William Gill

This sign reminds me of a presentation from Seth Godin at the 2006 Gel conference. This was one of his examples of stuff that is broken. “They’re building a device that can crush small children to death,” he says. “They oughta walk down the hall to the engineers and say, ‘The sign is not the…

I remember reading about a concept from Taoism called Wei Wu Wei. Roughly translated it means “action without action”, or “effortless action”. In the same way that running water naturally and effortlessly flows around obstacles, so should our actions be thoughtful and mindful, but effortless. Bruce Lee, when describing his martial art Jeet Kune Do…

Many processes and organisational controls are set up to minimise failure. They are set up to minimise the number of times a team releases bad software; minimise the number of customer complaints; minimise the server crashes or minimise the failed product launches. What if instead of trying to minimise failure, your organisation focused on maximising…

Not my job One of my first jobs was as a bartender in a pub. My supervisor, Ted, had what I then thought was a compulsive neatness habit. If he saw a chair was out of place, he would straighten it. If there was an empty glass on the table, he would take it. A…

Photo from here. In Agile development teams we talk about technical debt. A debt is basically anything you owe the codebase; anything you need to pay back. When you make a decision to ship less-than-pefect code to meet a deadline, the less-than-pefect code is the debt you have to pay back. When a junior programmer…

You can gain a lot of insights about people’s mood and reaction to news and disucssions just by watching them. One habit I have picked up is during the daily standup, instead of watching the person speaking, I look around and watch the other members of the team. If I know the speaker is discussing…

A vote for everybody is a vote for nobody. Photo from here. The best software and products dazzle out of the box. They set new boundaries and exceed expectations. And they don’t settle for less than outstanding. Designing software with lots of stakeholders is complicated, but when the product manager prioritises reaching a compromise between…

In agile we promote working in small iterations, and building just enough to solve your problem today. I try to encourage my team to avoid designing a problem to the very end, but to focus only on what is necessary to solve the first; most basic problem. BUT: focus and iterative execution should not be…

What happens if you start building a castle and you end up with a dinosaur? That’s ok – maybe in the end the dinosaur is the solution to your actual problem. What happens if you build a castle, but it turns out you really needed a dinosaur? Well, then you’re in trouble. With any creative…

We had some tradesmen in our apartment building this week to renovate the stairwell. It was a bit depressed looking and the old carpet was a bit naff; so time for a refresh. So the first tradesmen on the scene were the ‘stairs guys’. These guys pulled the old carpet and re-laid some new stuff…

Teams often run into trouble in a sprint when they’re trying to work with poorly split stories. Stories that are too big, too small, confusing or that mix the problem with the solution… We should split stories into small, discreet chunks of functionality. A single story should generally be the smallest discreet piece of functionality…

I recently wrote about the Satir change curve, which is a model for describing the impact of new processes on the performance/velocity of a team or organisation. In short, your velocity is going to go down before it goes up. Understanding this curve, and having the courage to stick it out, is the key to…

You can’t change your shoes while you’re running. Have you ever heard the expression “it’s gonna get worse before it gets better?” If you’re talking about improving processes or ways of working in your organisation, then chances are this expression’s probably true. Any new process or change in ways of working has a wearing in…

Your product’s user interface is its window to the world. It’s how your users interact with you, and how you interact with your users. The words on your interface are central to the user experience, and crafting perfect copy is every bit ‘User Experience Design’ as designing the user flows, choosing colours and designing screen…

Today, for the first time in what seems like ages, my PC caught the flu. This time it was a particularly annoying piece of malware called HDD Low; one of those fake system config utilities that spams you with fake warnings about your hard drive or memory until you give in and buy their special…

For the first time in what seems like ages I somehow managed to catch a virus… this time a very annoying one called HDD Low. It’s one of those fake system optimisation utilities that keeps spamming you with false alerts about your system (low memory, hard drive error, etc) until you give in and buy…

It’s important to understand what your users do, how they use your product… but remember: data never paints the whole picture. User research, user testing, usability studies, behavioural analysis, usage statistice: it’s all important – understanding and making sense of this data is crucial for your product’s development – but this data doesn’t exist in…

In the world of Scrum the user stories are at the heart of everything that’s added to the software: it’s how you break down the product strategy and requirements into discreet, develop-able chunks. We build software for our users, so it makes sense that everything that’s added to or taken away from the software is…

The Sprint Demo is one of the most important meetings on the sprint calendar. So why are so many sprint demos so poor? Firstly, why is the Sprint Demo so important? I think for several reasons: It makes the progress (or, where applicable, lack thereof) of the team transparent (to management, to other teams, to…

When you communicate, you have two responsibilities: 1. communicate your message 2. ensure the message is understood #1 is easy – but it is #2 that counts. You can do #1 and forget or skip #2 – but you haven’t really communicated. Saying words out loud is not communication – it’s just making noise. Communication…