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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)? ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. * ...

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 website 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

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 :)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?

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)! ...

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. ...

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 :)

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). ...