Two Questions They Didn’t Rehearse
I recently landed a contract role, so I’m out of the interview cycle for now. Sadly, I know plenty of good people still slogging through the job hunt drudgery. The market is rough right now. I was fortunate to work with an interview coach a…
The Feedback Outlived the Job
In 2008, at the end of a team retro, I handed out 3×5 cards and asked each person for at least one good thing and one bad thing about me. Honestly. Brutally. They looked at me funny. Then they asked for more cards. 34 comments…
Mile Markers
Sometimes I find people get really hung up on sprint boundaries and the intense focus to start and end things within a sprint. They want everything committed to at the beginning to be nicely completed at the end. Academically this makes sense, but reality is…
Speaking for the Empty Chair
Ten minutes left in refinement. The product owner steps out for a call. Half the team wanted to skip the last story until the next meeting. The other half wanted to guess and move on. I said what I remembered from a conversation with her…
The One-Word Test
One of my litmus tests for a company, and sometimes an interview question, is this: “You have to change a single word in legal copy on your production website and it’s critical. How quickly can you get that fix to production?” The gap between answers…
On Track, No Impediments
My greatest pet peeve is watching a standup where the facilitator calls on each person round robin, each one says “on track, no impediments,” and the meeting wraps in 4 minutes. Just like yesterday. That’s not a healthy standup. It’s a status report with eye…
The 10% Meeting Rule
I regularly hear engineers complain about too many meetings. They’re right. The specific complaint is usually about flow state, and it’s worth taking seriously. Flow state is where you’re fully locked in on a problem, holding a lot of context in your head at once.…
Fly in My Soup
A card hits done. Someone immediately finds a bug. Now there’s an argument about what to do next. Two options come up every time: The answer depends on the bug. If the product owner can live with it and it’s low impact, option 2 is…
Forgotten Suggestions
Most retrospective improvements die between sessions. The conversation was real, but then the sprint started and everything got buried. By the time the next retro rolls around, the last one is forgotten, along with its planned impact. That gap is where accountability lives. Two approaches…
Capacity Is Not the Constraint
Over my career, the ask from leadership has been pretty consistent: more development capacity. The list of requests never shrinks, so the conclusion is always the same: we need to go faster. AI is now delivering on that in ways hiring never quite could. The…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Kevin E. Schlabach 