Today one of my peers asked for a quick call. He wanted to talk about how he was running a fairly complex workstream with multiple phases and stakeholders. From what I could see, he is doing a good job, so I asked him two questions: 1. Has anyone complained that you dropped a ball in the last two weeks? 2. Did you miss any major deliverable for an external stakeholder? It was a "no" to both. So I told him that he was not failing. Is there room for improvement? Always. But perfect cannot become the enemy of good. If the outcome is what was expected, you are doing well. Sometimes leading your peers means giving them a bit of positive reinforcement. How have you uplifter recently? How could you a bit of your positive energy? Do you need some?

One of the internal tooling teams I work with is only 3 devs strong. A small team, but very easy to work with. We wanted to organize our backlog and have an easy way to say what we delivered at the end of some sort of review cycle. A natural move for a PM is to say → let’s use Agile, and more specifically Scrum. I have to admit that was my initial approach. But then I realized that I would introduce way too much administrative overhead, and not enough leadership through vision, motivation, and the occasional win. So I decided to go with the simplest admin solution: an Epic (or a document if you don't use JIRA) stating the outcome we want at the end of a two-week cycle. Tasks will follow, but the idea is to drive towards the outcome and give the team space to do the real work instead of managing the admin. Let the team have a quick win, help them get momentum. How do you help your team get momentum?

I am dealing with an interesting problem at work - one of my teams is building tools for internal use only, and somehow it got a bad rep even before anyone used it. It got me thinking -> how is that even possible? Two major things in my mind: 1. Lack of clear direction led to 80% of every feature being done, but none of them finished 2. Really poor communication by the dev team to the rest of the org about progress and outcomes. So now it is my job to turn this situation around. How would you do it?

After a few weeks full of AI content, it is time to get back to some more soft skills-related topics. I have a few to start us off:

I've been using AI agents for months, and I want to show you what actually works. We will go through 3 levels - basic automation with LLM, outsourcing meeting management to agents, to full vibe-coding prototypes. The point of the workshop is to showcase what you can do but also to get you thinking about what can be done and how you can start. After this workshop, I'm taking a break from AI content for a bit. There's more to leadership than AI. Thursday, August 13th @ 4–5 pm Vancouver time meet.google.com/cvz-seqs-mbf