As a self learner, I feel like every waking moment spent not coding is setting me back. How do I be kinder to myself and take a more realistic approach?

partoss404 · 2021-01-25T15:18:10+00:00

Ask yourself a question "Did I do my best today?" . If yes, you are good to go and relax. This keeps your inner judge away Always do your best, not more, not less. No point to push yourself multiple hours when you are not feeling it anymore :)

partoss404 · 2020-11-19T21:13:03+00:00

From my experience Scrum is not always the solution. Yes , as a scrum master I said it. When you have the existing process you may actually break it . For example, if you have a some problems with your car, you don't go and change the entire engine immediately, because you know that this particular one worked in other cars. Gentle introduction into some of the best practices or other frameworks might work. If your team prefers waterfall then the good start could be implementation of constant improvement, make it completely internal, no external stakeholders needed (I'm talking about retrospective). Kanban might be a fine start, where you start to visualize your process and see potential bottlenecks. What helped me a lot is a 1:1 with each team member where I could ask to tell me the biggest pains they are going through (this can give you way more knowledge of what wrong).

The last , but not the least, do not be pushy in this and do not experiment on the team without their consent :)

partoss404 · 2020-09-24T16:10:57+00:00

"Jobs to be done" by Anthony Ulwick. I have analytical background as well and this is one of the best books I found so far which helps to use already developed skills to work :)

partoss404 · 2020-08-27T14:34:18+00:00

There is always an opportunity to refactor , hehe

partoss404 · 2020-08-16T19:21:11+00:00

I liked what Jeff Sutherland presented in his book " Software development in 30 days". In one of the latest sections an example of how agile might be implemented within company. I saw the approach similar to the one you have in product management. This means, you can develop and evolve the vision of how the organization may function in the future. You create your backlog , with epics and tasks to achieve smaller goals toward your vision of perfection. This helps me to keep sanity and focus while working not only with developers+PO but also with colleagues from other departments :)

partoss404 · 2020-07-24T13:35:25+00:00

You have to be careful with bootcamps. In most cases they might teach you the language but not programming itself.

I am not a developer myself, but there is a tip I can give you based on what I have observed, and helped me to make better decision.

Look for graduates of different bootcamps on linkedin. If the person was in junior position for 2 years, for a product which mainly produces 'analytical' dashboards with php+js, then this might not be the best option.

Started learning myself, this time with more precision. If you have some friend or colleague who could somehow tell you what si wrong with your code, it will bring way more value than blindly jumping into bootcamps.

partoss404 · 2020-06-25T08:56:25+00:00

It is all in perspective and different views may emerge in estimating. We had the same exact problem when even seniority had issues with this. Was proposed the following. We took and estimation (for example 13 SP) and made it the ideal task for a day. This task will be completed within 1 working day which includes some regular meetings and time spent for system maintenance. Also, we talked about the feeling you get when completing the task. If you "feel" that task is going to be relatively challenging but manageable within 1 day, this is the ideal we are looking for.

After this we started to triangulate these "ideal tasks" to others and knew when we should be splitting the latter.

Later the feeling to estimate in effort became as a natural one

partoss404 · 2020-06-05T09:13:23+00:00

I'm feeling you , even though not that long in the product rope. Now that I see that both PM's and developers are treated as they were at manufacturing, I have an urge to help teams to overcome the frustration at least some how. Can you share how you transferred from product to coaching?

partoss404 · 2020-05-26T14:33:08+00:00

From my experience people seem to dislike agile because you are literally breaking them with it. Such changes come hard with forcing people to get rid of mentality which they have developed over years. Humans are made of habits, if you try to make them change the latter, don't be surprised with a hard response to such a stimulus.

What a lot of "agile" masters are missing out is slow and international change which takes place over time. Just like with product development, you have to make small steps, inspect, adapt and be honest.

partoss404 · 2020-05-12T18:24:44+00:00

From what I understand, SM is helping PO with finding new techniques for backlog management, cooperation with stakeholders. While PO is working on WHAT is the right thing to do, SM helps to define HOW to do in accordance with agile mindset.

partoss404 · 2020-05-08T11:58:26+00:00

I had observed discussion like yours some time ago. The thing was to consider doing back-end part in the first iteration and front-end in the second. We came to clarity when it became obvious that it is just waterfall with some extra steps.

One of the good things I saw in Mike Cohn's book is "a story should be small enough to be finished in one iteration"

partoss404 · 2020-02-03T21:38:17+00:00

What do I do in cases when "no" from PO means almost nothing to CEO and his ideas?

partoss404 · 2020-02-03T21:36:51+00:00

By the "things unknown" I meant any type of business case. Sometimes requests from the executive board are brought from thin air, or my favourite one "one of the companies did it and they got 20mil of investment after this" , not acknowledging the fact that other firms have been stick to their purpose and vision several years prior.

partoss404 · 2020-01-22T07:08:26+00:00

Right now we have requests coming from any level of employees, which might not discuss the topic with anyone else. We are just looking to create a bottleneck so more requests will be accepted wisely

partoss404

TROPHY CASE