I'm an operator-grade peer to CEOs of post-PMF software companies when the work cuts across more than one seat at the table - when the standard functional moves keep widening the gap rather than closing it. The problem isn't function-shaped. There's no seat at the table exactly shaped for it.
Across CEO, CPTO, CPO, and CTO seats over six platform shifts, I've watched the same shape arrive: the company that should be moving but isn't.
The work: I diagnose the actual shape, embed alongside the CEO for a bounded window, and transition into the right permanent structure on the other side.
What makes it hard isn't only the technical and operational dimension - it's the human-systems read underneath: what's actually happening between people in the leadership team, not just what's on the whiteboard. Get that read wrong, and the engagement falls apart under stress. Get it right, and you've unlocked the next level.
Four exits. Engagements are bounded, with capability transfer on the back end.
Please vote for my SXSWi Panel "Lean Startups: Beyond the Hype, Successes, Failures & Techniques"
Last day to vote for my SXSWi panel; please vote! “Lean Startups: Beyond the Hype, Successes, Failures & Techniques” http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3884
iPhone Voicemail Badness - why-oh-why AT&T #fb
Noticing that I haven’t received any new voicemails in over a week - and hearing rumors about problems with voicemail on the iPhone… I reset my iPhone and after a reboot - ta-da! Over a weeks worth of voicemails suddenly appear. Grrr. Never seen this before and I’ve had my 1st generation iPhone for a couple of years
kanban development oversimplified + shiny bits on couchdb
Lots of buzz lately about kanban / lean in software development. While watching this from the sidelines, I’ve also been looking at my current team and previous teams and gauging applicability.
With my current team (at FiveRuns), we hit a point a while ago where the team began to reject the extra formality and overhead in some of our scrum practices (e.g. sprint planning, release planning) and began to smooth our rhythm out until we ended up, more or less, as continuous-flow.
The great thing is, I’ve looked back on earlier teams and seen similar trends - but different results. This time (for me) reality & results were stronger than dogma & fear - so we went with what made us better.
Then, I stumbled across Kanban Development Oversimplified and passed it out - it’s a great quick & simple overview.
It’s not good enough to be doing something… I’ve got to build something related. So, combine this with the desire to get some more experience with some new shiny bits (standalone apps on couchdb) and ta da: a simple board with cards + columns to represent our worfklow (surely a cliched application, along with blogs); the board will be a centralized service and a de-centralized service (ref: git) so that people can take their own copy of the board with them - keep using it - and sync up with either the centralized service or another instance, as needed. More later: I’ll post some cucumber scenarios and then a link to the project on github.