software delivery

Lengthy manual deployments and calls are risky business

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Have you ever worked somewhere where they deployed once a quarter? I have. It sucks and it’s super risky. On the other hand, I’ve been at places where we push to production over 1000+ times a week. “But we have 75 people on the call and they’re all paying attention”. Yeah, OK. I’ve been on these and I’ve heard people sleeping. Midnight calls suck and sleep deprived people who are deploying large amounts of code with a lot of steps manually is RIPE for error. Making mistakes happen and “short deployments” turn into hours and you get delayed even further.

What is a TPM?

What is a technical program manager?

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There’s a lot of confusion on what a technical program manager is and isn’t. It also varies wildly by each organization. Some are really technical whereas others aren’t as technical but have a lot more soft skills. I’ll get into my experiences on what the role likely is, how to get into it and where paths might go. What is a technical program manager? Most don’t really understand what a TPM is and isn’t. I see fairly generic postings confusing the role with a project manager or a scrum master or some sort of delivery manager on the team level.

Story point estimation computer

Story point estimation doesn’t matter on the wrong things

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Back with a somewhat controversial topic. I find estimation for the sake of estimation a waste of time as teams generally focus on the wrong items in the backlog and agonize over the stuff that really doesn’t matter. What really matters is that top 15% which is truly important for the organization and your customers. That’s what you should focus on and leave the rest to discussions. Really, Why don’t you think story points matter? It’s not that I think they don’t matter, I think they’re an inefficient use of time for most teams. Here’s more to it: My team