A practical assessment tool for evaluating an organization's readiness for meaningful change, focusing on long-term goals versus quick fixes and problem-solving versus solution-seeking.
About:
Adrian Howard is a coach and former developer focused on strategy, research, and delivery in cross-disciplinary spaces.
Website:
Specializations:
Interests:
Incoming Links:
Outgoing Links:
Subscribe to RSS:
A structured guide for teams to enhance customer interviewing skills through collaborative preparation, practice, and performance, emphasizing effective questioning and teamwork.
The author discusses the importance of setting expiry dates for dashboard metrics to reassess their usefulness. After tracking a specific metric for eighteen months, the author realizes it has become less actionable and relevant. ...
The post discusses the drawbacks of traditional time tracking and introduces a method of tracking interruptions instead. The author shares personal experiences and insights on how this approach can lead to more productive conversa...
The author reflects on the odd experience of encountering online content from a friend who has passed away, and how their digital presence continues to affect his life. He discusses the increased 'surface area of grief' that comes...
The author discusses the misconception that certain professions are immune to bad actors and emphasizes the importance of taking responsibility for one's actions. They argue that people from various professions can engage in uneth...
0Scrum Doesn't Say…
2025-02-03 •
The text discusses the misconceptions about Scrum and clarifies that Scrum does not mandate many of the practices that people criticize. It emphasizes that Scrum is a minimal process improvement framework and encourages people to ...
0One Approach to Beating Conference Stage Fright
2025-01-26 •
The article discusses an approach to overcoming stage fright when presenting at conferences. It suggests starting with a comfortable level of interaction and gradually pushing the boundaries. The author shares the story of 'Nick' ...
0Two Useful Prompts to Explore Intent & Behaviour
2024-09-09 •
The text discusses the importance of not making assumptions about behavior and provides two prompts to explore intent and behavior. It shares two personal experiences to illustrate the importance of finding multiple explanations f...
0Facilitating Your First Wardley Mapping Session
2024-08-12 •
The text provides a guide on how to facilitate a Wardley Mapping session, emphasizing the importance of alignment, user needs, and value chains. It includes a detailed step-by-step process for conducting the session, along with as...
0Why I Dislike Maturity Models
2024-07-29 •
The author discusses the problems with maturity models, arguing that they are often oversimplified and do not accurately reflect the real experiences of organizations. He points out that maturity is not linear, and that the size o...
0Reflecting on Fourteen Years of Journaling
2024-07-20 •
The author reflects on the benefits of journaling, having written over 270k words in the past year. He discusses the impact of increasing his journaling frequency and the insights it has provided. The text also explores the correl...
0The Self-Service Research Sweet Spot
2024-07-01 •
The text discusses the concept of self-service research and how to split work between dedicated user research practitioners and People Who Do Research. It emphasizes the importance of risk and cadence in research work, and how sel...
0Three Questions to Help Triage Your Dashboards
2024-06-07 •
The text provides a checklist to review dashboards, focusing on visibility, actionability, and usage. It emphasizes the importance of having the right information at the right time, ensuring that the dashboard helps in making bett...
0Turn It Up or Turn It Down
2024-05-21 •
The text discusses the issue of when to do certain activities, such as discovery, interviewing, usability tests, and building prototypes. It argues that these activities should not be seen as one-off events, but rather as ongoing ...
0How Do Candidates Describe Your Hiring Process?
2024-05-09 •
The text discusses the hiring process from the perspective of the candidates, highlighting both the negative and positive experiences. It emphasizes the importance of a well-defined, informed, and balanced hiring process, and sugg...
0You Have a Performance Problem
2020-09-21 •
The text discusses the issue of slow code and the need for a culture change to address performance problems. It emphasizes the responsibility of the developer to address performance issues and the need for a cross-cutting concern ...
0Overlap and Glue
2020-08-28 •
The text discusses the concepts of overlap and glue in integrating different communities/disciplines/groups within an organization. Overlap involves active collaboration and cross-functional work, while glue is about defining the ...
0A Brief Story About Pizza (and Agile)
2020-08-09 •
The text discusses the concept of a recipe for Pizza Margherita and how different people interpret and use it. It also draws parallels to the Scrum Guide and other set process descriptions.
0Dumb Hiring Shibboleths
2020-07-27 •
The text discusses the concept of shibboleths in the context of hiring developers, emphasizing that there are many different paths to becoming a great developer and that traditional hiring practices may be filtering out great tale...
0Pointless Job Requirements
2020-07-20 •
The author criticizes the practice of including unnecessary job requirements in job adverts, arguing that it leads to a less qualified pool of applicants and narrows the diversity of who will apply. They suggest that fixing job ad...
0Vitamins and Painkillers
2020-07-15 •
The text discusses the metaphor of 'vitamin' and 'painkiller' products, emphasizing that there is no clear distinction between the two. It highlights that a product can be perceived as a vitamin by one customer and a painkiller by...
0A Spotter’s Guide to Good Retrospectives
2020-07-08 •
The text discusses the importance of good retrospectives for team effectiveness. It provides a list of indicators to determine if a team is good at retrospectives and includes follow-up suggestions from various professionals.
0A Story for Engineers Hiring Their First UX Person
2020-06-21 •
The text is a metaphor used to explain the importance of hiring a senior person with a good testing culture to make necessary structural changes to process, culture, and people to improve product quality in a company.