Talks at Google
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2021–2026
1:04:31 · 441K views · Apr 6, 2016
Eric Brechner, a Microsoft Xbox development manager, presents his Kanban approach for agile project management at Talks at Google. He covers using sticky notes to organize work, estimate and meet deadlines.
Recommended as a clear description of how Kanban works and a practical alternative to sprints.
3 comments from Hacker News
I mean, Switzerland and North Korea both call themselves democracies but the specifics matter. The specifics matter! These discussions are always fascinating in a sort of baffling way to me because I've only had great experiences with what I call agile. Like, you bring it into the team and within months everyone is gushing about how much better life is now. Yet threads like this one are full of people reporting awful experiences. Apparently whatever it is they're doing involves a lot of meetings and little actual flexibility? The deeply unexpected thing about that, to me, is, if they hate some parts of the process, why are they keeping them? Every team and every business is different and you have to iterate to arrive at whatever will work best for you. That's possibly the one most important point, IMO. Dropping the things that don't work is a key part of that! Eric Brechner of Microsoft (of all possible places...) gives a great talk on his team's approach, and I've had good experiences using it as a starting point: this video But again, every team is different. Even the greatest possible theoretical approach is only a starting point. And like with Switzerland vs North Korea, I guess the key thing is how much ownership of the process those subjected to it have?
If you're interested learning more about Kanban, I thing Eric Brechner does a great job of describing it - this video
I always wonder why most implementation of kamban use only one column per step, instead of two as explained by Eric Brechner. this video