Scrum pep talk

I took two days of training for Scrum product owners. At the end of some excellent training the trainer said, "We're going to send you a certificate that says you're a certified Scrum product owner. Take that certificate and put it on the wall. It doesn't entitle you to tell anyone anything. It will be there to remind you that you don't know anything yet, you really don't. But it's your job to learn everything you can and put it into practice."

That's the kind of pep talk people need to hear when they get a "certification."

Listening to customers pays off - really

People (like myself) who practice user-centered design spend an inordinate amount of time preaching to and pleading with various gatekeepers in companies to bring customers into the design process. There's always a dozen excuses why it can't be done: "too expensive," "the customers can't design," "they don't want to be bothered," etc. etc. etc. Sometimes I think the gatekeepers just don't want to know how unappealing/unusable/unwanted the company's products are.

So it's a pleasure to read stories where some young gun has put the advice into practice and is rewarded appropriately. This is so easy to do and so rewarding, yet so few companies do it well.

Consistency <> Copying

I told someone recently that I was working on a project to improve consistency among some web-based applications. Their response was, paraphrased, "It's boring when everything looks the same." And that's true, it is boring when everything looks the same. And even harmful, if the things that "look the same" behave in different ways or mean different things. Useful consistency comes from an agreed-upon set of rules for presentation and what that presentation means. If the layout of two pages are the same, it's done for a explicit reason. If the layouts are different, that's for an explicit reason.

I think I need to find another word besides "consistency," since nearly everyone I talk to understands it to mean "look the same."