Last week I was in Portland Oregon for RailsConf 2013. Portland is a great city with beautiful views of mountains that us East Coasters dream of, unusually good weather (last week anyways), and a very entertaining soccer team. But none...
My background is technical, not in sales. But as a lean entrepreneur, I have to wear my sales and marketing hat more than I wear my programmer hat these days. So I was excited when I could make it to this month’s DC Lean Startup Circle....
The Ignite talks at the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco in December were a lot of fun, both as an attendee and as a speaker. Below is the video of my talk on "Just Deploy It!". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEsk8Nfwfck In my...
What's the best conference that you've ever been to? For me, the 2012 Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco is definitely the best one that I've been to so far. It was my favorite as a speaker, where I did a short Ignite talk on...
Here are the slides that I used last night at the Lean Startup Conference's Ignite talks. I am indebted to Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein of The Lean Startup Conference for giving me the opportunity to present. I have spoken at a good...
"Good design is no longer something that sets you apart on the web, it's the price of admission." - That's a paraphrase of a great quote I heard at the WarmGun UX conference in San Francisco. I attended WarmGun as part of my all inclusive...
Does your startup have a mobile application component? You're certainly not alone, and that app should be more than just a mobile-aware website. That's one thing that I heard repeated at the #MoDevTablet conference last Friday just...
Last night I attended an impromptu meeting of the #LeanDC meetup. I say impromptu because it's my understanding they pulled the meeting together in just a few days because Eric Ries, author of the Lean Startup, was in DC this week and so...
Would competition in a game help create engagement and conversation, or stifle the conversation in favor of “one-ups man ship”? That was one of the questions that came up when I led a session of Agile Failure Pattern Poker last month at...
I tend to write blog posts that are too long. Which is why sometimes I don’t blog as often as I should. But I really want to share everything with you that I learned at Agile Coach Camp US (#ACCUS) in Columbus Ohio last week. So instead...
What is the ideal contract model to use with sub-contractors, and is it any different than you would use with a lead contractor? I'm curious myself, and so I'll just post a couple of quick thoughts and I encourage you to share your...
How do Lean principles complement and reinforce the roles in a Scrum project? That was one question on my mind as I drove up to the Agile Leadership Network DC meeting, held in Tysons Corner. People sometimes discuss Scrum, XP, Kanban,...
This past Tuesday at AgileCville we had a series of lightning talks on "Agile for Newbies." The meeting went very well, and I'll provide a brief recap of it here. Thanks go to RallySoftware, who sponsored the meeting this month and...
Have you ever faced prioritizing a long list of stories or requirements and thought, "This is going to take forever!" I have, and so I was thrilled to learn a technique at XP2011 that helps with this dilemma. I had a chance last week to...
As mentioned in a previous post, we played a game last night at AgileCville's meeting last night that was fun and definitely kept the conversation going. We had some very good discussions around a number of agile topics, and so that...
Tonight at the AgileCville user group meeting, we discussed Scrum in Schools. This was a roundtable discussion of group members, and it was very interesting. Paul Erb kicked off the discussion for us. Paul is an Agile Cville regular,...
About a month ago I was working with a team planning another iteration for the project, when we had an interesting discussion about how to manage our burndown. On all of our previous sprints, our burndowns were based on hours. That is,...