Lessons from being a stay-at-home dad

Call it a lesson learned. My son is almost 10 months old, and all my notions about how I’d blog about my experiences as a stay-at-home dad have come to naught. But that’s okay. Though I haven’t been writing all my experiences down, I’ve still been learning alongside my little future changemaker. Here are a few thoughts:

1. Don’t ask your friends on Facebook for advice about anything. You’ll get tons of advice, often contradictory, and start an online parenting war between your friends. Trust me. Just research it yourself and talk to your pediatrician.
2. Think you’re going to have time to catch up on all those projects around the house? To re-organize your garage? Or finally create the garden of your dreams? Think again. I’m still waiting for my son to have some periods of relatively predictable sleep.
3. Cut yourself some slack. With a baby, the pace of life is different from what you’re used to in the corporate world. However, it is still just as draining and complicated to get things done. Don’t be hard on yourself when you can’t get every single thing done.
4. It’s okay to go back to work. Even as I fall more deeply in love with my son every day, I still recognize that I have an abiding passion for agile coaching. Just because I get help to look after him, it doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped looking out for his well-being. It’s just another way of helping him (and me) grow.

That’s it for now. My next post will probably be on some agile topic. I’ve got a few things that have been brewing in my head that I need to get out…

Scrum Product Owner Analogy

My mind took a tangent today while I was coaching someone on the role of the Product Owner in Scrum. Let me know what you think?

Imagine you’re at a very special fast food restaurant where the kitchen is capable of producing anything you want. Your order can have any ingredient and can come out looking any way you can imagine. You are very hungry. But you have to follow one rule: if you don’t get exactly what you want, you can’t just accept it. You have to send it back for the kitchen to produce it again. (And no, you can’t go make it yourself.) What is the best way to order your food?

• Would you email your order to the order-taker?
• Would you go to the drive-thru window and tell the order-taker through the intercom?
• Would you go to the counter and tell the order-taker in person?
• Would you go into the kitchen with the order-taker and show the cooks what you want? You can point to the ingredients and rapidly iterate how it is presented.

In Scrum, the Product Owner is not just the order-taker. They are a stand-in for you, the customer. You are supposed to be of the same mind.