Scope Creep

Some of the best developers I've worked with were quietly convinced they weren't very good.

Somewhere along the way, transparency became a PM virtue nobody's allowed to question. Share everything. Keep the team in the loop. Let them see the whole picture.

The thing I couldn't find when I started was a straight, practical list of what actually needs deciding, in what order, written by someone who had done it rather than someone selling translation services.

You were hired because you know how to run things, so it feels like the job starts on day one, ideally with a process improvement and a new tool by Friday.

"I know there's no spec yet, but can you just give me a rough number?"

It was built in week one, shared in the kick-off deck, saved in the project folder, and it has not been opened since.

There's a genre of LinkedIn post that always does well: things PMs say versus what they actually mean.

I chose a words job with a brain that charges me a toll on words. Here's what that's actually like, where it started, and the one opinion about it that tends to surprise people.

The estimates are exhumed and examined, and the strange thing is, they were mostly fine.

New series, same rules as the books. Online courses need a "worth finishing" filter even more than books do, because course completion rates are legendarily dire, and because "free course" usually means one of two things: a genuinely free course, or a trailer for a paid one wearing a mortarboard.

I have a complicated relationship with reading. Always have. I'm dyslexic.

In an earlier article about learning from bad managers, one line kept coming back to me afterwards: if people only ever report good news to you, you have built a reporting system that manufactures surprises.

Learning the job is partly learning this language, and nobody hands you the dictionary.

The corporate version says stay in your lane, the hustle version says ask forgiveness not permission, but there's a third way.

Google Fonts is a library of over 1,500 typefaces, of which roughly 40 are worth your time

Project management books are about work: why it's late, where it queues, what it actually costs, and why adding help makes it worse.

A web development book earns its place only if it survives contact with the current platform and changes what you actually write on Monday.