Alistair Cockburn on Use Cases & User Stories

Are use cases an essential partner to user stories for Agile teams? Agile Manifesto co-author Alistair Cockburn thinks so. In this episode, Richard and Peter discuss use cases and user stories with Alistair, including some practical steps to get started with lightweight use cases as a complementary tool for your Agile product development. Read More

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