A little about DeanOnDelivery & the nut behind the keyboard.
TL;DR — Who is Dean Peters? Let’s start with experienced agile product manager, recovering programmer, servant leader, mountain biker, grill master, husband, & Dad with a secret past life as a professional opera singer.
A grizzled veteran of nearly three decades of delivering valuable software, Dean Peters is a product manager and recovering software engineer working across numerous domains and technologies. Passionate and experienced in Agile, Artificial Intelligence, Coaching, Analytics, Cultural Transformation, Mobile, Natural Language Processing, Search, and Team Leadership, Dean offers innovative and out-of-the-box approaches to effectively cut through the chaos and bring people together.
His superpower is servant-leadership that helps teams create effective solutions early and continuously while guarding and growing the underlying culture so critical to long-term success. Dean enjoys spending time with his family, mountain biking, and gardening at scale while currently trying to leverage his secret past life as an opera singer and electronic music composer to launch a product management podcast.
I purchased the DeanOnDelivery.com domain some time ago with good intentions to blog about my experiences in delivering software, not just as a product owner but as someone who spent a couple of decades making a living integrating external devices with computers and databases. Along the way, I was blessed to serve various teams of incredibly bright and talented people along the way.
Put another way; I’ve survived no small number of software projects and lived to tell the story. For example, I’ve been to the land of large waterfall endeavors. Heck, sometimes I was the unfortunate schmuck who was stuffed into a barrel and wished the best luck as I was cast down a Gantt chart of Niagara proportions.
[Speaking of Niagara Falls, did I ever tell you the story about the time I was on the hook for a product demo for a biometric identification integration on the U.S. & Canadian border for the World Games? Yeah, there I was in Maple Leaf territory on the north side of the Rainbow Bridge coding my brains out to get things to work, while a co-worker yelled out how much time I had in the closing distance of oncoming U.S. political big wigs. Good times … but I digress]
So yeah, I’m hoping this little corner of the Interwebs gives me a place to kvetch about how frameworks are killing Agile and how I prefer to dodge disasters born out of BDUF, betting on tiny, incremental experiments instead.
Well, that and I can’t help but be intrigued by areas of technology such as UX, mobile, analytics, NLP/Search, and AI. That … and from time to time … describing how a past secret life as an opera singer has aided me more than once in my current product management pursuits.
So, it is with apologies to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux that I intend to make good on this blog, creating small stories of interest that I hope inspire larger conversations and dialogs of value.
FYI … I really enjoy any questions, comments, and constructive criticism you might offer me here on this blog DeanOnDelivery.com, via Twitter, or LinkedIn. I’m always up for nudging things towards perfection.
Oh, and a really important disclaimer, the opinions I express here are SOLEY my own. They do not reflect any employer, nor social affiliation, nor any individual other than myself. That said, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Tell’m DeanOnDelivery sentcha.
Dean P. — Agile product manager, recovering programmer, servant leader, mountain biker, grill master, husband, & Dad with a secret past life as a professional opera singer.
