Book update for the New Year’s resolution:
I’m reading, in parallel, three books. It’s not the best way to nail one book per month, but I’m really enjoying it because the context switch keeps the content of each book fresh. Here’s where I am with all three:
Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business – 100 pages to go, and we’re starting to apply a lot of this to our design and product development process. Not overly explicitly yet, but we’re understanding WIP, the amount that can be delivered in a sprint, and I’m mentally creating the stages for projects. From there, we’ll want to start telling the story of how it all works, and there are some good folks helping me out with that.
Above the Fold: Understanding the Principles of Successful Web Site Design – This one I’m about halfway through. It’s not a lot of new content, but some good examples of existing best practices. Useful to read, but not really a life changer like the Kanban book.
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days – I need to dive back into this guy. I’m only 25 or so pages in (PayPal’s Max Levchin, and the founder of Hotmail). I didn’t realize how much the Hotmail guys hated their VCs. A lot of lessons to be learned in this one.
And so the resolution is slightly revised to be reading 12 books this year. But other than that, I’m on course!