This summer was a very interesting chapter in my professional career and personal development. I was consuming a lot of materials realted to busienss development, managerial skill, mostly in operations and running systems and AI of course, as this is one of my main interests right now. And I came to realize that the time and energy I am investing in trying to build this community could be spend better elsewhere with more impactful results. With the end of the month, I am considering closing this page. Using a service like Skool has a lot of benefits, one of which is an easy cancellation policy and subscription management. So the logistics will sort themselves out quite easily. The part that won't be so easy is the transition to a new venture. I am not ready to announce it yet, as I am still considering some options. But I am glad I gave this a proper go. Almost 2 years, close to 150 posts, and quite a few workshops. I am happy I was able to grow with it and see how people respond to this kind of content and how I can provide value via it. I guess the main lesson I learned from it is that it is necessesity that drives urgency, which then in terms drives engagement. Managerial or leadership skills are only applied when a true need arises; I guess I needed this community to fully realize it, for which I am grateful to you all. I will keep this page open till the end of the month and post a few thoughts to leave you all with something to ponder; I guess this was always the purpose of those posts. I hope to hear from all of you soon.

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: