In 2021, I wrote a blog post on running effective show & tells. If I were writing that blog post again today, the first thing I would add would be kick off the event with trumpet time. What is trumpet time? A chance to celebrate the achievements and contributions of your team over the past […]
Product discovery is all about uncovering user problems and validating solutions to those problems quickly. When teams start discovery without preparation this can lead to wasted time, wasted effort and bad solutions. This post explores my thoughts on how best to help teams prepare for product discovery (aka pre-discovery). 1. Explain the big picture Want […]
This post describes the simple approach we have settled on to keep track of our work at Climate Policy Radar: actions on Linear and documentation on Notion. How we use Linear Why we like Linear Linear prides itself on being a simple alternative to larger more complex task management systems like Jira. Their method is to offer […]
Good product teams are focused on rapidly delivering maximum value to their users. This post describes four factors that when kept to a minimum, enable teams to deliver more, more often and at a higher quality: cycle time, queues, work in progress and batch size. In this post, I explain what these four things are, […]
If you have ever worked with a software or agile team before, you have probably done a daily stand-up. In this blog post, I share my thoughts on why daily stand-ups are useful and some tips on how to run them well. About stand-ups What is a stand-up? Stand-ups are regular meetings for the team […]
When a new team is formed or an existing team goes through change, it is important to take some time for team members to learn more about who each other are and how best to work together. In this post, I summarise my two favourite workshops to help teams get off to a good start: […]
This blog post explains why and how we (Climate Policy Radar) decided to split from one big product team into two smaller teams. The problem with working as one big team As the team grew in size, we found it increasingly difficult to do everything together as a whole team. Meetings took a long time […]
I am working at a startup of 13 people with big plans for the future. Notion is one of the main tools everybody in the team uses. This post describes how we have set up Notion to make information easy to find across multiple growing teams. What is Notion Notion is a note-taking and productivity […]
This post provides an introduction to team retrospectives and a guide on how to run them. Intro to retrospectives What is a retrospective? A regular meeting for the team to reflect on past performance and identify ways to improve. Why bother? Good teams continuously improve their product. Great teams also continuously improve how they work […]
Premortems help us identify and reduce risks before they happen. They are a great exercise to run before launching a product or feature. What is a premortem Product teams often use postmortems to understand what caused a problem and how to reduce the risk of it becoming a problem again. Premortems are the opposite. You […]