When examining real workflow data, there's a common pattern: clusters of tasks that have aged significantly, some clearly stagnating beyond recognition acceptable timeframes. These cases point to one of the most important yet very often overlooked metrics in flow management: WIP Aging. WIP (Work In Progress) Aging measures the elapsed time that a work item has … Continue reading Boosting Efficiency with WIP Aging Insights and Tools
TL;DR: Forecasting team Throughput is super-easy and much more reliable than traditional methods, if you limit your work in Progress. Reliability confirmed by research data. We've already extensively covered Throughput (one of the flow metrics), how to analyze Throughput data from 3 key angles. And why it's better for forecasting than storypoints. Now let's get … Continue reading Monte Carlo Simulation: Forecasting Throughput and Project Timelines
Today we'll talk about Throughput metric. Why is it so important, how to read it's patterns and what to be cautious about. Premise Imagine walking into a bar on a Friday evening, exhausted, and ordering a beer flight. The bartender thinks: “Over the past hour we completed 12 orders; there are 4 in progress; this … Continue reading 3 key data slices to understand your team’s Predictability through Throughput (pun intended).
Over seven years of running Story Points workshops, I've seen the same pattern: teams learn the technique, apply it for a few sprints, then gradually drift back to old habits. At my current scale — 47 teams, around 400 people in IT — 60% use Story Points, 40% don't. What's interesting: those 60% who do … Continue reading 5 Reasons Why Your Story Points Aren’t Working (And What to Do About It)
(Experience from an AI-Based Fintech KYC SaaS Startup Focused on LATAM and Africa) Your regular challenge: When Sales, Marketing and IT Speak Different Languages Our SaaS startup served emerging fast-paced fintech markets (it still is). Speed + compliance were existential. Since most startups live on venture capital with limited runway, every delay in shipping value to the market … Continue reading Product Operations: simple steps to build transparent Feature Pipeline to dramatically lower Lead Time
The startup scene in 2022 and 2023 has been tough. This "Startup Winter" has seen less funding, many layoffs, and startups closing down. The hopeful times of 2020 and 2021, driven by big investments, feel far away now. Add to this the global events and banking decisions, and we're in a tricky spot. I've helped … Continue reading Stop being a “Feature Factory”, you can’t afford it! Shift to Product-Led SaaS with an easy-to-use Feature ROI check
My latest tenure of 2.5 years is closely related to Designing and Adopting Incident Management Framework (as part of Program Management org). This activity was driven with two primary objectives in mind: Reach an uptime of 99.99% , and Ensure engineering knows about any outage first. Establishing the Network Operations Center (NOC) Team is a strategic move to shape a robust system and take charge of Incident Management. I'll talk details about Metrics and KPIs, such as First Time to Respond, Time to Acknowledge, Time to Assemble, Proactive Engineering Detection Rate, Number of Critical False Positives that helped boost the uptime to almost four-nines.
Over the past 2 years, I've been working as Program Management lead at Metamap.com, helping to set up OKR framework among other things. As challenging as just working with OKRs is, we are a distributed team, spanning from PH / SG to the very west coast and even Hawaii 🙂 The common issues we've found … Continue reading Navigating OKR Challenges: Common Pitfalls and Agile Solutions
Hey everyone, here's my list of resources and literature for getting prepped for the PSM II examination. I would be tremendously happy if you share yours 🙂 Sidenote: if you are "certificates are overvalued" type of person - I'd agree. This is especially true when it comes to CSM / PSM I - because that … Continue reading My experience in preparing to PSM II (Professional Scrum Master) certification
Last week me and Alex Pikulev of Agilix recorded Trust Stories podcast episode, on Growing Team Trust in Distributed Teams. Courtesy of In Teams we Trust website https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq82aFap1rc Main bullets are: - Growing trust in distrubited teams is hard, but nevertheless as important as in co-located team. - Team itself creates an atmosphere of trust in itself. … Continue reading Trust Stories – Growing trust in distributed teams (RU)
Marat Kiniabulatov | Agile Coach, OKR, PMO 