Project | Product Management

I have come to acknowledge a few core principles that are important to guiding projects and products through conception, development and release. I just want to get them down here for now. I'll come back to add to them and expand upon them further in the near future.

You can't know how effective you're being if you don't know what your goals are.
It is critical to understand how to define requirements in the domain of the client, and to be able map those requirements to the technical execution process.

Change is the only constant. Knowing how to adapt is the key to successful projects.
It is important to understand the likely sources of change, to build variability into the scope of a project, and to control the outcome.

Multidisciplinary excellence is the road to true happiness.
Being able to communicate effectively and with native competence in the creative, technical and business realms is central to managing a modern project.

Focused design is incredibly effective.
Attention is finite, for both developers and users. Keeping an application focused on its most salient elements will deliver a more effective and compelling product.

Agility | Cybernetics | Jeet Kune Do

In the software development game, there is a lot of talk about being agile. It's a set of practices and methodologies that describe a light-weight, flexible, adaptive and reflexive way of doing things.

Really, the concepts are pretty simple and straight forward: It's all about communication, collaboration, feedback and the acceptance of change.

do what works


Back in 2001, a respected group of developers let loose with the Agile Manifesto. This statement increased the visibility of the movement a great deal. Unfortunately, it was also partially responsible for the branding of various Agile (big A) belief systems... and my sense of it is that any sort of dogmatic belief system is a bit counter to the agile mindset.

use the right tools for the job
even if those tools change over time



A consideration of all the various brands and flavors of Agile led me to rethink my own take on agility, both as I practice it in my work environment, and as a conceptual space.

I found that I'd already encountered agility several times in my life, in different arenas of experience. In the foundational theories of cybernetics, from Wiener to von Neumann, I'd seen the theories many times before: a self regulating system that optimizes itself through reliance upon protocols of reflection and feedback. Or, as Louis Couffignal more artfully describes it, cybernetics is "the art of ensuring the efficacy of action."

point
and counter-point

I'd also encountered this modus operandi at an earlier age, and as I thought back, I realized that it was very similar to two of the principle tenets of Jeet Kune Do: be like water, and embrace an economy of motion.

Simple power and graceful elegance, adapting to situations in both mindset and practice - these are the unifying concepts that drew me to the agile way. It's the startling efficacy of the paradigm that keeps me there.