February 2025 Recap: Trends, Conversations, and Reader Responses

We’ve made it through another month of 2025, which means it’s time to look back the previous month and reflect on:

1. Trends I see across clients
2. Conversations with practitioners
3. Responses to the past month’s newsletters from readers like you

If you missed the start of this series, you can check out the recap from January.

Trends I see across clients
There is generally a strong push to start initiatives in Q1, although across practically all of my clients, I’m seeing this manifest itself as a spectrum of shipping things to borderline burnout.

At the meta level, there are two contributing factors:

• Commitments are made to increase the number of initiatives or scope of an initiative
• There’s not enough time in the day for specific people

To mitigate these:

1. Organizations need to embrace tangibly defining what their goals are and ensuring that everyone knows what those are and how they contribute
2. Teams need to be strict and ruthless about what initiatives are advancing those goals
3. Leaders need to right-sizing the allocation of their resources to those initiatives

Unfortunately, this is an area where systems can demonstrate where issues exist, but they can’t solve the hard problem that is “what to do”.

Conversations with practitioners
A few weeks ago, I hosted my first executive roundtable for CEOs and COOs. Leading up to the event, I polled the folks ahead of time to understand which areas they were interested in diving into.

We landed on these topics:

1. Cultivating and managing culture
2. Acquiring, building, and retaining talent
3. Experimentation versus focus

Even with cutting edge technologies, there still exists differing opinions about how and when to gather people together in a digital or collocated setting.

Concisely, my opinion is the future of work will be increasingly:

• Transparent and asynchronous
• Collocated for important moments and milestones, otherwise remote
• Blended between action-oriented, full-time staff with high impact solo or boutique firms

I’ll save the insights from the last topic (experimentation versus focus) for a later newsletter.

Responses to the past month’s newsletters
A huge motivator for writing this newsletter is to strike up conversations about topics to push our own boundaries, while also seeing our worlds through different perspectives.

This past month, y’all have been a bit lighter on responses, yet the discussions have centered around estimating capacity, projects and work, and allocations.

One of the readers responded to the newsletter about estimating capacity with his experience of using story points and t-shirt sizes while adopting Agile practices in their engineering organization.

I remarked in the next newsletter (about estimating projects and work) that “all of [those] are nonsensical”. Perhaps, this is a bit harsh.

The important takeaway is to find something that works for your organization, even if it doesn’t align with my perspective.

Thank you for being a subscriber 🙏🏼 I hope you’re on the way to a fun start to your weekend!

P.S. If you know someone in your network that is struggling to balance how their systems and business processes work, I’d love for you to forward this along to them.

I am actively growing my practice and will hop on a call to hear where they are and point them in the right direction, including to folks within my network that can help them.