🤖 I Used an AI Agent for Planning and Execution. Not going back.
I used Claude Code like a coach instead of a coding tool. Here is what actually changed.
My top 3 most impactful articles
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💡 7 Things I learned that helped me build a successful career without a university degree
My university career spanned 7 years, 3 departments and ended in me dropping out. There is one thing I learned during that time that helped me build a successful career without a degree. Ok, 7 thin...
👹 What can you learn from the part of yourself you hate the most
According to Carl Jung each one of us carries a shadow. The shadow is a part of us we hate the most. The weaknesses and tendencies we are desperate to suppress. The parts we will do anything to hid...
⚽️ Play well with your team by asking "Who has the ball?" for each important topic over time
The Problem Sometimes there is more than one person who could do something. How do we avoid stepping on each other's toes or even worse – leaving the problem unsolved because everyone thinks it's s...
🍑 Juicy Goals - find out what people actually care about
If you want people to care you cannot be satisfied with dry, superficial goals. You must dig deeper to uncover the juicy goals that actually drive people's decisions. We meet a person who has a nee...
🧪 How to learn from experience?
This post is a sneak peek at an idea from the upcoming book 'Grow Together: Gain Clarity and Momentum in Your Tech Leadership Career' At various points in the lifecycle of our projects we like to a...
👉 What To Do Next?
This post describes one of the key ideas from the upcoming book 'Grow Together: Gain Clarity and Momentum in Your Tech Leadership Career' When you feel stuck on the way to your long term goals or c...
🧱 Three false beliefs
The following are three harmful beliefs: 1. What I see is reality. 2. What I think is the truth. 3. What I want must be. What I believe is more accurate: 1. What I see is a tiny subset of reality, ...
😭 Three Pits of Team Despair
Our purpose with Grow Together Academy is to help more great teams happen. Great teams that create and learn together. Great teams that get amazing results, without creating casualties. That is not...
Build learning into everything you do
Hello there! Around 2015, I believed that online training could be better than live training, so I started experimenting under the name “People Skills for Geeks.” By the end of 2019, I had proof. T...
📗 Get inspired by stories
To go far you need a large tank of high-octane fuel—or even better, a steady supply of renewable energy. You need to be able to tap into powerful drivers that actually move people to do things. And...
🕯️ Organize your communication around focused work
Where does teamwork happen? For many teams it’s in meetings. Sure, everyone might have tasks to work through on their own, but in many teams the key interactions happen in meetings and conversation...
👉 Don't use the same tools to direct attention and store information
Use email or chat to direct attention, use a team wiki to store information. Email and chat usually carry a high-level of urgency, but make it pretty hard to refer to key pieces of information late...
✍️ Make it easy for people to understand you
When you have something to say, say it in a way that makes it easy for people to understand you. Lack of clarity causes problems If you leve things unclear or ambiguous some people might just ignor...
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💎 Know What You Want
* Mountains picture by Tobias Rademacher via Unsplash If you don’t know what you want, you’re probably not going to get it. So to help you figure things out here are three things that helped me: Ex...
🏋️ Train like an athlete
What do pro athletes do all day? Barbell picture by Victor Freitas via Unsplash.com Let’s say you want to become a world-class athlete. You wouldn’t expect to get strong from lifting a barbell once...
🍏 Use limits, regeneration and meaning to not go crazy in difficult times
* Eggs picture by Tengyart via Unsplash.com Autumn was a busy time for me and my girlfriend. We’ve moved from a single room micro-appartment to one more conducive to two people working from home al...
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✉️ De-noise Your Email
If you’ve been reading One Minute Tips for a while or you’ve just downloaded your Meeting Overload Rescue Kit you are familiar with the idea that good communication is concrete, concise and meaning...
🤔 How might this make sense?
Owl photo by Joe Green via Unslash One problem with remote work is that it’s even easier for misunderstandings to occur. It’s hard even when we’re working from the same physical space and have mult...
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☀️ Make good decisions in difficult interpersonal situations
When the stakes are high and emotions run hot it’s not so easy to make the best decisions we would normally be capable of. The following set of questions will help you give it your best shot. Step ...
🎖️ Encourage acts of leadership at all levels
Let’s look at leadership through the lens of action. I like the analogy to mindsports like chess, go or poker. It’s not enough to be a good player. To win you have to actually make good plays. If y...
🚦 You can't solve problems while angry or fearful
Have you ever said or done something you regret while angry? Have you ever tried to reason with a person overcome by strong emotions? Yup, so did I. It’s a useful skill to be able to recognize emot...
🏴☠️ One of Us
How do you create a shared identity for a distributed team, without the benefit of physical proximity? Here are some things that I believe are most important: 1) Spend time in shared spaces Even if...
🤝 A fast decision-making method for teams
Here’s one way to get to the point faster and also to make group decisions that have a much higher chance of sticking. 1) Make your decisions in a concrete, concise and meaningful way A decision-ma...
🏆 How to become a great team
Here’s a powerful framework that can help you lead your team to greatness. Part One: The Setup 1) Get clear on what matters most to you, your team, your customers and the organization you are part ...
🤪 How to stay sane on the road to meaningful outcomes
There’s a slight wrinkle hidden in the previous one minute tip about clarifying outcomes and actions when you’re stuck. I told you to start by clarifying the outcome by asking: 1. What would you li...
What do high-performance teams need from their virtual space (that they're not getting from existing tools)?
Whose Space is it Anyway? What do you do right after you rent a new space? You move in! You bring your stuff and arrange it the way you want to. You do it for yourself mostly, but you also don’t mi...
🔎 When in Doubt Clarify the Outcome and Action
If you want to do something, but you’re stuck it might be because you lack clarity about the exact outcome you’d like to make happen and the concrete action you need to take to get there. When? It ...
⭐ Your Work Serves a Purpose: Make That Purpose Visible
Kanban people remind us to visualize work. The default example is a board full of cards that represent tasks and their status. Something like this: That is a powerful tactic and we will surely expl...
💛 Make Your Communication Meaningful (For Your Intended Audience)
After concrete and concise, now is the time to cover the third part of the trilogy: meaningful. Talk about what they care about … … using the same words they use to describe it. Great, but how do w...
💎 Make Your Communication Concise
Use the pyramid principle Last week we covered the first C of good communication: Concrete Today it’s time for the second C: Concise 1) The best way to make your communication concise is to start w...
👀 Make Your Communication Concrete
In the previous One Minute Tip we covered one of the three key skills of remote work, namely to communicate well in short chunks of writing. We ended that tip with the statement that good communica...
✍️ Communicate Well in Short Chunks of Writing
One of the key skills of remote work is to communicate well (in short chunks (of writing)). Let me explain: Communicate well What counts as communicating well depends on the purpose: 1. if it’s inf...
🤩 Don't rely on "wow" effects
Live your differentiators If you want to create a successful product or service a common piece of advice I hear is to “wow” your customers. To deliver such moments of sheer delight that they will n...
⚖️ How to make Very Big Decisions?
Base key decision on estimated impact on quantified stakeholder values Will your project succeed? That question hangs on a simple commandment: Make things people want. Great, but how do we know wha...
🧠 Use Trello as a structured whiteboard for distributed brainstorming and online workshops
Some people use Trello as a Kanban board (i.e. a task management or workflow app) and that’s a great use for it. A different way is to think about Trello as a structured whiteboard that you can use...
⚔️ Heroic Adventurers vs. Brutish Invaders
Check Your Story Have you ever found yourself on one side of a situation like this? Ancient philosophers knew it and modern ones developed the idea: We do NOT have direct access to reality: 1. We p...
🔭 How to Start with WHY
3 practical strategies Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” is like a tsunami rolling over the business world. If you haven’t seen it yet or you’d like a reminder here’s Simon’s original TED talk. I used...
🥥 Don't keep valuable ideas locked up
Meeting minutes are where great ideas are left to die One question: How often do you go back to old meeting notes? Yeah, … me neither. As I do more and more remote work one key discipline has becom...
💝 Assume Positive Intent
Don’t Let Worst Possible Stories Win If you can count on one thing, it’s that whenever there’s limited information people will make up the Worst Possible Story to fill in the gaps. * “My boss hates...
🌲 Enable Knowledge to Grow Over Time with AsyncABC
The more useful stuff you have in a well-organized, densely interconnected team information system, the richer your interactions can become. A great TIM can be like a beautiful garden where things ...
😀 Aim for a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions
What holds a great team together despite inevitable conflict? John Gottman has some answers. John has been studying married couples for decades. Work relationships are not marriages but the same co...
🍎 First Find the Good
Imagine you’re holding a magic sword. The only problem is that it’s wrapped in dirty rags. When faced with a worthy challenge it would make sense to unwrap the sword and cast away the rags. Once yo...
📐 Use a consistent information architecture across tools
Build up your team information environment. Today’s one minute tip is: use a consistent information architecture across tools. For example: given you use JIRA Stories as the main unit of work and y...
🖼️ Show, don't tell
The first ever One Minute Tip for Remote Leaders is about making references concrete. When you’re talking about something (document, ticket, website, app) — share your screen and show it. If you ha...
Create Psychological Safety to Get Better Teamwork
Have you ever experienced that another co-worker didn’t want to listen to your feedback, even though it would clearly improve their performance? Did an important project fail because an employee di...
A new operating system for learning
The Challenge I believe that in order to create a better world for everyone we need to become better at working together and in order to unlock our collective potential we need radically better way...
Help Your Team Be More Effective (the Google Way)
(This is a short note about something I found useful in my role as a manager and coach at 9LivesData.) Project Aristotle was a research project conducted by Google. The goal of the project was to f...
Maximise Collective Intelligence With Empathy
(This is a short note about something I found useful in my role as a manager and coach at 9LivesData.) Notes: * teams are much better than individuals at solving complex tasks * individual or maxim...
A Note on Empathy and Compassion
Emotional intelligence and co-feeling There are two distinct aspects of empathy: 1. noticing and understanding feelings (your own and in others) 2. feeling what the other person feels, co-feeling I...
When making decisions as a team aim for soft consensus
Sometimes there are decisions to be made in a team and sometimes we don’t all agree on what to do. If the discussion is dragging on it’s easy to just vote on it and move on. For a high-performance ...
Ask for Feedback
The trouble with feedback I have mixed feelings about feedback. In my own life I have grown tremendously by accepting direct feedback from people I trust and respect. On the other hand I hate it wh...
How to Speak so that People Listen
The first topic is a simple but powerful model that has helped me greatly. Now it can also help you, so without further ado: Are people listening to what you have to say? How often do you try to co...
Thinking tools for Product Owners (my talk at Agile by Example 2014)
I'm a entrepreneur, former senior engineering manager and agile coach helping software people do better. I'm most interested in action-oriented professional development.
7 Pitfalls that can Destroy new Product Owners (my talk at Agile by Example 2014)
I'm a entrepreneur, former senior engineering manager and agile coach helping software people do better. I'm most interested in action-oriented professional development.
How (not) to begin your journey as a Scrum Master
In a strict sense the role of a Scrum Master is defined in the Scrum Guide as: “The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted. Scrum Masters do this by ensuring that ...
How to Design Highly-Usable Dialog Boxes
Software apps often ask their users to confirm (potentially destructive) actions. The method most often used are dialog boxes with a message and yes/no buttons. Unfortunately this is often bad desi...
The old WHAT vs. HOW debate
When explaining to laymen what a requirement is (or more importantly when telling a junior analyst what job is required of them) some people say: “Requirements specify the WHAT without going into t...