Key practice in effective product development culture. — TL;DR Evolutionary design is YAGNI + Simple Design + Refactoring. Also known as Emergent design; Continuous design; JIT (just-in-time) design Opposites Big Design Up Front; Planned design; Anticipatory design YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It) YAGNI means building features only when they are necessary. …

Migrated from my old blog. — When talking about motivation, many people will reference Drive with its three key factors: Autonomy Mastery Purpose One of the main sources that Dan Pink used for Drive is self-determination theory, which also points to three key factors for intrinsic motivation: Autonomy Competence (which…

Key practice in effective product development culture. — Test Driven Development: Write a single test first; Run the test to ensure it fails; Write just enough code to make the test pass; Refactor (see Kent Beck’s 4 rules of simple design) ; Repeat This is often summarised as Red Green…

I’ve previously written about the 6 sources of influence: Let’s use this to assess some well-known change models. Kotter 8 step change model From The 8-Step Process for Leading Change | Dr. John Kotter (kotterinc.com) but also Leading Change, The Heart of Change, and The Heart of Change Field Guide and a whole bunch of…

I’m learning more about LLMs and I figured I’d record useful references as I go. I’d appreciate any additional suggestions. At the moment, I’m approaching this using 4 categories: Prompt engineering; Fine-tuning LLMs; How LLMs work; Broader topics. Prompt engineering ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers by DeepLearning.AI which seems to be the…

Key practice in effective product development culture. — Effective product development teams have clear missions that are aligned with a broader overall product strategy. They are expected to act autonomously and empowered with the capability and support to do so. This typically requires the teams to be cross-disciplinary. Autonomy is about enabling teams to decide and act more quickly. Teams that…

I’ve been wondering about simple rules for team design inspired by Kent Beck’s rules for simple design. This is partly triggered by noticing people incorrectly using team size as their primary (or even sole) design criteria. — In order of priority, a well-designed team: Has a clear mission. Everyone knows…

On 29 Nov 2022, I learned I was being laid off by Spotify, official termination date 31 Dec 2022. This is a rough summary of my job search experience. I started looking the moment I got the same day “urgent” calendar invite on 29 Nov and had set my LinkedIn…

Use an iterative-incremental lifecycle. Using a serial lifecycle (aka waterfall or SDLC) increases the likelihood of failure. If you are using a serial or waterfall lifecycle, you are increasing the likelihood of failure. But what if the problem is trivial? Once you’re in “program” territory, it’s highly unlikely that the effort is trivial enough to risk waterfall. Note: Using a “hybrid waterfall” is still unnecessarily risking failure.