How to determine if systemic factors slow down your teams’ velocity

Last week, I pulled out the critical thing that Steve Jobs did, upon returning to an Apple computer with a sagging stock price. He went after a major systemic factor that was holding back release dates: too many priorities. If you are really going after top performance, you need to look at all factors, including the…

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The one thing Steve Jobs did that turned around Apple

After a nasty battle with Apple shareholders, Steve Jobs, then the original founding CEO, was ousted. He went on to create NeXt computers (later acquired by Disney). In the meantime, Apple drifted as a company. It proliferated product lines. Lost focus. And the share price entered a death spiral phase. A few years later in…

How to analyze the impact of velocity on your release date

While “agilefall” has many well documented downsides, I’ve found a counterintuitive bright side to the following aspect of it: “We have a product backlog with priorities, but we start working on a release with a long list of features already committed to the business.” In this case, we have a pretty detailed view of scope…