it’s pointless to look for evil people; look instead for evil systems.

The idea behind the Backlog is that it should have everything that could possibly be included in the product. You’re never going to actually build it all, but you want a list of everything that could be included in that product vision. The key, though, is what you decide to do first. The questions you need to ask are: what are the items that have t

As I’ve said before, I’m not very interested in individual performance; I’m only interested in team performance. I can double a team’s productivity in a month, but an individual? That could take a year. And a whole bunch of individuals? A whole division? A whole company? That could take forever. So I use transparency to focus on improving the team.

Psychologists, including Harvard’s Ben-Shahar, say that one way to analyze how people approach the world is by asking whether what they’re doing makes them happy today, and whether it will make them happier tomorrow.

People assume that if everyone else is going along with something, their own reservation is silly or misinformed, and they don’t want to look stupid in front of the group. Remember, this groupthink isn’t an individual failure; this is a human failure. In the literature this effect has been explained as an “informational cascade.” As Sushil Bikhchan