When launching this series of Tales, I decided to publish a new Tale every Tuesday and Thursday. Usually I write them well in advance, but the last couple of days I spent in bed with fever, feeling totally exhausted. My mind was empty and the only thing I could think about was my illness. Here’s why I decided to write about not feeling great. And how this is by no means a reason to postpone a release.
My team and I demonstrate our results to the company on a regular basis. We call it a ‘demo’. The demo is a…
Product owners and their development teams always face the same problem: the product owner advocates for new features, while the developers demand time for refactoring. The technical part often gets neglected, causing technical debt to pile up. The problem, however, is not in the harsh reality of the business world, but in the programmers’ inability to manage the technical backlog properly. Their backlog usually consists of tasks like “To refactor a controller.” The value of such tasks is not obvious to the product owner. Here are the key principles of turning scrappy tasks into a proper backlog:
- VALUE. Tasks need…
You most probably know how credit cards work. You take out a loan from a bank for whatever reason and you are given a grace period of a month or two to pay back the money you owe. If you fail to pay back within the grace period, you will be charged interest, which increases like a snowball as it is rolled on.
It’s the same with technical debt. You’re rushing to release new product features, while taking out a loan from your “future self”. It’s OK at the beginning, but after a while, it starts bothering you. Eventually, it…
Some years ago, my team and I accumulated a huge technical debt, which has completely paralyzed the development of our product. Any change to the product was taking weeks to implement and resulted in multiple errors. The team lost motivation, conflicts began to arise. The retrospective meetings weren’t helping either. The product development almost stopped, and business representatives were getting more and more concerned about the situation. The question arose: Who is to blame? …
My relative used to work for a community centre during the Soviet times. Most of her working hours she spent drinking tea in the reception area. Once she surprised me with a quote from a gun manual, which she knew by heart: “The trigger pushes the sear bar of the lock up until the sear pawl disengages from the full-cock notch and allows the tumbler and hammer to rotate forward, firing the gun. She told me that every year she had to pass the firearm proficiency exam. I was shocked and asked how often she gets to use a fire…
At SEMrush, the development teams do all the hiring and firing themselves. Over the past years, I have had the pleasure of working with two teams. One of them was good at firing and lived a happy life. The other one wasn’t and they experienced lots of technical and personal issues. Bad employees paralyze work. They write a bad code, which remains a real pain in the neck even after they leave. They make the team’s existence unbearable. Sometimes, it takes firing one person to save the entire team and the product.
People are afraid of firing their colleagues: “But…
My team has recently taken over a new product. In 3 months, we had to find, hire and train a whole new team to replace us: a manager, 2 back- and 2 frontend developers, and a QA specialist. Interviewing and hiring staff is a basic skill that every member of the product team should have. Here are some of our tips:
- Write the job descriptions yourself. Use a simple language to portray your product. Do not trust HR to do it unless you want a standard corporate text that sounds pretty boring.
- Invite for an interview only those candidates who…
To attend our Global Marketing Day conference, users were asked to fill in a form to register. After that, they received an email with a link to confirm the registration. However, we started receiving complaints that the registration link was broken. Both QA and the development team looked into this, but couldn’t find where the problem was. So I found all users who complained about the broken link and looked at their session logs in more detail. It turned out they all started the registration on desktop and then tried completing it on mobile. …
There are two approaches to training boxers. The first one, which I call the “Soviet” approach, starts with grasping the technique. Children are drilled for years, learn how to punch properly, and sharpen their boxing skills. The “American” approach, on the other hand, takes into account the individual characteristics of a boxer. A newbie boxer is invited to fight in the boxing ring, while the coach assesses his main strengths that will be built upon. Both approaches have proven effective in giving rise to great boxers, but the American approach tends to have quicker results.
In 2011, I had 15…
Over the last year I have experienced several planned hospital admissions, both for myself and with my mother. I had the opportunity to compare 3 public hospitals and one private hospital. Let’s talk about the actual admission process. In public hospitals, you are first asked to queue in the admission area. It then turns out you’re waiting in the wrong line and have to go to the next one. Then you find out something is wrong with your insurance certificate, so you need to go elsewhere to fix it. You end up running from one room to another, trying to…
Aleks Ritov
Product Owner at SEMrush, a former startup CEO and Chief Experience Officer. http://ritov.com
