Is that team offsite in Mexico worth sacrificing family time? — I was recently invited to speak at DevOps Days Chicago, several hundred miles away from my home. This will be my first multi-day business trip since my daughter was born almost five years ago. As I’ve been preparing my slides, I’ve also been preparing my child care arrangements and realizing…

Writing user stories is a good practice, but for articulating business outcomes, they are not enough. Let’s talk about how to share a compelling product narrative. — Once upon a time, I thought writing a good set of agile user stories with specific Given/When/Then acceptance criteria was the most important part of a product person’s job. I had recently made the switch from software engineering to product and was committed to spelling out requirements in a user-centric…

Lessons from my dad on building a team, a business, and a life worth living — My father was a great man. It has been six years since he died at age 56. I miss him every day. The gnawing hole he left behind never gets easier to hide, but it has become a familiar struggle. Glen Riesterer, my father, was a great man by all…

Trigger warning: Graphic description of miscarriage My heart has been breaking all day for the women of Texas. I know I typically write about product management and software engineering, but I needed a space to process my grief, trauma, and fear. …

“It was missing a piece. And it was not happy. So it set off in search of its missing piece.” — Shel Silverstein, The Missing Piece — In Shel Silverstein’s classic children’s story The Missing Piece, an incomplete circle slowly rolls along, talking to worms, falling into holes, and enjoying the company of butterflies as it searches for its missing piece. Meanwhile, the Missing Piece is waiting out there, somewhere, hoping the circle will come and find…

What is Cycle Time? Cycle Time, the time it takes for a user story or other task to go through the software development lifecycle, is a common metric used in Kanban. It replaces velocity as a measure of efficiency and predictability for a team. If we consider the very simple JIRA Kanban board above…

Sprint Demo. Sprint Review. Demo Day. All Hands. Show and Tell. Lunch and Learns. I’ve seen many flavors of the BIG DEMO meeting in tech companies who want the disparate squads of a growing engineering team to still come together and feel like a team. They generally look the same…

A lesson on opportunity costs from Mo Willem’s children’s book In Should I Share My Ice Cream by Mo Willem’s, Elephant Gerald is frozen with indecision: should he share his awesome, yummy, sweet, super, great, tasty, nice, cool ice cream with his best friend Piggie or keep it all to…

Product Management Lessons from Mo Willems’ Award-Winning Children’s Book — Mo Willem’s book, Let’s Go For a Drive!, starts with a great idea. A self-organizing, enthusiastic team dives headfirst into a road trip adventure. Elephant Gerald declares that if this endeavor is to be successful, he and Piggie need a plan. Unfortunately, planning is not Gerald’s strong suit. …