Over the years, I’ve written a lot about the Agile methodology on this blog. For those of you who are regular readers, you may remember a post I wrote about our Agile Everywhere initiative— where all Return Path teams were tasked with implementing agile practices. A little over a year later, I want to update you on our agile journey–where we are now and how we got there. My colleague Cathy Hawley (our head of People) will write a more detailed series of guest posts for those of you who want to get more details of our transformation process. Before we started our Agile Everywhere initiative, only our product and engineering teams were using agile. The rest of the organization…
Archives / August, 2017
The Value and Limitations of Pattern Recognition
My father-in-law, who is a doctor by training but now a health care executive, was recently talking about an unusual medical condition that someone in the family was fighting. He had a wonderful expression he said docs use from time to time: When you hear hoof beats, it’s probably horses. But you never know when it might be a zebra. With experience (and presumably some mental wiring) comes the ability to recognize patterns. It’s one of those things that doesn’t happen, no matter how smart you are, without the passage of time and seeing different scenarios play out in the wild. It’s one of the big things that I’ve found that VC investors as Board members, and independent directors, bring…