Hello, Miss? I’m calling from the hospital. I have here the results of your breast exam. I’m sorry to tell you; you have cancer.

Those words struck one relative of mine like a train. After the doctor’s news, her legs started shaking, her head spinning, her vision getting dizzy. First, the mental shutdown: “I will not listen to another word.” Then the emotional breakdown, with large tears rolling down her face, screaming, “Why me? Why now? Why?” Both knees and cell phone hit the floor.

Rewinding two months before the untoward phone call, she had the first signs of what…

Once upon a time, there was a need… The need to build the greatest digital product the world has ever seen. One product that would revolutionize the market, creating new trends and opening disruptive ways for doing business. A product built by the greatest team walking down the Earth, using the most efficient framework ever defined: Scrum.

“Why?”, “What?”, “When?”, “Who?” are questions that don’t need research. The market-fit is clear; the end-users identified upfront, the stakeholders listed and converging, the monetization strategy is a gold mine waiting to be put into practice. …

Working from home for twelve months straight obliterated my capacity to meet people spontaneously. Informal events need to be officialized in the calendar and the formal ones suffer from all the “digital noise” created by the bad usage of digital platforms like Teams or Zoom. On top of that, we didn’t fully embody the real remote work, keeping traditional principles used in a traditional office and assuming they could be 100% transposed into a digital and remote ecosystem.

The interaction magic that happens when you enter a physical meeting room and start chatting with your peers about trivial (yet connective)…

Big companies thrive or fail based on the quality of their middle management. By “management”, I don’t mean the classical & hierarchical structures but a more holistic view of people harnessed with enough soft and hard skills to bring leadership, guidance, competence to do/support well-educated decisions.

Once, Simon Sinek mentioned,

“Middle-management group has the hardest job of them all. They need to translate on what happens on Board level — strategical thinking — to what happens on the ground — tactical thinking.

(…) One of the reasons for things to break under middle-management level: we don’t train people to lead…

In 50 years, someone will study the social phenomena of showcasing certifications on Linkedin, especially Agile ones. The standard post usually goes like this:

“Today, I am a Certified Scrum Master. I decided to take the exam to verify my understanding of Scrum and the Agile Framework. A Big Thank You to my colleagues, my teachers, my coaches, my family, my friends, my cat, my dog, the stranger I met at the supermarket, etc.…

“<put here your shinny youracclaim.com link>”

• “< hopeful quote e.g. #1> Long journey ahead…”
• “< hopeful quote e.g. #2> My path is only starting…”
• “< hopeful…

Once upon a time, a software development model called ‘Waterfall’ — father of all evils, as some say… — advocated a granular breakdown of project activities to culminate in one gargantuan, tremendous, larger-than-life software rollout.

My first contact with Waterfall-ish methods happened more than a decade ago, as a Software Developer in a large Public Sector project. We released full-blown software packages every 4–5 months, with dozens of new features and hundreds (literally!) of bug fixes. Common those days, before you click “Ok” to rollout, you had to say 3 Hail Marys, kiss the crucifix, and jump on your right…

“Brace yourselves! Another article on how to manage meetings…”

If this was your 1st thought, don’t worry. I’m not going to repeat the already-known tips shown here, here, and here. Today my narrative is different: I amused myself recapping recent moments where my productivity went down the hill and 80% of them happened during or due to a ‘bad’ meeting.

But like everything in life, bad meetings are created by bad (human) behaviors. The following real-life examples highlight persona archetypes that I had the luck (not!) to cross paths with. …

It’s funny how your professional maturity takes you to see things differently over the years. Going back 13 years, my product team standards were based on pure performance supported by absolute metrics; more ‘output’ than ‘outcome.’ Fast-forwarding to the present day, my standards lay heavily on holistic, empathic, and value-driven approaches.

Over the last decade, I had the pleasure (and luck!) to work with exquisite people who built not only great products but also great relationships that brought their teams to the next level. …