You must align your OKRs! One of the promises of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is that they help an organization achieve its goals. This is done by aligning OKRs throughout your organization’s hierarchy. I’ve written about how OKRs should be aligned in my article, “OKRs — Cascade or Align?” The idea is that the…

As 2022 comes to a close, I thought I’d do what a lot of others are doing and look back on the past year. Actually, I’m going to cheat a little bit. I’m going to start my review in December 2021. …

Here’s a recent conversation I had: My colleague (let’s call him Pete): “Value Streams own all the people, processes, and resources necessary to produce the stream’s value.” Me: “Uh, no. A Value Stream is just an abstraction. It doesn’t own anything. It represents the application of people, processes, and resources…

After publishing articles on Medium for about a year and a half, I received the following email from Medium: When I first received this email, I didn’t even know what a Top Writer was. I’ve since learned that it means that I’m somewhere in the top 50 writers on my…

I was formally introduced to the idea of strategy and strategic thinking almost a decade ago when I took a year-long leadership training course as part of my job. Here’s how the strategic thinking process was presented: Determine your current state Define your desired future state Identify the Gap between…

Is Management a Science or an Art? If you read many articles and books on management, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that management are mostly an art. There are clearly skills and techniques that you can learn. However, especially in recent years, there’s been a great emphasis on culture and EQ (Emotional Quotient, or more commonly…

Why agility is key in product development I’m driven by the question “how do we do the right thing?” My PhD research was focused on determining the best way to measure the performance of computer systems. Over the next decade, I worked as a professional software engineer. I studied software modeling languages and design patterns to learn…

Hello, In September, I was invited by the good folks at Collato.com to write an article for their blog. Their product helps people manage their OKRs, goals, and product roadmaps in an Agile work environment. My article touches on a number of these points from my perspective. You can check out the article here: https://collato.com/blog/agile-product-development I was also out on vacation much of September, so Strategy for the Rest of Us has been somewhat silent. I’ll get back to my normal writing cadence soon.

Which is more painful — putting up with a broken product or calling customer support? Do you want your customers asking themselves this question? I doubt it. In fact, you want it to be as painless as possible for your customers to get quick solutions to their problems. Making customer service painless Most modern…