Humanizing Work Show

Feature Hostage Negotiation

Have you or your team ever felt like prioritizing your work is like a hostage negotiation with your stakeholders…and you don’t have the leverage to get a good outcome? In this episode, Richard chats with Dean Peters about what he calls “feature hostage negotiation.” They dig into where it comes from, what problems it causes, and how to respond if you’re a product manager in that situation. Read More

How to Set the Right Goals for 2024

It’s January, and people are setting goals and New Year’s resolutions. But how do you pick the right ones? It can be overwhelming, and you can end up picking no goal at all or just picking ones that are easy to define. In this episode, Richard and Peter share a simple process using the Theory of Constraints to find just the right personal and work goals for 2024. Read More

When Your Team Inspects But Doesn’t Adapt

In this episode, Richard and Peter give actionable advice for how to get unstuck when your team’s retrospectives produce lots of good ideas for change but never seem to lead to actual changes getting implemented. They share an agenda for a special retrospective you can do to address that exact challenge. Read More

Culture Signals for Everyone

Richard and Peter introduced the concept of culture signals in episode 71. But because of the examples in that episode, many people got the misconception that culture signals were only for CEOs. Not at all! In this episode they share 7 inspirational examples of mid-level managers, team leads, and individual contributors creating effective culture signals, and they review how you can do the same in your environment. Read More

Finding the Right Style For Your Leadership Team: Lessons from Take6 and Greg Popovich

Most leadership teams adopt their style by accident and end up with wasteful meetings and unnecessarily noise and conflict. In this episode, Peter and Richard share an approach for figuring out the right kind of leadership team style for you based on your context. They describe the tools that fit each style and when your team might shift from one to another, drawing lessons from great music groups and sports teams. Read More

Overcoming Burnout through Daily Purpose and Vision

Are you looking at your task list today and dreading it a bit? In this replay from the October 2023 Humanizing Work Meetup session, Richard and Peter share three recent situations when they were feeling a little burned out, and what they did to fix it. They walk through a process to think and communicate about Purpose and Vision at the micro level. That process took them less than five minutes in their examples, and energized them to make their work meaningful that day. Learn how you can do the same thing to tackle the day with energy, even when the tasks aren't something you're looking forward to. Read More

The Business Case for Better Product Backlog Refinement

In this episode, Richard and Peter talk about the business case for getting better at product backlog refinement. What’s the financial and human cost of bad backlogs? Way more than most people realize. Here’s why it matters and what to do about it. Read More

Can Agile Even Work With This Business Model?

In this episode, Richard and Peter answer a listener question about whether an Agile approach can work with a customer-funded project model or whether you have to change your funding approach to work in an Agile way. They address the implications of Agile for things like funding, why project funding works for some orgs, and how to change things like funding in an Agile way. Read More