Week 75 – 09/02/2020

We reached a bit of a hard deadline scnario at work. Ended up with a sprint with way too much in to complete to try and hit that deadline. These crunches are good and bad. Good becuase the reality of the amount of work needed to meet a deadline force you to look at what could be improved, bad because you realise maybe things are not being managed realistically and you are not really doing agile but just pretending. Going to do an indepth retro to look into how we can improve (we might have been skimping too much on the team improvement aspects as well). Feels like it could open a few cans of worms but that candour is needed for us to improve and grow.

Went to the MTPEngage conference in Manchester. Part of the global Mind The Product bunch of conferences and it was very good to go to a big conference in the North. Met a few people who had travelled from outside the country to visit so proves that not everything has to be in London. The conference itself was also very good. A couple of really great talks that were just perfect for areas I am focused on now.

Rachel Shah a delivery manager from the Co-Op talked about the challenges of team building on a new project. Some very useful tips in light of the above. Thor Mitchell was excellent on humility being one of the most important aspects of a product manager. Clearly I am very humble so I must be a great product manager. John Cutler, who I am a bit of a fanboy of, was great but had a bit of a rambling start but grew into his talk and you can see a real intellect at work. He was talking about the importance of avoiding being too rigid in your frameworks and processes and that it takes time to make change happen. Practice, practice, practice, experiment, measure etc. He did say don’t be rigid on processes but also pitched the popcorn flow process. I ate it up. Good conference.

Six year old learned how to solve the 2×2 rubiks cube which felt good. I am still struggling to remember those algorithms to be honest.

Went to see Stewart Lee who was excellent as always. Amazing to see such a professional at the height of his powers.

Watched The Act. Very good show. Patricia Arquette is horribly brilliant as the overbearing mum. Joey King even better as the abused Gypsy Lee.

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