Afraid of the Reaction
A CEO I was coaching wanted to let their first engineering hire go. This person didn't take ownership, the CEO told me, couldn't be trusted with the harder calls…
Read More →Blog
The Startup Patterns blog
Essays on product, engineering, Agile, and leadership, here since 2016.
Prefer email? See recent newsletter issues, or browse the video library.
Archaeology of Meaning: From the Steppe to the Screen
Every organization was trained to write things down: specs, contracts, postmortems, onboarding docs, whatever the moment calls for. But people can still…
Read More →
Taylor Had a Stopwatch. They Have Your Knowledge Work.
The April unemployment rate is 4.3%. That number is no longer telling you what you think it's telling you. Headline unemployment measures people actively…
Read More →
The Reality Behind the Singularity
Every few weeks, a technology executive makes another announcement about the imminent arrival of artificial general intelligence, and the cycle of…
Read More →
The Risk of AI Writing Is Leadership Without Judgment
Sounds Good, Changes Nothing This is one of the most common leadership failures in modern organizations. The CEO brings a strategy document to the…
Read More →
The Real Estate Trap of the AI Age
In the United States, the cost of keeping a roof over your head has been climbing for decades. In 1970, the median home cost about 2.5 times the median…
Read More →
This Isn’t AI’s Decision. It’s Ours.
Everyone has an opinion about whether AI will take over knowledge work. But that might not be the right question. Some say AI is coming for doctors,…
Read More →
Mindfulness Is Good Business
The biggest misunderstanding about mindfulness is that it is some kind of squishy self-help luxury item, that you can take or leave it. That it is only…
Read More →
From Humans Managing Machines To Machines Managing Humans
When the New York Times sued OpenAi in December of 2023, alleging the AI giant used large amounts of NYT content to train its model, without supplying any…
Read More →
The Mindful Product Company
The future of product development is mindful. Product orientation broadly, or Product-led Growth specifically, is quickly becoming a must-have for…
Read More →
STEM Blindness
I would put my money on a CTO who casually references Melville or Dickens over one who only builds side project apps or tinkers with the latest LLM tools…
Read More →
Driving your company without a strategy: what can go wrong
“We’re not moving fast enough!” “The team doesn’t know how to get things done quickly.” “We can’t stop right now. We have too many things that we need to…
Read More →
The CEO's Dilemma: Balancing Profit and Purpose
There is a great scene at the beginning of the very first episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley series that perfectly captures a certain cynical hypocrisy of…
Read More →
Leading With Influence: The Art Of Changing Your Organization
Let's face it, changing an organization is hard. Whether you're trying to implement a new process, roll out a new product, or simply make a suggestion,…
Read More →
Managing Up to The CEO
“What do you really want from your people?” I asked. I was speaking with the CEO of a growth stage technology company. After several decades of…
Read More →
The Flow Dialectic: The Key to Creating Healthy and Effective Organizations
There is a strong correlation between organizations that struggle to adapt the people and process elements of Agile and those where the foundational…
Read More →
Scaling Leadership: From Command and Control to Self Organizing Teams
“The board wants us to double revenue this year.” I nearly spit out my coffee. I should be more careful about taking a sip right as someone is about to…
Read More →
Mind Games at the Office
Jane arrives at work Monday morning, after a weekend with the other senior leaders at an executive offsite. First thing this morning, a meeting invite…
Read More →
Speaking Your Truth: Conflict Avoidant Leaders Create More Conflict
“I am having the most difficult time with our Head of Engineering,” said the Product Manager. “What’s going on,” I asked? “Every time we’re in a meeting…
Read More →
Confidence or Arrogance: Using Power Responsibly As A Technology Leader
The question he asked was, “how do I prove that I’m worthy of this job?” A senior engineering leader has had the VP job for a year, temporarily. His title…
Read More →
Why Empathy Is The Key To Building Great Teams, Products, and Companies
A good friend told me a hilarious story about continuous improvement. His dad was a manager in a manufacturing plant back in the 80s or 90s. I imagined…
Read More →
Uncovering Hidden Bias: The Silent Killer Of Projects, Products, and Transformations
A large naval ship powers steadily through a fog bank. Suddenly, a light emerges in the distance, and it appears to be coming straight for them. Alarmed,…
Read More →
Reducing Noise, Boosting Signal: Learning to Say No More Often
A senior product leader in a large company reached a breaking point recently. What might be described as burnout emerged as the inevitable consequence of…
Read More →
Overcoming Internal Barriers: What Sets Great Leaders Apart
I once had a boss who was completely unflappable. It was amazing. I was early in my career and hadn’t been a manager in a big company for very long.…
Read More →Podcast Interview: Digital Product Development
Please note: This is a transcript of an interview for The No Nonsense Agile Podcast. Listen to the above podcast for the full experience. SUMMARY KEYWORDS…
Read More →
Finding Your Purpose, Both As Company, And As A Leader
Why Purpose Matters Truly successful leaders are not motivated purely by financial gain. They are driven by a deeper sense of purpose. That purpose may be…
Read More →
Corporate Babel: What Do You Mean By Agile, Exactly?
When your boss uses the term agile or lean , there’s a good chance that they are not using it the way you think they are. And this can have dramatic…
Read More →
Soft Skills for Hard People: Embracing Modern Leadership
[Author’s Note: This talk is adapted from a keynote I’ve given a few times in 2019. It covers a lot of what I emphasize in my leadership coaching sessions…
Read More →
How To Explain Technical Debt To Executives. Hint: It’s Not Technical.
Every engineer I know has, at one point or another, complained to me about some crazy client or stakeholder who is asking for a feature that the software…
Read More →
Red Tape is Killing Innovation
Image Source: Wikimedia Next time you need some work done on your house, try this: Say you need some brush cleared, and you find a local landscaper to…
Read More →
Build Your Professional Network Quickly and Easily With These Simple Tips
You know you have to do it eventually. You keep reading articles talking about the importance of building your network. Whether you are looking for a new…
Read More →
How To Overcome Your Internal Barriers
Feeling stuck is very common these days. A friend, a product manager in a high-growth tech company in San Francisco, confessed she feels stuck in a…
Read More →
Leaders, The Problem Is Not Your Agile Teams — It’s You.
I should have realized something was wrong when the Engineering leader said something to the effect of “I just want you to get them to ship code faster.…
Read More →
How To Manage Up
One of them most impactful bits of feedback I ever got was when I was interviewing for a VP of Product role at a startup. I didn’t get the job. I was…
Read More →
Change Organizations By First Changing Yourself
There is something pretty big that I want to share with you today. Over the last few years, a kind of deep transformational shift has been underway in our…
Read More →
You Cannot Achieve Agility Without This Critical Step
Most companies attempting to embark on an Agile or other digital transformation skip the critical step of having a clear leadership development path for…
Read More →
Navigating Difficult Conversations at Work
I used to think it was possible to convince anyone of anything, if you could only explain it clearly enough and provide enough data. As a young engineer,…
Read More →
Leading With Influence When You Lack Authority
My friend, Peter, is amazing. He is one of those people that can get you into any event or arrange a call with almost anyone. And he’s not rich and…
Read More →
How Psychology Affects Your Team’s Throughput and Creativity
Stress will destroy both your productivity and creative problem-solving ability — just the things you and your team need to compete in this economy. But…
Read More →
Don’t Start A Company Until You’ve Asked Yourself These Questions
For most startup founders, their key motivation is not the money or the fame of success in business. Rather, they are driven by a core desire to change…
Read More →
The Counterintuitive Secret To Fixing Broken Teams
If you manage a team that is struggling to perform, you know how frustrating it can be when nothing you try seems to work. Watching them flounder, at…
Read More →
Want to Get Ahead in Your Organization? Get Good At This Game.
“What feedback would you give me?” asked Bill (it’s not really Bill, but we’ll call him that for the story). Bill was the Scrum Master of a team I had…
Read More →
Product Management Is Easier When Your Team Can Actually Ship.
Product Management is a tough job. One of the toughest aspects is the fact that, in nearly all cases, you are on the hook for delivering a product, and…
Read More →
The DevOps Connection: Innovation is Both Technical and Organizational
“How long does it take to deploy your app from the time you first think of a feature to the moment it’s in front of a customer,” I asked? “In other words,…
Read More →
Why Enterprise Agile Teams Fail
Last week, I was standing in a conference room at a $20 billion company, facilitating a workshop on Agile. The group in attendance was made of the…
Read More →
The “One Big Customer” Trap
It’s hard to beat the feeling of relief upon landing that first big customer, whether you’re in charge of a new product in an established enterprise, or a…
Read More →
It’s Not Really A Technology Problem
I recently had a conversation with a client who was looking for a third party to assess their software product’s quality. He is a very capable…
Read More →
Effective Leaders Get Out Of Their Peoples Way
A good friend had been working for a startup company for about 6 months. He had been very excited about it initially. It involved robots, artificial…
Read More →
No-Nonsense Product Development Estimates
When will the team be ready to ship?” There is probably no question we engineers hate more than that one. For as long as I have been building software,…
Read More →
Need to Outsource? Do This Instead.
“We’re unhappy with the engineers we’ve hired to build the product. That’s why we’re calling you guys. We want you to fix it.” This was a frequent request…
Read More →
The World Doesn’t Want Your App
“We need to build an app. Do you know any good mobile developers?” I paused, taking a sip of my coffee. “What makes you think you need an app?” Waiting…
Read More →
The Dangers of Measuring Performance
“How do you recommend I measure the individual performance of my engineers?” It was late, and I had an hour drive ahead of me. I had no energy left to…
Read More →
Twelve-Week MVP
The name of the game in any startup venture is to find product-market fit as quickly as possible; and if you don’t hit it first time, to find an idea that…
Read More →
Kanban in 5 Easy Steps
The primary goal of a Kanban system is to maximize the delivery of value to the customer by steadily increasing the speed and quality of output,…
Read More →Like what you’re reading here? Subscribe to our regular email newsletter for exclusive articles, offers, and updates. Not sure yet? See recent issues first.
Also, don’t forget to check out our video library.