Co-creator of CAPED (Complexity-Aware Planning, Estimation & Delivery). I help leaders deliver high-stakes initiatives without late surprises. @HumanizingWork
Hotchkiss, CO
Joined January 2009
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15 years of experimenting, writing, and teaching on user story splitting, consolidated and updated in one comprehensive guide: humanizingwork.com/the-human…
“It’s tempting to wish you didn’t have so many stakeholders to deal with. But all those stakeholders are an indication of the importance of the work. Initiatives that don't matter don't have stakeholders. No one cares.”
humanizingwork.com/stakehold…
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Value isn’t a number. It’s a function of time. To prioritize correctly, you need to know not just cost and an expected financial benefit. You need to know when that benefit can be realized.
humanizingwork.com/timing-ca…
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“The time box (the sprint in Scrum, the iteration in other iterative methods) is one of the most powerful tools in agile software development for revealing problems in a team or organization. Notice I said reveal, not fix.”
humanizingwork.com/why-longe…
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US employee engagement dropped below 30% for the first time in 15 years. Gallup cites two factors: knowing what’s expected of them and feeling cared about as a person.
Feeling cared about as a person needs to be connected to the work.
humanizingwork.com/new-gallu…
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“It’s easy to think, ‘We should have planned better.’ But some things just don’t emerge until you get into the real work.”
humanizingwork.com/what-do-w…
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“Green at the start of a project—when you’re carrying around all the things that could go wrong—looks a lot like denial. Or at least unfounded optimism.”
humanizingwork.com/earn-gree…
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“Very different organizations, but the same pattern: 5-8x faster, just from getting the right people on the same team. We've seen this over and over again.”
humanizingwork.com/two-month…
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“Story splitting is a very learnable skill. With about three hours of deliberate practice, you can go from ‘that's not splittable’ to ‘oh, it's another one of those, I know how to split it.’”
humanizingwork.com/why-are-w…
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“The Product Owner is not a rebranded requirements writer, a backlog tool clerk, or a proxy project manager.”
humanizingwork.com/guide-to-…
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“The problem isn't that the agile values and principles are wrong. It's that too often, typical agile practices assume a context that doesn't match where most people actually work.”
humanizingwork.com/agile-doe…
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“There’s nothing magical about story points. But if you’re not treating them as reference class forecasts, you’re just adding an extra layer of waste and frustration.”
humanizingwork.com/how-to-fi…
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Too often, quarterly planning tries to impose certainty on work that’s naturally going to change as the team does the work.
humanizingwork.com/quarterly…
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“Delegating a decision and then pulling back the decision when you disagree is what we call ‘delegation theater.’ Delegation theater breaks trust and leads to a culture of cynicism and disengagement.”
humanizingwork.com/when-and-…
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“Items on a backlog function as implicit commitments to do the work at some point. Your stakeholders read them that way. So does your own subconscious. And we should avoid making commitments we don't intend to keep.”
humanizingwork.com/but-what-…
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“It takes way less effort to think of something you could build than to actually build the thing. As a result, there will always be more ideas than capacity to implement them. Thus, you can’t sustainably buy your way out of the prioritization problem.”
humanizingwork.com/why-is-pr…
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“The problem with framing it as Scrum versus Kanban is it misses what makes each approach valuable. It's like asking whether you should use a calendar or a to-do list. Yes, you should. You probably need both, just for different things.”
humanizingwork.com/scrum-or-…
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“We all know that most detailed project plans for complex work are basically fiction.”
humanizingwork.com/agile-doe…
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“Predictable work is easy to estimate, easy to staff, easy to put on a timeline, and easy to call progress, so that's what gets done first. The hard stuff waits.”
humanizingwork.com/why-proje…
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“Most engineering managers got promoted into management by being good engineers. But the skills that made the promotion happen aren’t the skills that lead to success in the new role.”
humanizingwork.com/3-essenti…
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“It wasn’t an unsplittable story. It was a story they didn’t know how to split yet.”
humanizingwork.com/unsplitta…
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