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Your team isn’t slow. It’s leaking time.
Eight ways work leaks time — Lean calls them DOWNTIME. Once you can name them, you can’t stop seeing them.
Jun 6
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Zac Beckman
1
1
May 2026
Can you rely on SAFe to deliver elite-performer gains?
The cadence got shorter; the shape didn’t change: SAFe is what happens when you keep the waterfall org chart, rename the meetings and run a PI Planning…
May 28
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Zac Beckman
2
1
Good product team / bad product team
Marty Cagan’s good-team / bad-team list is a decade old and still the cleanest mirror in the business. Pin it to your wall. Ask yourself how many strike…
May 21
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Zac Beckman
1
Pull requests are a symptom of low trust: here’s the fix
T*D is the new name for the Playbook trifecta: Test-Driven Development, Trunk-Based Development and Team-Focused Development, fused into one operating…
May 16
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Zac Beckman
2
1
Ask your team how to make this worse
A 30-minute workshop called TRIZ turns a comedy round into a confession booth — the most valuable half-hour you’ll spend this quarter.
May 7
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Zac Beckman
2
1
April 2026
Product teams really do outperform: bringing the receipts
Researchers at DORA, McKinsey and Google have spent a decade proving what good engineers already know. It’s time to put that knowledge into practice.
Apr 30
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Zac Beckman
2
1
Your AI is not your mentor
Use it relentlessly for code tutoring. But the formation work — being seen, stretched and told the truth — has to come from a person.
Apr 29
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Zac Beckman
3
1
3.7 Elaboration
Elaboration takes your specifications from skeleton to sprint-ready, fully fleshed out across every layer at which the system is tested — and…
Apr 28
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Zac Beckman
2
1
Microsoft’s collaboration stack breaks every rule of a modern delivery toolkit
How SharePoint will sink your project: hidden pitfalls that suck the life out of teams. It’s getting worse, not better.
Apr 27
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Zac Beckman
2
March 2026
When to go waterfall
If you're working in a multi-modal organization you'll find this helpful: the canonical waterfall / agile decision tree.
Mar 24
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Zac Beckman
2
1
Observability as architecture: why you can’t bolt it on later
Most teams treat observability like a nice-to-have. They’re building blind — and paying for it in ways they can’t even see.
Mar 13
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Zac Beckman
2
1
How waterfall is wrong for software
We've known for decades waterfall and software don't mix; why do we keep doing it?
Mar 8
•
Zac Beckman
2
2
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