August 2023

Case Study: Establishing a Project Prioritization Framework

The Problem At scrappy startups and megalithic enterprise companies alike, deciding what to prioritize with available engineering resources is always a challenge. Everyone has an opinion aligned with their own agenda. Stakeholders clamor for initiatives that will increase their visibility or will simply make the lives of the members of their department easier. All of … Read more »

Case Study: Scaling Agile for Enterprises and Startups

The Problem Oracle’s social media marketing product suite was formed by the acquisition of several startups in the social media space. The overarching solution was cobbled together, re-packaged, then sold to enterprises as a comprehensive solution for social listening, engagement, analytics, and publishing. Team tribalism was rampant as there were contingents held over from the … Read more »

Case Study: Improving an Offshore Team’s Velocity

The Problem A SaaS startup had a South Asian outsourced offshore team as its primary application development team. The team had a project leader, who, while very capable and reliable, was a bottleneck for communication with the rest of the team. Stakeholders simply threw requirements over the fence to the project leader and were not … Read more »

Case Study: Building a Sustainable Platform for Long-Term Growth

The Problem A B2B SaaS startup (henceforth referred to as the Company) had built their platform 4 times in 6 years (that’s an average of a 1 version per 1.5 years). Each time a new version was built, new features and capabilities were baked in, but inevitably, some features and business logic were also lost. … Read more »

Scrum is Like Training Wheels for an Agile Mindset

In the last few years there has been a growing but steady backlash against Scrum and some its corollary concepts such as using story points to estimate work and make projections. As a proponent and practitioner of agile product development methodologies, this bothered me at first. But upon further reflection, I have come to welcome … Read more »