Posts
Adam DrakeIntroduction Sometimes when I’m advising startups the topic of a feature freeze comes up in a variety of contexts. The context I’m referring to is one in which technical debt, poor architecture decisions, and other related issues, have accumulated in a system to the point that it has become seemingly unmanageable. The situation has allegedly become so dire that all new development of features for the business must stop in order to dedicate all developer time and energy to cleaning up the mess. This cleaning up process, which the technical staff often referred to as refactoring, is claimed to require so much effort that no other work can take place.
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read more Adam DrakeIntroduction When leading teams, one of the most important things to keep in mind is to lead from a perspective of wanting the team to grow and improve in order to achieve a higher goal. The biggest part of that is taking care of the people on the team. This can mean things people may typically think of, like supporting and encouraging someone on your team while they pursue their career goals. It can also mean things people typically don’t think of, like firing someone from the team when they aren’t performing since you must continue to look out for the team’s overall welfare and advancement.
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read more Adam DrakeAs part of my advising work, I encounter a plethora of companies. Most of these companies want to begin, improve, or continue initiatives surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Data Science, Data Analytics, or other such labels applied to a project wherein data is used to accomplish some business objectives.
The difficulty is that these labels often serve to obfuscate the true nature of the project in order to make it sound more exciting, and to entice funding from those with the power to grant it. This is a travesty of the greatest degree. This practice intentionally belies the point of the project in the first place, which is not to engage in some AI research, but to build something valuable for the customer and therefore the business.
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read more Adam DrakeIntroduction When I’m asked to spend some time with a startup to help them continue their growth trajectory, by far the most common issues I help to solve are problems relating to leadership. Specifically, I’m usually asked by the investors and/or executive team to work very closely with the technology leadership in order to help them improve their output. The best way to improve output is to improve leadership skills.
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read more Adam DrakeIntroduction When I begin an advising engagement with a client, one of the first things I try to understand is what their top priorities are as an organization. This seems like an obvious step, but there is a subtle difference between what most people say are priorities, and what they actually do when they think they’re setting priorities. This is because people say they prioritize, but they actually categorize.
When most people think of prioritizing, they group things into categories such as important, urgent level 1, urgent level 2, blocker, Q3, and so on. It’s likely that they include multiple items in those categories. In other words, they cluster tasks instead of prioritizing tasks.
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