Staffan Nöteberg's Blog

Rigid performance targets often derail adaptability in a turbulent marketplace. The Guiding Star OKR model offers a framework for creating shared strategic direction, ensuring employee actions across the organization are aligned for success.

Our CTO George’s team meeting is a fortnightly gathering of the heads of the Project Management Office (PMO), product, and strategy, as well as our agile coach. The C...

While it may not be possible for a human to have a friendship with a gadget in the traditional sense, the kitchen timer can sometimes support you remarkably well in achieving your goals. This might be especially true when the kitchen timer is red and round — eventually shaped like a tomato.

Good friends understand and share each other’s feelings, offering support and compassion during difficult times. They know what it feels like...

A Large Language Model (LLM), like ChatGPT, generates synthesized text based on statistical inference . You may think of that processing as the average or the most frequent value in its training dataset — wherever that dataset came from. How does the LLM approach differ from human intelligence? Well, I asked ChatGPT seven questions.

[Staffan] A company seeks advice from an LLM regarding their CEO recruitment. Imagine that the LLM’s response, based on statis...

I have a secret that I want to share with you. It reveals how I achieved my most valuable successes. Everyone wants to be successful, don’t they? Suppose you have a math assessment coming up next week. I can imagine that you want to feel confident that you can apply the techniques and rules needed to do well in the assessment.

You may live in Beijing, Shanghai, or some other city in the great country of China. Although I live in Stockholm, on the other side of th...

A/B testing is becoming increasingly popular in digital product development. Early feedback on the choice of direction may save you a lot of time and money. However, be careful about drawing too far-reaching conclusions from your test results.

Imagine that for one day we let 5% of our retail’s online customers test a new feature. We notice that those who have the new feature (the test group) spend...

The message of a forthcoming pervasive Agile Transformation may not be well received by employees. Lessons learned indicate that more agility is not what to expect — despite the name. However, more often, there are opportunities for anyone in our organization to influence the outcome of these change projects.

After more than 50 employee interviews, the consult...

A remarkably influential book was written in 1973. Half a century later, in 2023, it has essentially been forgotten. Not only did Alan Lakein’s How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life sell over 3 million copies, it also outlined the main characteristics of Pomodoro and GTD, as well as most other recent productivity methods.

In my research for Monotasking, I f...

It’s easy to get rid of things when there is an obvious reason for doing so. It’s much more difficult when there is no compelling reason.

Marie Kondō has taught us to throw away all the things from the past that no longer contribute to our lives. One example is the tasks we have promised to carry out but will probably never have time for. Our to-do list — in scrum called the product backlog —...

Between 2008 and 2015, Volkswagen’s engineering teams intentionally and repeatedly tampered with the emissions of car engines in laboratory tests. On the road, the vehicles emitted up to forty times more nitrogen oxides. A pithy observation that seems to contain a general truth comes to mind:

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” ( quote from unknown )

Agile influencers go one step further when they say that if we get the culture right, pret...

“ That gum you like is going to come back in style ,” the elderly room service waiter ( ) famously said in episode 16 of the 1990s TV series Twin Peaks. This line is not only game-changing for the plot, but it also predicts the emergence of a reaptive event.

We all know that some features need adaptation to be fit for purpose. You may also know that innovation is often the outcome of exaptation. However, we often forget that reaptation is a third way to ...