Sketchnotes from Agile 2015

[This post is one of many sparked by Agile 2015.] Note taking helps me to stay focused on a presentation or meeting. I used to produce loads of  densely scribbled sheets that I never looked at again, because I couldn’t find the pertinent points anyway. For Agile 2015 I decided to go the extra mile …

Wall-Skills: Design the Box, Japanese Terms in Lean, User Stories, less +F

Recent 1-pagers on Wall-Skills.com: Is the vision for your product rather fuzzy? Design the box is an awesome technique to bring clarity and focus. If you’re in a Scrum environment you’ll might encounter Lean at one point. Here’s a vocab cheat sheet: Japanese Terms in Lean User Stories in a nutshell 1 page Does your …

3 Horizons, find, Coaching Cards – 1-Pagers

New 1-pagers on Wall-Skills.com during February 2015: Are you sometimes stuck as a PO or Scrum master? Geoff Watts created Coaching Cards with questions meant to “unstuck” you. Get a feeling for them here: Product Owner Coaching Cards Scrum Master Coaching Cards But that’s not all, here’s more: 3 Horizons – Consider future innovations in …

Mini Design Studio, Simplicity Rules, INVEST, Sprint Goal – 1-Pagers

There are a couple of new 1-pagers I created for Wall-Skills.com: A Mini Design Studio is a short workshop to design single elements such as a graphical interface, short text, etc. It’s useful for product teams that jointly want to shape their product’s face. Simplicity is 1 of 5 core values in eXtreme Programming, but …

The Sketchnote Handbook

Taking notes during presentations helps me stay focused and to remember the content. Visual notetaking aka sketchnoting is more fun and the result is more interesting to others. If you’ve never tried sketchnoting, check out “the sketchnote handbook” for a head start. The book practises what it preaches and is very visually engaging. I especially …

Clean Questions and the Power of Metaphors

A year ago I blogged about Non-Violent Communication as a means to avoid judgement and find needs. Now I think I found something even more radical (once again via Andrea Chiou): Clean Questions / Clean Language. With Clean Language, not only do you forego judgement, you don’t even offer interpretations. It’s a bit like the …

The Power of Habit – Book Tip

When the insanely insightful Amy Hoy is smitten with a book, I read it. And “The Power of Habit” did not disappoint! It’s an entertaining journey through cases that helped scientists uncover how habits (and willpower) work and how you can change them. Understanding why and how our automatic actions play out is highly important, …