Hallway Studio

Questions to ask when you hear “we need to accelerate development”

Shaving

No one calls me when things are awesome. Google and Facebook aren’t calling me. The people that call me need help and one of the most common things I hear is that they need to “accelerate development.” It could be that they don’t have enough engineers or their engineers are kind of slow. But there […]

The truth behind scope creep (Take 3 Podcast)

I recently appeared on Take 3 Scene 16: The Truth Behind Scope Creep with my colleague Adam Hahn to talk about how there is no such thing as scope creep, it’s just change managed badly. The podcast was inspired by the article “Scope Creep or Just Change?” that I co-authored for Mind the Product. Image: Found this abstract image of […]

Talking planning with Peter Morville

Recently I sat down with Peter Morville to have a fascinating conversation about planning for his new book. Peter is a very accomplished information architect and author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Intertwingled, Search Patterns, and Ambient Findability.  I’m not a born planner, I’m not the kid who color coded their schedule in elementary […]

Pre-Mortems are great for kickoffs

The first few weeks of any product development effort are tricky. You are trying to figure out what you’re doing and how to work together. The expectations are always high and the timeline short. Recently I discovered the premortem in the excellent book Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Robert Sutton and […]

You’re funding technology wrong

Snowbird2016

Occasionally I work with clients who fund technology based on project business cases that are evaluated on a periodic or annual basis. These business cases require your leaders and their teams to spend endless hours creating and editing a deck. In many cases you could have built the thing with the money it took to […]

Product’s Role in DevOps

ConnectedCircles

I recently sat down with my friend Dan Greene to talk about the role of the product team in DevOps. He and I like to joke that DevOps is the new hotness, since most of the sales and senior technology people we know are talking about it. Dan wrote “What is DevOps?” for TechCrunch. People […]