Allen Holub, Discover and Read the Best of Twitter Threads by @allenholub

Allen Holub

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I really don't like the UX notion of a "persona." Personas are not people. They're a trap that lures you into thinking that you understand a customer when, in fact,

The reason for decisions to happen at the team level is agility plain and simple. This applies even to strategic decisions, which are best made collaboratively at the executive-team (they

"Working software is the primary measure of progress" is an enabling constraint. Sometimes, managers use the phrase as a club to get people coding. Coding, however, is a necessary driver

I'm really dubious about componenents shared between products. The notion of a universal reusable component is really a failed one. Those sorts of things are usually vastly more complex than

A week or so into my first CTO gig (I was brought in to help rescue a failing startup), a team returned from a trip to the customer where they

I feel like stoking some outrage this morning from the corporate "in the real world" folks: I'm a big fan of Lean thinking. However, I sometimes wonder if we need

Some thoughts about product owners. First, it's best to have one PO per product, not per team. Otherwise you have a cacophony of conflicting decisions with no coherence. The teams

Taking a cue from epidemiologists, it might be a good thing abandon the notion of "forecasts" and "estimates" in software and talk, instead, about models. A model is a dynamic

Let's look at how to write a good story by looking at a bad one. "As a user I need to save so that I won't lose my work" is

The notion of a user story is pretty simple. A user story is, literally, a story (using the standard dictionary definition of the word). It describes your end users performing

Some open-source math:round( OSProjectsThatWork / TotalOSProjects ) == 0; By "work" I mean work well out of the box, have all essential functionality, can be configured easily w/o an 800-page