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As per James Clear, in Atomic Habits, referring an article published in the New Yorker:

“Japanese firms emphasized what came to be known as ‘lean production’, relentlessly looking to remove waste of all kinds from the production process, down to redesigning workspaces, so workers didn’t have to waste time twisting and turning to reach their tools. The result was that Japanese factories were more efficient and Japanese products were more liable than American ones. In 1974, service calls for American-made color televisions were five times as common as for Japanese televisions. By 1979, it took American workers three times as long to assemble their sets.”

Americans had to learn Lean in order to compete. Shouldn’t we learn Lean?

Owning a product, leading a team, hiring a professional, designing an architecture with colleagues, and almost everything in life is a negotiation. Serial trade-offs, intercessions, conciliations or dialogues.

A great way of learning how to negotiate is through the George Siedel course in Coursera: Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies and Skills. Have a look and try it out. I learnt a lot!

You can see everywhere that more and more companies are not including a Scrum Master in their teams. Others renamed the Product Owner role as Product Managers or Product Marketing Managers, and these don’t play the same rules as the PO. Many are even dropping Scrum and moving to a plain Kanban.

Software industry got fed up with Agile Coaches, stiff ceremonies, games and multitude of meetings. I don’t blame them for doing so. I personally reckon you’ll do it OK if you pick the best of each framework and remove any practice that is not working for you or it is not as productive as it should be (Law of Diminishing Returns).

Keep stuck with the basics: deliver software frequently, welcome changes, work close to Business people, and more important than anything, keep it neat and simple. You’ll be OK.

We tend to believe that creating comprehensive Gantt diagrams, precise roadmap documents, and making the customer sign the meeting minutes will make us and our projects more trustworthy.
We need to plan, and try to foresee what is coming, but you can only be sure of a few things: estimations are going to be wrong, customers are going to change their minds, and you’ll need to adjust the Gantt.
Suggest, propose, execute, test and iterate again. As Naval Ravikant says, do 10,000 iterations not 10,000 hours.

What to do if it takes me ages to get to production? Have a look to this article if your cycle time is huge: https://www.antoniomartel.com/2023/10/theory-of-constraints-toc.html

What to do if your to-do list and backlog is growing endlessly:

• https://www.antoniomartel.com/2023/09/when-everything-is-a-priority-nothing-is-a-priority.html
• https://www.antoniomartel.com/2023/11/dont-even-write-it-down.html

And when your tangled with bugs and incidents, but no any new features: https://www.antoniomartel.com/2023/11/equilibrium.html