21 product development tips from the trenches

Over the past four years at Metro we have delivered one replatform, four redesigns, multiple native apps and built and sold an online casino. From these experiences we have iteratively built a process and environment that aids product development. An Agile mindset has helped the development team achieve a consistent output. This coupled with Lean […]

Communication and trust are the foundation of high performing teams

High performing teams can achieve unbelievable performance multipliers over sets of like minded individuals. I have spent the last few years working on building high performing teams and from this experience I have found the foundation of high performance is communication and trust. It takes time It is hard to get communication right within a […]

Heidi Rozen: It’s the business model, stupid

Heidi Rozen gave a great talk at the DMGT Technology Summer School simply titled “Failure”. A Silicon Valley Alumni she has started companies, worked for Apple under Steve Jobs and now is involved in Venture Capital so she had her fair share of stories. I was really impressed with her perspective on development and seemed […]

Wendy Lea from Get Satisfaction on Customer Driven Development

Wendy Lea the CEO of Get Satisfaction gave a presentation at the DMGT Technology Summer School on “The voice of the customer”. There were some great points on how they have infused passion for their customers into a customer driven development process. As their business is based completely on capturing customer feedback it was great […]

Strategic Perspectives from Bill Raduchel

I had the pleasure of spending some time at the DMGT Technology Summer School with Bill Raduchel. He had a long and interesting career before joining DMGT as a technology advisor to the board. I managed to capture some of his advice below and a couple of quotes which resonated well with me. “Heroism is an […]

How Metro built a metrics driven product development process

I have spent the last three years at Metro constantly tweaking our development process to fit our environment and teams maturity. At the same time the product development process had remained reasonably unchanged. Someone comes up with an idea we all have a debate about how good/bad we think it will be and someones opinion […]

22 tips for managing successful Agile projects

In the past year I have run two large successful agile projects that have delivered software using the Scrum methodology to build a minimum viable product (MVP) and then transitioned to Kanban once they have gone live. The first one was the Metro.co.uk responsive redesign and CMS migration which was delivered on time and under budget. […]

How to use Atlassian Jira with Greenhopper to manage multiple Backlogs

At Metro our development project has multiple product owners who each have their own backlog and want to prioritise them separately using Greenhopper’s drag and drop interface. We didn’t want to create multiple projects to enable this and Greenhopper’s multiple backlogs support for a single project is something that had previously eluded me. Ade Shokoya who was our business […]