Content drop for week ending 12/18

Here are a few things that I’ve been reading over the last few weeks or so that I thought were interesting and that others might find interesting. This concept is largely borrowed (ripped off?) from the InfoSec blog posts that Bill Sempf does.

I’m trying to get back on the horse with publishing this on a regular basis. Some of these are a bit old as I’ve been sitting on some of them for a bit. Future editions may be a bit more current.

• We don’t talk enough about Product (feature) debt and we probably should. Here’s a good article that covers why this is an important topic.

• I kind of dig these in detail developer metrics. They get a bit more in the weeds than the standard flow metrics and might be useful if you’re seeing issues in cycle/lead time.

• Optimism Bias is another one of those fun things you don’t realize you do until you learn what it is. Here’s a good TED talk on the subject.

• Culture is one of the biggest impediments in any kind of digital/agile/DevOps/Product transformation. Psychological safety plays a huge role in that and here’s why people need to feel they can fail as you can’t learn if you can’t fail.

• Here’s another reason why your transformations fail - stop spreading people out across multiple projects to “maximize their utilization”.

• Cool backgrounder on how they made that dumpster fire/email integration thing at dumpsterfire.com.