Feature Mining Q&A

Feature Mining is a technique for figuring out where to start on a big, complex idea. Following up on a Feature Mining webinar on February 6, 2023, in this episode, Richard and Peter answer questions from the webinar and from other workshops on the topic of Feature Mining. If you’re not familiar with the Feature Mining technique, don’t worry, there’s a short intro to it before the Q&A. Read More

Using Questions Well

Using Questions Well In this week’s HW Show episode, we talked about coaching and particularly what makes for a good question when you’re in… Read More

Seven Skills All Great Coaches Master

In the previous episode of the show, Peter and Richard mentioned the importance of team coaching to increase your chances of a healthy, successful team. In this episode, they look at the seven skills all great coaches master. Read More

Own-Influence-Respond

A key idea that came up in both last week’s leadership community of practice and in this week’s HW Show episode was the own-influence-respond model. Read More

These Six Things Improve How Teams Work

The health of teams has a direct impact on organizational results as well as on individuals’ happiness in their work. In this episode, Richard and Peter outline the 6 conditions that researchers J Richard Hackman and Ruth Wegeman have discovered are critical for a team to be healthy and effective. They also cover what you can do to contribute to those conditions, whether you’re a leader or a junior team member. Read More

The Secret to Easier Prioritization

People often assume prioritization—whether for a Scrum product backlog or a personal todo list—is an analytical problem best solved with value calculations and spreadsheets. But it turns out that great product people tend to use intuition, gut feel, rather than analysis to prioritize. In this episode, Peter and Richard introduce a set of heuristics gathered from the best product people that you can use to prioritize work quickly and intuitively. Read More

Prioritization Heuristics

When we survey Product Owners on the techniques they (actually, not officially) use to prioritize backlogs, we consistently get three answers: HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s… Read More

Two Key Moves for Better Sprint Retrospectives

The Sprint Retrospective is perhaps the most important event in Scrum. In this episode, Richard and Peter share their two favorite ways to make the Sprint Retrospective meeting way more effective. If your team’s retros have become boring, repetitive, or just a waste of time, these two key moves will bring them back to life. Read More

Effective Sprint Reviews

In this episode, Richard and Peter dig into how to have an effective Sprint Review meeting. Great Sprint Reviews, achieve 3 goals and answer 3 key questions. Learn how do accomplish this on your team. (And discover why “Sprint Demo” is too limited a name for this meeting.) While this is explicitly Scrum-focused, it’s really about how to have a meeting to review a body of work as a team, whether you’re using Scrum or not. Read More