General

So today, exhaustion somehow kicked in. In combination of finishing one big chunk of work and now I have to deal with 4-5 smaller topics where a top priority doesn't exist isn't the best setup.

The biggest issue so far is that freaking IKEA (Germany) was not able to get me my new chair. Why? Because their online shop didn't had my house number only street name. Like how is this even possible? I don't even remember not putting it in. My guess is that I used Safari auto-fill and somehow it forgot to add the number.

Yet, this is not the first time I experience a really shitty customer experience with Ikea. The only advantage they have is speed. Due to corona they can't guarantee this (it took them almost 2 weeks to ship + delivery and then I got informed of missing address details. 😡)

Any recommendations? I will have a look to Wayfair, Home24 and others. Maybe this will be the moment when Ikea lost me completely.

Work

Had a nice 1on1 as usual with my Lead. Some chatting, some issues and as usual he helped me organize a bit my mind.

I can't thank him enough for having this clear mindset and always finding the asking the right question. It surprises me each time.🤩

I think it is related to the fact that I'm not as good in this questioning. Maybe because of human bias or missing knowledge 😃

So big Kudos to him.

Other than that, we are changing our Scrum Refinement Meetings to 3 small blocks and agreed that for now our Product Manager will share 1-2 days before the Meeting the new Topics. This is needed for now as we are still a relatively new team and we are all dealing with a different code base. One none of us worked the last years.

TIL

The learning I had is that a lot of people, from developers to managers, don't understand the idea behind agility (agile manifesto). Again, I heard how people have the following argument:

Me: Where did this topic comes from? I never heard before
Other: It was discussed in "Round X" and we decided it is now important until date X.
Me: Ok, having a new topic is fine, but why do we have this deadline?
Other: It was agreed that the whole company needs to do until that date.
Me: Yeah, doing it in parallel is fine but why this artificial deadline creating pressure?
Other: Come on, we are agile, we should accept constant change and be open.

Stop it.

Changing Focus is part of "being agile". Using "agile" as an excuse for top-down driven roadmaps, artificial deadlines is not part of it.

I plan (short-term), I develop, I measure and I iterate. The truth is, you're not agile when top-down changes to roadmaps, team sprints is happening. "Agile Project Managers" for me is a big smell for Top-Down.

I can accept some planning but this I can't.

Recommending Videos:

• Robert C. Martin (uncle bob) about "Future of Programming"
• 3X Model from Kent Beck
• Agile is Dead by Dave Thomas

These 3 videos are a great introduction into todays problems.

Cheers,

Ferit