Mike – Mike Veerman

Thinkers and doers

Post author:Mike
Post published:30 November 2022
Post category:Planned Attention

Back in the days of what we now call Waterfall, requirements were king.Intelligent people got together to spell out features long before the first techy got involved.The Requirements Gathering and…

Busy teams get nothing done

Post author:Mike
Post published:15 November 2022
Post category:Planned Attention

Crowded roadmaps, huge backlogs, sprints stuffed to the gills. Being busy is the norm in software development. With all the talk about sustainable pace, the average team is still racing…

Long-term plans are just different

Post author:Mike
Post published:2 November 2022
Post category:Planned Attention

A plan for today is more straightforward than one for next year. Uncertainty grows exponentially over time. The closer we are to a task, the clearer it becomes.That makes short-term…

Estimates rot

Post author:Mike
Post published:3 October 2022
Post category:Planned Attention

Estimates are at the heart of traditional project management. We break the work down into tasks, guess how long each of these will take, and build a mosaic in Excel.…

Bug First policy

Post author:Mike
Post published:6 September 2022
Post category:Planned Attention

I remember the days of non-iterative software development. Teams would start churning out features from day one and quality was a worry for during the "testing phase". The last few…

Shutting down staging makes production stronger

Post author:Mike
Post published:30 August 2022
Post category:Tech needs better leaders

Running servers in the cloud ain't cheap. It's one of those operational costs that sneak up on you. It always starts small: we need a web server. And a database.…

Scaling to a skeleton crew

Post author:Mike
Post published:26 August 2022
Post category:Planned Attention

When we talk about scaling a team, we think about scaling up. Adding more people. More throughput. More power. What we don't often discuss is the very common case of…

Bad practices and lucky streaks

Post author:Mike
Post published:24 August 2022
Post category:Tech needs better leaders

Imagine you're at a poker table. You get dealt a 2 and a 7, objectively the worst hand in the game. And just like that, you decide to go all…

Production Access Gatekeeping Is Keeping Your Teams Dumb

Post author:Mike
Post published:23 August 2022
Post category:Tech needs better leaders

The magic in software products doesn't happen in the software. It's not the features, the code, or the data structures. Software doesn't create any value in a staging environment. A…

Teams that puzzle together, grow together

Post author:Mike
Post published:15 June 2022
Post category:Planned Attention

People can multitask. Of course, we can. We can take a phone call and look for a pen while cooking pasta. We can do a few tasks at the same…