debt back - with interest.
I think the parallel with the product design world is a welcome addition. I frequently find myself using the term product debt but I also get the sense that very few people know what I am talking about. Like technical debt, product debt is inquired when you make short term product decision with an expensive long term consequence.
Read MoreHow come we always make a strategy and then something else happens? Would we better off without any strategy since nothing we do seems to work? What is a strategy after-all? - All questions I was asking myself during sleepless nights or during discussions with my colleagues. I knew the difference between strategy and tactic but somehow this "strategy" concept was one that I didn't fully use. Clearly I didn’t understand it completely.
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