Category: Team & Operations
Priority Whiplash: Why Your Best Engineers Are Updating Their CVs
Constant reprioritisation destroys engineering morale faster than anything else. If your team never finishes anything because leadership keeps changing direction, here's what's actually going wrong—and how to fix it.
Stop Overloading Your Roadmap: Why WIP Limits Are the Most Important Rule in Product Planning
Why the single most important rule for building great product roadmaps is limiting work in progress—and how WIP limits transform both delivery speed and stakeholder conversations.
KTLO (Keeping the Lights On): What It Means in Software and Why Your Roadmap Ignores It
Stop pretending that 100% of your P&E team is doing feature development
KTLO (Keeping the Lights On) is the essential maintenance work every engineering team must do—bug fixes, security patches, compliance, and technical debt. Most roadmaps pretend it doesn't exist. Here's how to plan honestly and protect your feature capacity.
Firebreak Sprints: When Your Entire Engineering Team Needs to Stop and Fix the Foundation
SonarQube just flagged 347 critical security vulnerabilities. Your DORA metrics are in the red. A threading bug is crashing microservices across the platform. Sometimes the whole team needs to stop feature work and fix the foundation. Learn how firebreak sprints work, when to call one, and how to insert them into your roadmap without destroying delivery commitments or losing stakeholder trust.
Size REALLY Matters: Finding the Squad Size Sweet Spot
Your Squads should be three developers, plus or minus two. Discover why squad size impacts planning effectiveness, why individual-level planning creates fragility, and how to structure teams for accountability and successful delivery.