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Supporting a Product’s Cluster Headaches
Cluster headaches are problem reports that make everyone else in the organization ask “are we seeing that too?” and pile on. Alice suspects a memory leak and files a report. Bob tags his customers to it as well. They start discussing general performance questions in a chat or a meeting with a broad audience. Charlene […]
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Planning R&D Time
Granted that reality will disrupt the plan, I still find it useful to do a quarterly planning exercise. I’m fond of doing this with a zero based budget of person-time that has already had maintenance requirements removed. So you’ve got N full-time equivalent (FTE) people. They’re going to be sick and vacating and training 25% […]
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Internal Transfers
Role, tech stack, and culture. A new hire for a role must come up to speed on all three areas, and will be coming from behind on at least one. Some organizations are lucky enough to have a broadly common set of cultural or role expectations so that people can easily transfer skills from elsewhere. […]
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Executive Dashboards
Executive dashboards go through the Tuckman model… like team members, they have to be understood before they are accepted. Forming: a need for a dashboard is recognized and that dashboard is introduced to the executive staff. It may or may not be challenged, but its place is not certain. Storming: if not at introduction then […]
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Gambling or Groceries?
Following on the post about sustaining software, here’s an opposing argument. Go big or go home. Deliver shocking value. Focus attention on exponential results instead of linear ones. Leverage your investment into the biggest possible return. All of those exciting phrases are exciting because they mean increasing risk. Some are drawn to that risk, preferring […]
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When to use Design Discovery Patterns
People love one size fits all patterns and models, but it is usually better to use the correct tool for the job at hand. So you need to solve a problem. You’re going to build a solution to solve the problem with. It’s going to have users, who will configure it, give it their problems, […]
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Continued Improvement in Software Products
What’s more valuable to the software vendor: improving what you’ve already delivered, or building something new? At first it might seem like building a new thing will have the highest return on investment. After all, new customer growth being equal, the finished product is only going to get support, renewal, and expansion dollars from existing […]
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Enterprise Roshambo
Ever wish there was a simple game to explain how complex organizations make decisions? You’re in luck! Roshambo, also known as rock-paper-scissors, explains it all. There are a few productive hours in each day, and three conflicting ways to spend them. The game explains how they will be prioritized. Default rules: in enterprise roshambo, Compliance […]
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Total Compensation
Career decisions are complicated, but here are a few models to work with which might help. A salaried job is more than a simple exchange of your time for their money: you will be giving it some headspace in most of your waking moments. This conversation is not relevant to contract or hourly jobs. Still, […]
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Thoughts on Logging
Those two phrases are contradictory and context dependent. This is why logging has different levels. They may be expressed as numbers or words. Each more verbose level is inclusive of the less verbose levels. Sematext has a nice in-depth overview. I can’t count the number of times that initial log collection didn’t uncover the root […]
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