Stop Managing Chaos. Start Shipping. Most PMs just track tasks. I build the playbooks that bridge C-Suite strategy with tech execution. The Fluent PM Playbook is where I give you those exact plays. For free.
You are the Good Idea Fairy and it's killing velocity
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The biggest threat to your team's speed isn't a bug. And it isn't technical debt. It's the Good Idea Fairy. And usually, that fairy is you! You walk in on a Wednesday and say, "Hey, can we just make this one quick tweak? It will only take an hour." You think you added 1 hour of work. You actually took away 2 days of velocity. Fluent PM Playbook #23: The Sprint Lock Fix As a Professional Scrum Master (PSM), I enforce the Sprint Lock. When we commit to a 2-week sprint...the scope is locked. Why? Because of the Switching Tax. Every time you interrupt an engineer, it takes them 25 minutes to get back into flow. Your quick tweak breaks the flow of the entire team. My playbook handles your good ideas without killing velocity: The Icebox: I don't say "no." I say, "Great idea. I'm putting it in the Icebox for next sprint." The Trade-Off: If you insist on doing it now, something else must die. "If we add this 'quick tweak,' we have to drop the reporting feature. You choose." If you want your team to be fast, you have to be disciplined. Stop interrupting the sprint. Start respecting the lock. Your good ideas can wait 10 days. Your velocity cannot. You're burning money on "wasted work." You feel the friction, but you can't measure the cost. Stop guessing. I built a 60-second calculator to find the real number.
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Justin K. Peterson, MBA, PSM
Stop Managing Chaos. Start Shipping. Most PMs just track tasks. I build the playbooks that bridge C-Suite strategy with tech execution. The Fluent PM Playbook is where I give you those exact plays. For free.
You just discovered a critical bug in production. You ask your team: "Whose fault is this?" Three people point at the codebase and each other. You are not failing because of bad code -> You are failing because of shared accountability. Fluent PM Playbook #27: The Single-Point Accountability (SPA) Fix In execution, shared responsibility means zero responsibility. It’s a management structure designed for excuses. As a Professional Scrum Master (PSM), my job is to create accountability....
You have a $5 Million idea. Your tech team tells you it will take 9 months and cost $750k to find out if it even works. So you kill the idea. You choose inaction over innovation. You are not failing at innovation...you are failing at risk management. Fluent PM Playbook #26: The 7-Day Profit Test Fix As an MBA and a PSM, my job is to de-risk your big ideas. We don’t build the $750k feature to test a theory. We build a $10k experiment to validate the profit. My playbook: The 7-Day Profit Test....
You just left a strategy meeting. You used words like synergy, disruption and pivot. So what's the problem? Your execution team just heard: "Go waste 5 days figuring out what the boss meant." The space between the boardroom and the backlog is where the budget bleeds. Fluent PM Playbook #24: The Buzzword -> Blueprint Fix As a TEFL-certified communication expert, I don’t let strategy stay abstract. I force it into the Buzzword -> Blueprint formula. A buzzword is a vague wish. A blueprint is an...