Marat Kiniabulatov | Agile Coach, OKR, PMO

Methodology: How We Compare Research Architectures

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Full methodology for the Deep Research Benchmark — 7-step pipeline, dimensions, gap analysis, DRACO evaluation, cost measurement

Product Engineer в гибридных IT-командах: паттерны перехода 2025-2026

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Как внедрить роль Product Engineer в гибридных командах, где стеки не пересекаются. Конкретные конфигурации для Java+Data, Card Processing+COTS и путь от системного PE к LeSS.

The Triangle of Team Efficiency: Goals, People, Flow

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An effective team achieves business goals, sustains its people, and delivers predictably. Three pillars — one triangle. Based on 7+ years of data from 75+ teams.

Zero Bug Policy: From 77 Bugs to 18 in One Month

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

77 bugs in the backlog. 60 of them without any due date.

One month later: 18 bugs. Every single one with an ETA.

No magic. No crunch. Just a policy.

The Problem

How were bugs prioritized before?

Three criteria:

Who screams loudest — the most frustrated stakeholder wins
Which client has the biggest ARR — revenue drives priority
How urgent it sounds — panic is contagious

The result? A chaotic queue, broken promises, customer-facing teams losing trust in engineering, and engineers trapped in constant context-switching.

Boosting Efficiency with WIP Aging Insights and Tools

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When examining real workflow data, there’s a common pattern: clusters of tasks that have aged significantly, some clearly stagnating beyond ~~recognition~~ acceptable timeframes. These cases point to one of the most important yet very often overlooked metrics in flow management: WIP Aging.

WIP (Work In Progress) Aging measures the elapsed time that a work item has spent in active progress but remains incomplete. This metric serves as an early warning system for workflow problems, helping teams identify where work gets stuck before it significantly impacts delivery timelines. Unlike cycle time, which analyzes completed tasks retrospectively, WIP Aging provides real-time visibility into current work, making it the single most actionable metric for proactive flow management.

Monte Carlo Simulation: Forecasting Throughput and Project Timelines

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: Forecasting team Throughput is super-easy and much more reliable than traditional methods, if you limit your work in Progress. Reliability confirmed by research data.

We’ve already extensively covered Throughput (one of the flow metrics), how to analyze Throughput data from 3 key angles. And why it’s better for forecasting than storypoints.

Now let’s get to essentials and practical questions that our management looooves to ask: “When will you guys finish this project of X items”?

3 key data slices to understand your team's Predictability through Throughput (pun intended).

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today we’ll talk about Throughput metric. Why is it so important, how to read it’s patterns and what to be cautious about.

Premise

Imagine walking into a bar on a Friday evening, exhausted, and ordering a beer flight. The bartender thinks:

“Over the past hour we completed 12 orders; there are 4 in progress; this will be the fifth. Your flight will arrive in 20–25 minutes.”

There are no subjective complexity estimates - only historical data to forecast wait time. Wouldn’t it be great if an IT team could plan as simply, honestly, and predictably? ~~Ha-ha, you wish~~

5 Reasons Why Your Story Points Aren't Working (And What to Do About It)

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over seven years of running Story Points workshops, I’ve seen the same pattern: teams learn the technique, apply it for a few sprints, then gradually drift back to old habits. At my current scale — 47 teams, around 400 people in IT — 60% use Story Points, 40% don’t. What’s interesting: those 60% who do use them do it completely differently.

Even 3 months after the training, only 20-30% use Story Points correctly (as intended). The problem isn’t the tool itself, but how we use it and what we expect from it.

Product Operations: simple steps to build transparent Feature Pipeline to dramatically lower Lead Time

Tue, 07 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

(Experience from an AI-Based Fintech KYC SaaS Startup Focused on LATAM and Africa)

Your regular challenge: When Sales, Marketing and IT Speak Different Languages

Our SaaS startup served emerging fast-paced fintech markets (it still is). Speed + compliance were existential. Since most startups live on venture capital with limited runway, every delay in shipping value to the market means lost clients and regulatory risk. It also a huge roadblock on your path to become self-sustainable. So you need to be super frugal and efficient.

Stop being a "Feature Factory", you can't afford it! Shift to Product-Led SaaS with an easy-to-use Feature ROI check

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The startup scene in 2022 and 2023 has been tough. This “Startup Winter” has seen less funding, many layoffs, and startups closing down. The hopeful times of 2020 and 2021, driven by big investments, feel far away now. Add to this the global events and banking decisions, and we’re in a tricky spot.

I’ve helped startups for 10 years, and one thing is clear: now isn’t the time to just keep making new features. Look at fintech and other SaaS areas. A startup that keeps adding features for every small need is very different from one that focuses on the big needs and does them really well. In these tough times, guess which one stands strong (spoiler: neither, but second is more sustainable)?

5 essential NOC Metrics to reach high uptime and detect potential outages

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My latest tenure of 2.5 years is closely related to Designing and Adopting Incident Management Framework (as part of Program Management org). This activity was driven with two primary objectives in mind:

Reach and maintain system uptime of 99.99% (our APIs and SDKs).
Ensure engineering is always firsthand source of information for any potential outage that can result in downtime.

In our foundational days, we lacked a comprehensive alerting and monitoring system. Establishing the Network Operations Center (NOC) Team was our strategic move to shape a robust system and take charge of Incident Management. We not only touched the 99.98% uptime benchmark but also heightened our proactivity from spotting 60% of incidents ahead of our merchants to a resounding 95% and higher.

Navigating OKR Challenges: Common Pitfalls and Agile Solutions

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past 2 years, I’ve been working as Program Management lead at Metamap.com, helping to set up OKR framework among other things. As challenging as just working with OKRs is, we are a distributed team, spanning from PH / SG to the very west coast and even Hawaii :)

The common issues we’ve found and discovered led me to creating this blog post. So without further ado, It’s time to delve into the captivating world of OKRs - Objectives and Key Results. These are the guiding stars that lead your organization to its true north. Embarking on this journey can sometimes make you feel like you’re treading choppy waters. In today’s post, we’ll chart a map of these common pitfalls and equip you with an Agile compass to help navigate with confidence.

My experience in preparing to PSM II (Professional Scrum Master) certification

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hey everyone, here’s my list of resources and literature for getting prepped for the PSM II examination. I would be tremendously happy if you share yours :)

*Sidenote: if you are “certificates are overvalued” type of person - I’d agree. This is especially true when it comes to CSM / PSM I - because that certification only mentions that you have been introduced to the basics. However, when it comes to PSM II you need to rely on your experience as a Scrum Master. No more “shu” (of shu-ha-ri), just your experience and daily understanding of agile values. *

Trust Stories - Growing trust in distributed teams (RU)

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Last week me and Alex Pikulev of Agilix recorded Trust Stories podcast episode, on Growing Team Trust in Distributed Teams. Courtesy of In Teams we Trust websit e

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq82aFap1rc

Main bullets are:

Growing trust in distrubited teams is hard, but nevertheless as important as in co-located team.
Team itself creates an atmosphere of trust in itself. Our task, as a scrum master, coach, manager - is to help and highlight needed areas.
XP and especially Pair Programmingи helps in growing trust.
Intrateam trust, from the informal side (skype beers, navigating as a guest to your colleagues in other locations, bike fixing via the webcam, ordering stuff on flea market in your city and sending it over to a colleague) helps a lot.
More freedom for the team, for collaborative work and motivation. More trust! Work harder on understanding the context and value of features implemented.

More details (rus) / tg channel : https://t.me/inteamwetrust_rus/35 Video: https://youtu.be/Pq82aFap1rc

How to turn off New Jira Issue view

Sun, 30 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Navigate to Personal Settings- Turn switcher for Jira Labs off- And leave feedback. Atlassian team needs you to help’em understand what didn’t you like. Ahem, I got some help :)
1. It’s not comfortable to edit- It doesn’t support markup- It doesn’t allow to work with resolutions- It makes it hard to find needed fields, although they are already turned on in standard view

Are you finding new view comfortable? Has it helped you improve your Jira routines?

Conducting Remote and Distributed Retrospectives with Trello

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

and why Trello?

Lately I’ve started using Trello as an ultimate tool for the Retros and Demos. So this post will cover the path to using trello as opposed to other solutions.

yet another pencil illustration

Tools

I’ve been using multiple tools, such as Realtimeboard (now Miro) as an interactive flipchart to collaborate with the team, Google Docs with sections appointed to the retro stages, Confluence (as in 100% of the projects I’ve been working in we’ve had Atlassian stack), even Jira once (wow that was a bad idea)!

Jira Cloud: Releasing multi-project old tickets from Kanban board without spamming developer's inboxes

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is an interesting case I always wanted to make better: almost every project you come to has a lot of older unreleased tickets, that actually already sit on production. And developers (without proper jira management) continue using the Kanban board that becomes more crowded in the Done / Closed column (and it can hit 400, 1000 tickets and be slow and almost pointless to use). Typical story, huh?

So what to do, if you want to release all those older tickets and don’t bother developers with, say, 450 updates on every ticket that fixVersion has been set to each one of them? The answer (and thanks to AUG Moscow Community) is to swap notification scheme for related projects while releasing.

Throughput vs Story Points velocity

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

So we’ve been measuring story points estimate and throughput through the last 5 sprints, and they really do show approximately similar results :) makes you think why do have an additional story points layer on top of the simple throughput? :)

Just as Vasco Duarte told :)

Anatomy of Distributed Team: Workflows, Agility, Communication - my talk from Atlassian Summit 2018

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been an extremely fruitful Atlassian Summit 2018 in Barcelona! Main purpose was to speak about Distributed Teams, however the atmosphere was so cheerful and friendly, that it was more like a fireside chat, even given that my speech was the closing one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFDtxT5-5MM

Got an awesome tracklead! Brought a giant bag of Atlassian merch for AUG events in Ufa, thanks Darlene! Finally met Ben Linders (check out his Agile Self-Assesment game!) whom I’ve been giving a Q&A to (which is now available in Japanese and Chinese).

My Q&A for InfoQ on Keeping Distributed Teams in Sync

Fri, 17 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I spoke with Ben Linders of InfoQ (thrilled to be published at that website!) about challenges and communication patterns for Distributed Teams, uncovering bits of my Atlassian Summit 2018 speech.

The biggest challenge of distributed teams is communication, which is essential for establishing ground rules on collaboration. Shifting working hours to accommodate each other and team liaisons help to communicate and synchronize work. Teams based on trust, respect, and openness will thenselves to help people throughout the organization and foster a culture that keeps teams in sync.

Stride is to be discontinued in Feb2019

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Stride is being discontinued as of Feb 2019, and Atlassian itself moves to Slack. It was quite hard to use Stride as the speed of the electron package was painful, integrations were worse than in Slack (even with Atlassian products), stability and features were suffering quite heavily.

It’s great that a team can admit it’s pain points, since it’s almost impossible to compete with de-facto industry standard ‘Slack’. I’ve written about experience of 6 months on Stride, we’ll jump off it, I presume, closer to the end of product support.

Minsk AUG Hosted!

Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Hey guys, good news - Minsk has it’s own Atlassian User Group now, me & StiltSoft kicked out the first event, gathered 60 RSVP’s in just one week, and had an amazing time in the beautiful city of Minsk, Belarus!

Hosted an event in an awesome Eventspace.by at the old factory!

[gallery ids=“902,899,900” type=“rectangular”]

- <a title="AUG Minsk, SkuVault->Jira" href="/images/aug-minsk-skuvault-jira.pdf">AUG Minsk, SkuVault-Jira</a> - Speech on how we organized processes and workflows in Jira, and helped SkuVault become more transparent in development;
- [AUG Minsk, Stride](/images/aug-minsk-stride.pdf) - our experience in migration from Telegram to Atlassian Stride.

https://www.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6396021858935861248

Telegram -> Stride Migration Experience

Fri, 04 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I hosted Minsk Atlassian User Group, where I shared our experience on migrating to Stride and gave the analogy between Stride, and Russian word ‘Stradai’ (-> eng.: ‘Suffer’). I’ll explain the analogy later. Hence the ‘Napalm Death’ song ‘Suffer’ joke on the first slide :)

Given that a lot of people use Telegram as a corporate messenger, and given all of the telegram-blocking happening in Russia currently, it’s pretty relevant to write about alternatives. We at SkuVault migrated due to the need of user control, but migration experience is relevant to many other teams.

Ufa AUG #1. Wrap Up

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

So we’ve survived Ufa Atlassian User Group, the very first meetup, with 17 people visiting our office to hear about jira, confluence, bitbucket and other atlassian products :)

[gallery ids=“869,870,871,872,873” type=“square”]

We’ve discussed how Jira helped us in reflecting SkuVault development processes, and how do we keep documentation on the feature in Confluence, until it’s released, and what info do we store there.

Panel consisted of Smena.io, modulbank, MEGI, and a couple other teams :) Presentation is available in Russian via this link: UfaAUG_1.

Agile Communication in Distributed Teams (with no overlapping hours)

Thu, 18 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

So as you know my speciality is distributed teams :) This post is about what changes does the agile communication face (and scrum in particular), when it’s adjusted to the distributed teams. This is my experience, I don’t assume this is a silver bullet, but such approach works for me for the last 5 years and proved itself to be proficient.

Let’s divide communication by types:

- stragetic meetings (plannning, retrospective)
- daily huddles (e.g. daily standup in scrum)
- day-to-day clarifications.

by Text I mean Instant Messaging

about

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Hey, welcome! Name’s Marat, I help organizations and teams embrace agility, gain transparency and make better products.

I’ve built Predictable.Team - tool to

visualize trends of your Jira & Youtrack flow metrics,
get recommendations with step-by-step guide,
perform monte-carlo simulation to forecast “when will the project be ready”, “how many items should we take in a sprint”, “how long will this epic take”.

Currently, I work with upper management that teams within my domain (banking core) become more Productive and Predictable to achieve our strategic goals.

Ufa Atlassian User Group

Fri, 29 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

UPD: Rescheduled Jan. 30th -> to Feb. 6th.

Recently buddies from Moscow recommended me to join Atlassian User Group Leaders,to host Atlassian events in Ufa, so here I am (after an interview with Atassian)!

First ever-ever Atlassian User Group with special Atlassian swag will be happening January 30 2018, 7pm :) Meetup related to all things atlassian and related! Follow the link and save the date :) https://aug.atlassian.com/events/details/atlassian-ufa-presents-ufa-atlassian-user-group-1#/

- # I'll be talking about how we adapted our development workflow in JIRA
- # Documentation lifecycle in confluence at SkuVault

More topics to come, from our local Atlassian Users :)

Ufa IT Management Meetup #4

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This time it was all about requirements. And we hosted the event at our cozy SkuVault office:

- Eliciting and preparing requirements from gathering data till development:

Oleg Gumerov (PO at SMENA - solutions provider for a big delivery service) shared his experience on how they do it in SMENA.io; - Nur Ibragimov (Head Analyst at modulbank) shared their way of processing requirements; - Us (me and Ksenia - also PM/ BA at SkuVault) shared how we do it in SkuVault, as well as how we used to work on requirements at Storia.me back in the days.

And that was my first-time experience of stitching video and audio :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPxLpW1f8IA

Ufa IT Management Meetup (24.10.17)

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

2 weeks after we had the actual meetup, here’s the follow-up post :)

Topics this time:

- Keynote by me on [cynefin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz366X0-8) and how it fits our company projects. Had some discussion & arguing on applicacy of cynefin when it comes to rough development times, migrations, firefighting-based development. Overall, model was introduced, and the fact-and-experience-based arguments are always the best. Cause we all keep it harsh, true and ironic, when it comes to sharing something you've been stuffing bumps on!
- Afterwards beer-session was a 3-hour-rant on headhunting of employees by Moscow, Saint-Petersburgh, Europe and States, and that Ufa developers became much more audacious, over the past crisis-driven years (given that there was no crisis in Moscow and the rest of the world). Seems like the raises are imminent, if you want to keep the developer. Headhunting becomes more brutal and sneaky at the same time!
- Yet another topic was keeping the valuable professional, when he reaches the limites of intra-company growth, and what is best to offer in those cases.

Agile Turkey Summit 2017

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Me & my colleague basically decided to attend Agile Greece and Agile Turkey, and then exchange opinions and knowledge gathered there. Big advantage of my trip was Dave Snowden’s keynote, whom I wanted to catch after the speech and bore to death with silly questions :)

Agile Turkey Itself

The conference (1-day conference, october 19th) kind of frustrated me, as 2/3rds of speeches were in Turkish, so I had to ditch my plan to attend certain events, and half of the time was roaming around the conference floor.

Jira: removing transition from current status to itself (if All -> transition is turned on)

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Small and duct-tapey resolution for the time, when you have an All -> [statusName] JIRA workflow transition.

By default, it results in the following: Default Ticket Screen shows transition from current to current status, among others. So e.g., you have an In Progress ticket, you have the transition to the very same In Progress. To avoid that, use simple conditioning for the transition:

- Go to transition Conditions
- Click Add New
- Select 'Value Field' from the given list
- Select logical operator 'doesn't equal' / '!='
- And put a value in it (name of current status, and the value to be handled as string)

Start Working is the transition name to the “In Progress” status

This is how it looks in Workflow

RU: Открываем дочку американского юридического лица в России

Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post is available in English.

И делаем это без необходимости прилета в РФ американского гендира.

Последние полгода я набивал шишки, ходя по инстанциям, собственно, поделюсь опытом :) Задача: открыть 100-процентную дочку в России (материнская SkuVault.com находится в Луисвилле, Кентукки). Наш случай несколько уникален: CEO не мог посетить РФ, так что заверять и пересылать идентификационные документы приходилось туда-сюда меж двух контитентов.

На практике, все делается достаточно просто. Всего-то придется столкнуться с бюрократической машиной Mother Russia (которая за последние годы стала неимоверно удобнее), проблемами с межведомственной коммуникацией, ну да беготней с документами.

Workflow for the Requirements in the Distributed team

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is basically the anatomy of a distributed team, working on requirements. Key point here is that this is the process working for us, in current configuration, and it’s effective.

Disclaimer: Every organization is different: from internal structure to how it communicates with the outer world. So no workflow is a silver bullet.

*Disclaimer 2: SkuVault is an ever-improving team of ~50 people, distributed across 10 timezones, 2 different versions, and serving loyal clients worldwide 24/7. Learn more about Communication in distributed teams: Messenger & Rules, or *Why we ditched Scrum, in favor of Kanban in JIRA

Why we ditched Scrum in favor of Kanban in JIRA

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Warning: don’t misinterpret scrum for agile as a whole :)

Around a year ago I wrote a yearly retrospect on how the workflow at SkuVault is organized, and how we set up our jira boards to work in sprints.

sprints and their goals

There was no Kanban backlog at the moment, and we used Scrum board as an improvized scrumban tool: we had the sprints, which were treated as folders to fit tickets in some time period. Classical sprints were not suitable for our workflow, I mentioned the reasons in Year Retrospective @ SkuVault. So that sprint-folder system was great, visible and allowed us to predict.

Jira: how to allow editing fields for closed tickets

Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Jira is flexible, yet complex tool in some cases :)

- In order to make the fields (inline as well) editable, when the ticket is closed, go to Workflow -> Select 'Closed' status -> Click Properties
- There would be flags with bool values: we need jira.issue.editable
- ![](/images/edit_closed_issue-e1496131332151.png)
- In case you see jira.issue.editable is false - either change that to true or delete the property key with prev. value.
- Don't forget to publish the updated workflow.

So you want to open US-company subsidiary in Russia

Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post is available in Russian.

*And do it without the CEO flying all the way down to your city :) *

Let me share a bit of an experience from past 6 months :) We wanted to open a branch in Russia (parent company is in US). Our case is a bit unique: our CEO wasn’t able to visit Russia, so we had to verify and send the list of docs back’n’forth between two continents.

Communication in distributed teams: Messenger & Rules

Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In order for the distrubited teams to work, you got to have a clear flow, a set of general rules, that will fence the process and allow people to collaborate effectively around the globe. If everything is set up correctly, you are able to create amazing products with global professionals, and cover customer support 20+ hours a day.

Communication

What do you miss most when working outside of the office? ~~Procrastination!~~

Project Management & Business Analysis Meetup - Ufa

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

So it happened - I managed to gather 2 people for PM & BA meetup (without any PR xD).

After visiting Vienna, I desperately wanted a platform to share knowledge or / and mock each other on PM & BA failures. So I created one: Ufa Project Management & Business Analysis Group

Initial meeting consisted of Me, Nur (from modulbank.ru - online bank for small businesses) and Oleg (from smena.io - various crms / solutions for partners). Both work as analysts at cool and interesting teams.

Tuning up Scrum Approach

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Recently my colleague, Tim, decided to try out Planning Poker, to have better estimations. Planning is essential, and scrum already offers a framework of how to deal with planning. But over the course of my work and experience with scrum techniques, team usually shapes

Previous experience showed that daily scrum meetings are merely pointless. Direct communication / skype / IM is much more efficient. Especially in distributes teams.

And following each and every ritual from scrum routine is time and efficiency consuming during the first iterations, since agile methodologies need a good deal of instructions. Usually, after some time teams shape up scrum as they want, and it just works, so from my experience it’s not essential to follow scrum by the book (Agile Estimating and Planning book by Mike Cohn, written 10 years ago). Here are additional thoughts on why our transatlantic distributed team doesn’t fully fit into planning classic scrum and it’s rituals:

Year Retrospective @ SkuVault

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Last year guys from SkuVault offered me an amazing opportunity to help the company manage a growing development team, create organized schedule, establish workflow that reflects the company goals .

For those who don’t know - SkuVault is a Warehouse Management System (WMS). Like a swiss army knife, SkuVault manages and syncs your inventory across e-Commerce platforms, POS, Logistics and Warehouses, providing accurate quantities in order to prevent out of stocks. Headquartered in Louisville, KY - SkuVault helps to manage the inventory for hundreds of clients all across the globe.

Notes on Austrian Startup Scene

Thu, 05 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently been to Vienna, and visited local Austrian Startups Stammtisch. It went by the number #31, so quite a consistent event going on for more than a year now. The event took place in Sektor5 co-working space (which I have to recommend, because it’s a really cool place with only eur 18 per day! You can feel the international vibe and all that kinds of stuff).

Sektor 5 got a cool terrace :)

Manage process, not people

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It’s all about the process

I might be a captain obvious here, but supporting a process for an analyst / pm is a more important, than micromanaging tasks amongst developer pool.

When a new team member steps in, who’s responsibility is to manage development processes, she needs to find how to make business processes inside a company better.

Business processes are evaluated from various points of view, but in a nutshell, aside from developer professionalism, she needs to make sure there’s no room for slowdowns and uncertanties when product passes different stages across different teams. Whether there are delays in communication, or delays of resources for the project, or sick-days, - there should be a correct process to tackle such cases, in order to minimize negative outcome.

Three-week sprints for iOS projects

Thu, 12 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

While working on Storia.me iPhone app, we’ve eventually came up to the three-week sprints. Empirically, they proved themselves to make product high quality and provided time to get moderate functionality chunks done. Two notes here:

- First of all - this is does not include time for appStore approval. That's additional week. So a release cycle is 1 month.
- Second, we came to three-week sprints after we released MVP. Preparing the app for MVP was quite a kerfuffle, but we managed to finish needed bits in 2 months. Don't forget to have some rest and go for a holiday after that :)

Team Spirit + Exciting Project = Good Product (and vice versa)

Tue, 16 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Product is crafted by people. It is not a sum of collaborative work. It’s usually a combination of work, excitement, collaborative ideas, feedback loop inside the team throughout the whole project lifecycle.

Passion is right at the heart of every person, and if environment tends to motivate - a person will work hard to achieve a good result (appreciated by the team and himself). Moreover, working with passionate team amplifies the overall product, makes it bigger than sum of efforts.

Storia.me App Rollout: Better Feedback Loop, Faster Iterations

Fri, 29 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

When developing Storia.me iPhone app, we had the following circles to deliver to:

- Developers
- QA
- Early adopters
- General Audience (AppStore)

And the following problems to solve:

- Provide Beta access with faster update pace and immediate critical bug fixing for early adopters (as in microsoft’s inner circle);
- Make AppStore version as stable as possible;
- Receive feedback on earlier stages, experiment with a limited set of users and influencers.

A scheme we came up with eventually, has three (four in special cases) versions before the final AppStore release. Each version is rolled out out for certain circle, with different readiness level.

Improving App Design Review, Ensuring Design is Ready for Development

Wed, 27 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Well-coordinated work across teams - let’s say design and development - is a huge deal when it comes to delivering a good product on time! So, part of my job as a project manager is making sure that the assets passed from design into development are ready for implementation.

At the very heart of the process, design review is nothing complex. You should know human interface guidelines, platform restrictions, requirements and a little bit of common sense =)

Scaling a startup session @ SxSW with Werner Vogels

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Werner Vogels, the amazon CTO, in a very informal way talked with Conten.ly, Distill Networks, and some other CEO/CFO/CCO’s on how the start-ups were scaling.

Werner still claims that Amazon is a startup. Yeah, just with billion valuation and an IPO. How cute, noted Shane of Contently. (UPD: this was shared lightning fast all over the media, see the full transcript)

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“How much time do you spent time on hiring?” Vogels asked. “At Amazon, of course, we’re a 20 year-old startup by now —”

A fine line: Journalism, Storytelling and Advocacy

Sun, 15 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

German writer and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once famously said, “silence in the face of evil is evil itself.” When there is potential for storytelling or reporting to create a tangible impact, is there an obligation for the journalist or greater media ecosystem relay a call to action to the reader? What is the role of the journalist in getting the audience to emotionally connect to what they are reading, potentially at the expense of objectivity? Presented by The Knight Foundation".

How to accurately estimate external projects. Part 1 - Delays caused by communication

Sun, 01 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

How to accurately estimate external projects

This is a first article from “How to accurately estimate incoming projects” series, aimed to help you see the possible future pitfalls. This includes both outsourcing projects and the ones where different teams around the world are involved.IT industry is dynamic. Companies change APIs, IDEs, upgrade hosting servers software, raise new compatibility issues. Of course improvements are welcome, but there is no way you will have a perfect product once and forever – it needs to be re-iterated. Don’t forget about hundreds of different environments that the system should work on. And people.

no title

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Nothing new this 2 weeks. Well, in fact tons of new stuff this 2 weeks, but no time to blog at all. We are experiencing extreme-2-week-game-development and are almost ready to release “how not to screw up big projects” book (this is a joke, everything’s under control).

Meanwhile, we posted some stuff at codebranch blog, and want to say “HI” to our folks at LeWeb in Paris this week ;)

Here are the previews for two next posts:

MS to challenge interactive web with kinect controlling JS library

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Latest post by LongZheng reveals MS Research’s plans to ship JS library for kinect-enabled website. We already mentioned this in our twitter, but today’s little article will take a look at opportunities that this fact brings to the market.

Kinect has been a revolutionary addition for XBOX and sold millions of copies first year, becoming the fastest selling product in Microsoft’s history. Although, I didn’t like the release name (codename: “Project Natal” was much smoother to our ears), we all now take it for granted. There are still no hardcore games for Kinect, titles like Sesame street (a must-notice title for parents out there) and Kinect adventures are great for kids so they sell well, while Dance Central series popularize this device as an entertainment.

Scott Barnes on reading MS' Roadmap

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is really interesting to watch! One of the best argued and balanced critical statements come from MS’ former employees, that’s why I follow for example Scott Barnes (@MossyBlog). Check this out ;)

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/53237950]

AWESOME! Microsoft's Speech Recognition and Instant Same Tonal Voice Translation

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Having worked in the sound recognition field in mobile space (bird sounds) I know about this hard process a bit. Mostly I was using predefined algorithms and just implemented them in c#, but my poor knowledge and puny brain would never do such amazing stuff!

[youtube=http://youtu.be/Nu-nlQqFCKg]

Natural UI comes to life! You can always see that some awesome MS Research powered speech recognition displayed on MS keynotes almost in real-time, but yesterday’s article on The Next Web highlighted the new addition to that wonderful feature: same voice tone speech translation in Mandarin! Check this out!

Apple moves to ARM? No way in at least the next 4 years!

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

7 years ago Apple announced that they would be moving from PowerPCs to Intel’s x86 CPUs in two years because they had been producing less heat and running much faster (PowerPCs were built by IBM. The 8-core version of this chip also powers PlayStation 3 ). This was a very dangerous step, which definitely brought massive boost in performance for Apple products, but caused additional emulation layer to run the legacy applications.

October is for Launch. Huge announcements from Microsoft, Apple and Google: Mobile Platforms News Overview

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

crosspost x codebranch

There were so many announcements this month, that the tech press kept whining about the jetlags and whole difficulty of travelling around the globe. And we’re not talking about the small announcements and launches – all of the three IT giants had something new for the ever growing personal computing market. October was huge for us as mobile developers, because we are the ones who will bring to life our future projects for these platforms.

Windows 8 Slates. Moronic Pricing in Russia

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Hi everyone, as always I’d like to rant on the following: greediness and insanity of Russian retailers. The latest issue of Svyaznoy’s catalogue is a great example of utterly insane management and completely moronic pricing amongst almost any hardware company here.

I was pleased by 6 tablets announced to be sold by the retailer this month, all 6 from Sammy, Asus and Acer. I was happy to see my beloved low-cost Acer Iconia W510 ($499 in US) (previews (1) and (2))! But here it’s priced as some crazy-ass magnesium-made premium ultra-fucking-machine. And that’s for Clover Trail! No way!

Codebranch: an external web development team is now active!

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

crosspost x codebranch

We are Codebranch – an external web development team. For the last couple of months we’ve been preparing the grounds to run – now the website is up, our 3 offices in Finland, Russia and Turkey fully operational, so we’re good to go!

Codebranch Website

We aimed to make our website content-centric, so you won’t find awesome charts and colorful pictures. You can find important information like what we do and how to reach us almost instantly. The same applies to the whole approach of our company – we work in a transparent, leanand efficient way.

Be Microsoft! Screw your shipping up!

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I love Surface RT, the way it looks and works. I’m even ok with the lack of ***mkv **codec support (although, that’s a NO for me, until there’s an app).

However, reading the latest articles on how MS “nailed” shipping Surface Pre-Orders again makes me tip my hat to Apple, because of it’s polished supply / retail lines.

Surface RT — first attempt

Latest “Where is my Microsoft Surface? Here’s what we know” article sheds some light on the shipping issues inside the software giants. Although zdnet really sucks in 70% of it’s “analytics”, this is a good example of trying to understand what went wrong.

Zend guys on their enterprise victories

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Oh that is sooooo awesome! I love when the guys speak like that xD /s

Zend and PHP have made significant inroads into the enterprise market in the last few years — Gutmans told me that “when we go up against Java or .Net, we win — and the new integrated development environment for mobile, cloud, and business applications is part of a new mobile-first push for the company. http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/23/huge-news-php-developers-can-now-design-build-and-publish-mobile-apps-right-in-zend-studio/

UPD: Anyway, my tip of a hat for the work they’ve done =)

Newsletter — Predictable Teams

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Еженедельный дайджест про Agile, AI adoption, flow metrics и управление командами. Подпишись.