27 articles in Project Management
Linear challenged the dominance of Jira by building an opinionated, lightning-fast project management tool. This case study examines how co-founder Karri Saarinen applied design principles from his time at Airbnb and Coinbase to create a tool that developers actually enjoy using, and how saying no to feature requests became a competitive advantage.
A practical guide to setting up incident management processes from scratch, including roles, communication templates, and severity levels.
The foundational principles for building software-as-a-service applications that are portable, scalable, and maintainable across modern cloud platforms.
Why continuous integration is the single most impactful practice for software delivery performance, and how to implement it properly beyond just running a CI server.
How Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) capture the context, options, and rationale behind technical decisions, creating institutional memory that survives team changes.
How to design systems that gracefully handle failures — circuit breakers, retries, timeouts, bulkheads, and chaos engineering — because in distributed systems, failure is not an exception but the norm.
The shift to remote work exposed a hidden assumption: that most communication needs to happen in real time. Asynchronous communication — messages that do not expect an immediate response — protects deep work, respects timezone differences, creates documentation by default, and produces more thoughtful responses. This article provides a framework for deciding what should be synchronous versus asynchronous, tools and practices for effective async work (long-form writing, Loom videos, structured RFC processes), and guidance for managing the cultural shift from always-on to async-first.
A guide to the RFC (Request for Comments) process for engineering teams, including when to write one, what to include, how to get useful feedback, and how to make decisions.
The planning fallacy is the systematic tendency to underestimate time, costs, and risks while overestimating benefits, affecting over 85% of projects across all industries. Flyvbjerg's analysis of thousands of projects shows that optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation together cause average cost overruns of 28% in IT and 45% in infrastructure. Reference class forecasting, which bases estimates on outcomes of similar past projects rather than inside-view planning, reduces overruns by 50% or more.
Outlines best practices for facilitating sprint retrospectives that generate genuine insights and actionable improvements. Covers multiple retrospective formats—start/stop/continue, 4Ls, sailboat—and techniques for creating psychological safety so team members share honestly.
Analysis of why software projects fail based on decades of industry research. The top causes: unclear requirements (cited in 40% of failures), lack of executive support, poor planning, scope creep, and inadequate testing. Smaller projects succeed 3x more often than large ones. Covers strategies for improving success rates: iterative delivery, user involvement, clear scope.
Basecamp's alternative to Scrum and Kanban. Instead of sprints, use six-week cycles with two-week cooldowns. Shape work before building: define the appetite (time budget), narrow the problem, and design at the right level of abstraction. Small batch vs. big batch projects. Gives teams full autonomy within fixed time constraints. Influential in startup and product circles.
The sunk cost fallacy causes organizations to continue investing in failing projects because of prior investments rather than future value, wasting an estimated 15-20% of total project budgets. Psychological factors including ego investment, organizational commitment, and loss framing make rational project termination nearly impossible without structural interventions. The article provides specific mechanisms including kill criteria established at project inception, independent review boards, and rotation of project owners to overcome escalation of commitment.
Provides a practical guide to identifying and categorizing project stakeholders using a power/interest grid. Explains how to develop tailored communication and engagement strategies for each stakeholder group to build support and minimize resistance.
A practical guide to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), the goal-setting framework popularized by Andy Grove at Intel and adopted by Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Uber. Covers how to write good objectives (qualitative, inspirational) and key results (quantitative, measurable), cadence (quarterly), and common mistakes (too many OKRs, using as performance review tool).
How organizations like Amazon, Spotify, and Bosch have scaled agile methods from a few teams to hundreds. Covers common pitfalls (imposing agile on everything, trying to scale too fast), and successful patterns (start with leadership teams, sequence rollout by capability). By Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum.
Presents a categorization of risks into preventable, strategic, and external types, each requiring different management approaches. Provides a practical framework for building risk management processes that go beyond compliance checklists to genuinely protect project outcomes.
Comprehensive guide to adopting agile methods. Agile started in software but now applies to manufacturing, marketing, HR, and C-suite strategy. Covers the conditions where agile works best (complex problems, uncertain requirements, creative solutions), how to start (begin with a pilot), and six practices of agile: lean staffing, small empowered teams, short cycles, active involvement, daily standups, rapid iteration.
Tabrizi's research reveals that 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional, failing on at least three of five critical criteria including meeting planned budgets and staying on schedule. The article identifies the governance structures, accountability mechanisms, and leadership behaviors that separate the successful 25% from the rest.
Surveys estimation techniques used in software projects, from planning poker and story points to probabilistic methods like Monte Carlo simulation. Fowler argues that the goal of estimation is not precision but enabling better decisions about scope, schedule, and resource allocation.