The Stakeholder Management Trap
Melissa Perri identified the build trap: building more does not make you better at building the right things. It makes you a more sophisticated producer of the wrong…
The Missing Ingredient in Most SAFe Implementations
In recent years, SAFe has become the lightning rod for criticisms of agile at scale. From startup veterans to enterprise reformers, the refrain is familiar: “The first law…
The Rapid Prototyping Trap: Why Faster Tools Don’t Replace Problem Fit
Modern tools like Lovable and Cursor can produce high-fidelity, interactive prototypes in minutes. They’re genuinely exciting, and they’ve lowered the barrier to experimentation in ways that were unimaginable…
Service Design: A Product Management Perspective
What do users want? Organizations typically capture user demands in extensive documentation commonly known as ‘requirements’, align technical departments with ‘the business’, and start their development process, hopefully…
Consultancy As Bullshit Job (Part 3)
This is the third of three posts on David Graeber’s notion of the ‘bullshit job’: pointless work that becomes psychologically destructive in cultures that associate work with self-worth.…
Consultancy As Bullshit Job (Part 2)
This is the second of three posts on David Graeber’s notion of the ‘bullshit job’: pointless work that becomes psychologically destructive in cultures that associate work with self-worth.…
“For Complex Work, There Are No Experts”
Last week (December 12-13, 2019), I took part in a Professional Scrum Master (PSM) II training course hosted by Christiaan Verweijs and Barry Overeem, a.k.a. The Liberators. I…
Consultancy As Bullshit Job (Part 1)
The anthropologist David Graeber has introduced the notion of the ‘bullshit job’: pointless work that becomes psychologically destructive in cultures that associate work with self-worth. Bullshit jobs can…
Becoming Entrepreneurial: Maximizing the Impact of the Product Owner
In Scrum, the Product Owner is the person responsible for maximizing value, for example through prioritization of development work, engaging stakeholders, and learning from the market and customers.…