Author: jameshthsiao
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Swim, Bike, Run, Agile! PM lessons learned from training for a triathlon
Training for a triathlon wasn’t something I took lightly. Between mastering swim form, bike mechanics, and long-distance running, I quickly learned that success in endurance sports requires more than physical strength—it demands planning, adaptability, and relentless iteration. It wasn’t long before I saw the connection to my professional life. As a product manager, the two…
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From Chaos to Clarity: How I Rebuilt a Broken Agile Workflow
When I transitioned from engineering to project management, I thought I had a decent grasp of Agile. I’d sat through sprint reviews, added tickets to Jira, and even debated the finer points of story points versus hours. But nothing prepared me for inheriting a team buried in chaos. The devs were smart. The product was…
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Lesson Unlearn in the Path to PM
When I started my career as a software engineer, I was deep in the code—debugging, optimizing, and shipping features. I loved solving problems, but over time, I found myself more curious about why we were building things, who we were building them for, and how our decisions impacted the bigger picture. That curiosity ultimately led…
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Simplifier vs Optimizer
Are You a Simplifier or an Optimizer? Do you optimize every minute to squeeze the most out of each day, or do you search for the easiest path to get a task done? In his book How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams explores this balance, which raises an interesting question:…
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How to make the most out of your Sprint Retro
In every Sprint, the team isn’t just iterating on the product—it’s also refining how they work together. A powerful opportunity to assess and improve collaboration and processes is the Sprint Retrospective. So, how can you make the most of this valuable checkpoint? Building a Blameless, Constructive Culture In a productive retro, the team reflects on:…
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The Art of Kaizen
Kaizen a Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement of working practices, personal efficiency, etc. Kaizen, encourages us to optimize our processes, efficiency, and practices over time. In our last post, we discussed the inevitable accumulation of tech debt as a product scales and explored ways to prioritize addressing it. Now, let’s look at actionable steps…
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Prioritizing Tech Debts
A tale as old as time – the engineering team is racing against the clock, developing features with the understanding that certain aspects will be “fixed or improved upon” later. These well-intentioned @todo comments and tech debt markers accumulate over time, sidelined in favor of immediate goals. Then, as new technologies make parts of the codebase obsolete…
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Will the real Status Update please “Stand-Up”
As a manager or developer, we’ve all been there—slogging through stand-up meetings that were supposed to be short and efficient but ended up stretching far beyond their intended time. Ideally, a stand-up should distribute information quickly, discuss blockers, and outline clear next steps. But often, these meetings drift, consuming precious time. Are they status updates,…
PM Perspective 