It’s Not About You

Too often we get hung up on ourselves. PMs, developers, testers, whomever. We forget, or chose to ignore, the critical fact that we (almost always) do our work for someone else: a stakeholder, a customer, a user.

In a significant number of cases, the person we’re doing our work for may have put their entire career or business on the line. We need to get over ourselves and remember that we’re working to solve a problem, sometimes a crucial one, for those folks.

Instead of focusing on that, too often we get hung up on the stakeholder’s inability to understand technology (developers), think that we’re the final line of death who decides what ships (QA/testers), or get frustrated when the schedule/scope needs to change (PMs).

This deck is something that’s been noodling around in my head for a long time. I finally got my thoughts to Paper on a new iPad I got for work. It’s not perfect, but it sort of lays out my thoughts on this a bit more clearly. I hope you enjoy it!