When you’ve seen something work, you tend to view it as more “intuitive”. It’s easy to forget how counterintuitive it might have felt initially. Below is a quick brainstorm on areas where our intuition may lead us astray.

When we encounter drag with software product development…

Our Intuition (Often) Says… — > Instead Try…

• Optimize work assignments — > Pair and mob more
• Try to “catch up” — > Do less
• Don’t interrupt the team — > Show work to customers more often
• Better estimates — > Work smaller
• Lengthen sprint — > Shorten sprint
• Keep people busier — > More slack, lower optimization
• More prescriptive stories — > Build shared understanding (together)
• Plan ahead — > Limit planning in progress (PIP)
• Senior devs “crank out hard stories” — > Senior devs pair and teach
• “Better mocks” and pixel-perfect designs — > UX/DEV pairing and pattern libs
• Send individuals out to gather requirements — > Involve whole team in customer interviews
• More stringent acceptance criteria — > Involve QA earlier
• More status/progress checks — > Fewer transactional meetings
• Individual goals — > Team goals
• Spread work across multiple projects — > Focus on a single initiative
• More people, add shared resources — > Smaller team, fewer dependencies
• Assign single person to ticket duty — > Stop-the-line, swarm on fixing issues
• Cut-corners — > Refactor, focus on quality
• Longer grooming meetings — > Groom less
• Managers navigate external dependencies — > Form temporary team-of-teams
• Stay “heads down” — > Learn more about context
• Senior architect “figures it out” in isolation — > Senior architect facilitates/coaches
• Deliver individual “parts” — > Individual thin slice across the whole
• Success theater to “save face” — > Make it safer to acknowledge challenges
• Amplify what is broken — > Amplify what is working
• Add a layer of management — > Build team self-sufficiency with coaching
• Rigid “tech review” process — >\tDecentralized tech review COP
• Integrate less often — > Integrate more often If this was at all helpful, and you want to share this on Twitter…here’s a Tweet with the image attached.