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Allen Holub Profile picture
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25 Sep, 5 tweets, 1 min read
There is not a customer on the planet who cares how many story points you complete this Sprint 1/5
There is not a customer on the planet who cares what your velocity or burn-down rate is. 2/5
There is not a customer on the planet who cares about your planned:done ratio. 3/5
There is not a customer on the planet who cares about defects that don’t impact their work. 4/5
None of these indicate any sort of "success." 5/5

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More from @allenholub

Allen Holub Profile picture
28 Sep
Dan Pink’s "Drive" (and his Autonomy, Mastery, & Purpose) is a great book, but he’s just a popularizer of other’s work, primarily that of Ryan and Deci, who’s life work (and vast research) went into their Self-Determination Theory. 1/5
They have many long books, but there’s a reasonable (tho simplistic) summary here: [tinyurl.com/y6ur7dks]. Self-Determination Theory identifies three factors: competence (Pink’s "mastery"), connection (or "relatedness"), and autonomy. 2/5
I’m much more trusting of people like R&D, who spent their lives doing peer-reviewed research, than a popularizer like Pink, so I’ll stick with those three characteristics as primary. Don’t know why Pink left out connection, but it seems critical to me. 3/5
Read 5 tweets
Allen Holub Profile picture
27 Sep
Asked "how do you manage your backlog?" First, my backlog is entirely user stories—no PBIs. Any tech work that does not make your customer’s work in the domain easier probably does not need to be done. 1/9
I put essential overhead (e.g. updating key frameworks) on a separate kanban board, not the backlog. Allocate a fixed percentage of your time to to overhead—say one day a week max—so that it doesn’t overwhelm real work. 2/9
Next, Make the stories small—something you can implement in a day or two. You can’t reliably estimate stories larger than that, so there’s no point in pretending you can. 3/9
Read 9 tweets
Allen Holub Profile picture
26 Sep
Recently, @GeePawHill tweeted about this very issue & I’m very much aligned with his thinking. For a long time, I avoided politics (and still resist most of impulses). The constant walking on eggshells was eating away at me, tho. You cannot separate the code from the person. →
@GeePawHill If I lose followers because they don’t like me as a person, I’m truly sorry to see you go, but I am who I am. I’d argue, in fact, that my thoughts about software dev and everything else are not separable. One follows from the other. →
@GeePawHill I believe what I believe, both about software & life, because I am who I am. One of the things I believe is that people should respect and watch out for one another. People who will happily kill people by spreading contagion are not good people in my mind. →
Read 4 tweets
Allen Holub Profile picture
25 Sep
Was told "Increased revenue or customers are good for product marketing and to please the C level with some vanity but not a direct measure of success. Imagine trying to do that with multiple agile teams running in a larger org." 1/4
That’s wrong on so many levels I don’t know where to start. First, we are in business to make money. Arguing that that’s somehow a "vanity metric" is breathtakingly clueless about how businesses work. 2/4
Moreover, there is no measure for "success" at the team level. What matters is the system as a whole. Organizations are Agile, not teams. 3/4
Read 4 tweets
Allen Holub Profile picture
22 Sep
My friends who are Scrum trainers seem to be getting more and more annoyed with fake Scrum—a twisted perversion that people think is Scrum but isn’t—not at all what the Scrum Guide says or what they teach. 1/4
In other words, the same destruction of meaning that happened to "Agile" has happened to "Scrum." Even certification doesn’t seem able to stop that decay—you’d think it would slow the entropy down a bit at least, but it doesn’t. 2/4
Even the certified ppl ignore what they learn to get certified & descend into fake Scrum. People seem determined to twist things around to look like whatever’s familiar to them. Maintain the status quo at any cost, even when the status quo is a sh**t show that nobody wants. 3/4
Read 4 tweets
Allen Holub Profile picture
21 Sep
You reward "high performers" on the team. Performance goes up! Do it again. Performance goes up, but not so much. Do it again. Performance goes down. So, reward the high performers even more! Performance plummets. What’s happening?
In systems-thinking terms, we’ve been looking at the "reinforcing loop." People who aren’t being rewarded have a loop of their own that you’re not seeing, however—a "balancing loop."
Somebody else gets rewarded even though their work doesn’t seem to justify that. Grumble and put up with it. They get rewarded again! Now I’m getting angry. And again! Why bother to put any effort into this job at all?
Read 4 tweets

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