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I am always stunned when I talk to a team and ask about their customers and they respond with "We don't have a customer". "Well then you might as well all pack up and go home then, because the money to pay your salaries is going to dry up pretty damn quick." I get it, there can be some semantic confusion over what customer really means. Internal customers vs end-users, stakeholders and buyers. But while all of that is often up for discussion, the one thing that is absolutely impossible is to be getting paid to build a product that doesn't have a customer. *someone* is paying the bills. Whether that's the individual subscriber, the business stakeholder spending a pot of money on internal improvements, or a the VC who thinks you'll go public one day and make them billions. There are absolutely discussions to be had about who your customer really is. Whether the internal stakeholder counts or whether you should consider the downstream end-user as your customer. There are almost no wrong answers. Except the answer that 'We don't have customers'. That's a path to building garbage for leprechauns.

Just your regular reminder that the ideal WIP is 1.

Generally, you shouldn't be treating re-work as failure. Your goal should be to make rework so simple and cheap that you can re-work as often as is needed, in as small cycles as possible. There are exceptions, and this isn't an easy problem to solve, but getting stuck in the mentality that re-work needs to be solved through more up-front analysis and stricter requirements is exactly how organizations get into this mess of gigantic, complex projects that take years to complete. Instead, shorten feedback loops, invest in automation, break dependencies. In this world, you can build small, inspect and adapt. Rework becomes part of the process, not a failure state. You'll build better products, have more productive people, and deliver more value to your customers as a result. P.s I would be willing to bet that opinion on this topic will be almost equally divided between 'well duh, stop stating the obvious' and 'This is completely unrealistic nonsense, it would never work in my org'. This tells you something about where the problem might lie.

Doublethink. in Nineteen Eighty-Four (the book, not the year) Orwell created this term to define the expectation that the party has that people believe two mutually exclusive ideas, simultaneously. Sound familiar? This is Priority 1. The other thing is Priority 1. We believe in Psychological safety. Don't say anything critical of leadership. We focus on delivering value. Why is your velocity not increasing? Doublethink is insidious, not just because it encourages lies, but because it encourages *self* deception. The idea is not just that we say things we don't believe, but that we are expected to act as though we believe them, switching between beliefs whenever it is beneficial to those in power. This doesn't just undermine transparency and trust, it creates an entire class of people who cannot possibly be creative or thoughtful. When your brain has been turned into a maze of conflicting ideas, your power to think critically is diminished. This is exactly what Big Brother wanted, of course. The question is whether big businesses do this by accident, or by design. What examples of Doublethink have you seen in the real world?

"I don't need an arbitrary timebox to eat lunch, I just eat when I'm hungry" Perhaps there are some people who can say this and mean it, but I know the vast majority of us have learned the hard way that when we don't put an arbitrary timebox in our calendar, we have a tendency to not follow through on what we know to be an important break and recharge. We either skip it entirely, or we compress it to get straight back into what we were doing. Maybe we forget about it and have it late in the day when it's no longer optimal, or let give the time to other people so we end up scoffing a slice of toast half way through a meeting. The point is, it doesn't matter that it's an arbitrary timebox. That one hour block you save in your calendar between 12 and 1pm means you're much more likely to keep the time, use it to focus, and get the value you need from your other 7 hours in the workday. Arbitrary timeboxes can be incredibly valuable.

My Definition of Done canvas is now available via the Miroverse. If you're looking for some guidance in creating a definition of done, be sure to check it out!