Author: Meredith

There is a perception that if we can only scale the delivery of features we will be able to scale customer value.

Jeff Gothelf in “Scaling Agile is hard. Here’s why.“

Things that are true are never owned. They are just shared.

To keep people engaged we need to create limits and pathways for users so it feels familiar. Users won’t tell you because they don’t know it yet, but they’ll appreciate it.

Joe Toscano in “The Ultimate Guide to Chatbots: Why they’re disrupting UX and best practices for building”

– Will McPhail in The New Yorker

“An organisation that can accelerate but not change direction is like a car that can speed up but not steer,” DeMarco writes. “In the short run, it makes lots of progress in whatever direction it happened to be going. In the long run, it’s just another road wreck.” 

Oliver Burkeman in Why time management is ruining our lives

People tend to ask for more features in an effort to simplify a complex feature set.

Overheard:

The question for [design and engineering] to ask is, “Who are we solving this problem for?” And then, “How do we know we’re really solving that problem or not?” Too often it’s easy for designers and engineers to solve designer-y problems and engineering-y problems, respectively. This happens the better one gets at their discipline — it’s a constant struggle to stay close to the problem, instead of hanging closer to just “the discipline.”

– John Maeda

The single biggest mistake I see tech leaders make is to assess the value of individual team members by the number of tickets they close.

That mistake is the root cause of the number one challenge faced by developers: Unrealistic expectations. When you focus on an individual’s count of closed job tickets, you ignore the wider context of the project work and normal team dynamics, and the results can be disastrous: Poor morale, poor developer retention, and slowed productivity.

– Eric Elliott in The Essential Guide to Building Balanced Development Teams, a great article recommended to me by a superb senior developer

😍

“I purchased and configured [makeamericanastyagain.com] right after watching the debate,” says Weber, “chief semicolon advocate” at Automattic. “Apparently, my way of calming down and feeling like a productive citizen after watching these incredibly troubling, offensive Trump performances is to purchase domains and redirect them to Secretary Clinton’s site.

– Angela Watercutter, in Clinton Camp Isn’t Behind makeamericanastyagain.com – But it Should Be