10 Pines Blog
conference elevator pitch tips agile personal elevator pitch introducing yourself
It could sounds basic, but when you talk with people in a conference, you have to think quickly. So it’s very important to have in mind a successful path to a productive five-minutes chat. After being talking with a lot of people and making a lot of mistakes (since not knowing what to say about what our company do, to not asking how to contact him/her back); I’ve decided to write down a guidelines to introduce yourself and getting to know the other person, avoiding typical mistakes.
13 Oct 2015
agile agile 2015 agile alliance summary conference Washington
This was the biggest conference I’ve ever attended. There was 2300 registered people. 5 days of talks. More than 13 tracks in parallel every hour. Everything was in big scale. One thing that called my attention was the average age of the attendees; I’m used to see young people in the agile conferences in south america. But here, it’s really different; most of the people were around 40⁄50 and even more. So I understood this conference and the US agile culture about software is in a later stage than in South America. And this is pretty interesting because you will find people who have been working with agile practices for more than 10 years. Even in the government there are a lot of projects working that way. So I think it is time to see agile software development as the “classic” way to develop software and not as the “new” way. Another weird thing for me is that the conference is designed for you to miss things. There is a lot of things going on at same time, beside the talks, you have a coaching clinic, lighting talks, TDD workshops, space jam, companies lounges with activities, boost, and more. So, I think it’s designed to cover all needs, but it’s impossible not to miss anything you are interested on. For a guy like me, who don’t like to miss anything, it was hard to be relaxed.
7 Oct 2015
A few days ago, we were asked to estimate a new big extension for a previous application we developed a year ago. Since we had a strong deadline to send this proposal, and we couldn’t do it the way we are used to (through a Product Discovery Workshop), we decided to try an idea which was in my mind some time ago: a Corporate Lean Canvas, our customized variation to the original Lean Canvas [1].
13 Jul 2015
agile product management backlog
Yeah, this is how everyone called me in my latest gig. You want to hear the story? (I heard yes). It was a green field, ambitious project that was going to be performed differently than other projects in the same organization, using design thinking and Agile. People (mostly business people) was thrilled. Everyone working together, designing this new product. After a couple of weeks of design thinking, I said, innocently, that it was time to start building a backlog. Ohh nooo. Business people panic! This obviously was going back to the old, slow and painful way of building software that was used before. Interestingly enough (I thought) the backlog is that artifact that even myself alone use for any personal project. It’s light, useful and very powerful. In this post, I won’t focus on the psychological reasons of the freaking out. I will just focus on the backlog.
9 Apr 2015
We all know how it goes: An idea strikes our mind, and before we notice, hands are already on our keyboard, our favourite IDE wide open, (luckily a bit of brainstorming) and a product is born.
Yeah yeah, we all know we should hold the horses and make some state-of-the-art research. With ease we talk ourselves into believing that most of it sucks (compared with the product in our minds). We can do it way better, and everyone will love it, because everyone needs it. Code-blocks on it!
7 Nov 2014
El proceso de preventa puede ser doloroso, largo y costoso. Es el primer punto de negociación. Hay que convencer al otro que somos la mejor opción. Y hay que ajustar las expectativas siempre altas del cliente. Sin embargo existe una forma de mejorar y llegar a un balance, donde el cliente y el proveedor se sientan seguros y conformes. En esta sesión exploraremos como conjugar el proceso delicado y “costoso” de la venta con los principios ágiles de lean.
28 Oct 2014
A few days ago, in an interesting discussion I was having in a local Agile forum, someone posted the phrase: > Doing the right thing precedes doing things right
The phrase caught my attention and as the author didn’t give much explanation of it and given I am an early adopter of the Cartesian method doubt of everything until you can prove it’s true by yourself, I’ve decided to spend some time thinking carefully through it.
23 Sep 2014
When someone asks for an estimate I always think of this.
#NoEstimates pic.twitter.com/siZsVxs3D4
— Aaron Griffith (@Aaron_Griffith) March 14, 2014It’s not like estimations are like this, right? This post is a trigger to rethink estimations. To rethink why we do them, how much do we invest on them, what is their ROI. Should we estimate or not? If you think why you estimate in real life, you wouldn’t think there could be something dangerous about them. We all estimate how much it would take us to get to the bus station before going, right?. However, things get much more complicated in software projects and in organizations.
21 Mar 2014
Agile2011 is over. Back to where it all began. and with most of the people that initiated this movement, 10 years ago. For me, it was my first Agile conference and I must say it was a blast. Being able to hear these guys in the different sessions and talk to them in the hallways during the breaks was amazing.
What I enjoyed the most? Let me think…
2 Sep 2011
smalltalk smalltalks-2010 agile
Click ‘Read on’ to see the presentation
12 Nov 2010