Amy Kennedy Leadership

During standup, one engineer on my team reported finding and fixing a longstanding problem in one of our core modules. It might have added 10 minutes to his work, and the team celebrated. We had better code, and a customer didn’t have to report it to us. The release still went out a few days…

A product leader joining a new organization inherited the product objectives and the backlog. He also inherited the way the team had been organizing and connecting the backlog tasks to the problems they solved. When the leader who had been managing all this walked him through it, he immediately saw that the connections between objectives…

A team finished work on a component that passed all its tests. The next project was already waiting for them. The component let one set of core functions run in many different user contexts, and a presentation layer still had to connect it to the user’s daily work. It made sense to reassign the team…

The team had a clear picture of what the customer needed and designed an approach to deliver it. Every function wrote its plan: the solution, the customer-facing teams, the market launch, the sales team. Outside the project, the steering committee had committed to including AI in future work. When the plans were read side by…

An operations leader I worked with left after years of doing the job well. His team prepared for weeks: every operation with a procedure was transitioned, and the logs, playbooks, tickets and alerts were categorized and handled. The handoff still missed one category of work, the “support the operation here and there” tasks. Those were…

A team I know set up a very light project management system: a short list of the work, an owner on each item, and a status to change when something happened. A few weeks later, the list and the work didn’t match. Nobody skipped it on purpose. The team did its work together in one…

Some years ago I inherited a way of tracking a coarse-grained backlog. It ran across three separate places, held together by a method that was fiddly and undocumented. Eventually we dropped the fiddly part. The change-over was easy, the backlog functioned, and I would do the same thing again. The backlog has also grown steadily…

I observed a team decide to transfer ownership of a shared responsibility to one of the team members. They wrote down the decision but didn’t change any of the processes. The responsibility still lacked a strong owner, and everything operated the way it always had. Nothing changed about the problems that prompted the decision in…

A date on your project moves, and not by your choice: a client shifts a launch, a conference moves, a dependency slips. You sit down to review the plan, and within minutes the conversation isn’t about the schedule anymore. It’s about what the work was supposed to deliver to begin with. That second conversation is…

I worked on a team that provides high-volume data services, and I designed an interface change to open it up to new partners. I knew the format, I knew the team, and it had been years since anyone had changed the interface. I had documentation on every field. What the documentation didn’t say was that…

The Scorecard runs first. Five to 15 numbers, five minutes, each owner saying on track or off track. Then Rocks, same two words, same five minutes. The Scorecard owner is reading a result: somebody counted something against a goal set before the quarter started, and the two words are what the count came to. The…

I was the project manager for a church building that ran from 2019 to 2022, straight through COVID. It moved and crashed at the speed of construction. Supply chains fell apart, everyone involved was spending more than they meant to, and the only way to make it stop was to finish. If a decision could…

Week 9 of the quarter. The Rock owner says “on track,” and it’s true. They’re confident, they have reason to be, and nothing in the room is wrong. At the quarterly, the Rock gets marked done and someone asks what changed, and the answer is surprising, because what got built isn’t quite the thing written…

A community organization I’m part of has spent a year trying to grow its membership. A committee of volunteers meets once a month to move it forward, and every meeting opens the same way: ten or fifteen minutes spent rebuilding where things stood, because the last conversation was four weeks and a hundred other responsibilities…

Several years ago I worked on a small team doing a critical project. All at once, we multiplied to three separate teams covering adjacent areas in non-adjacent spaces. The governing decisions lived on a whiteboard, and someone photographed that board and sent the pictures out to the teams that didn’t share the room. Low rent,…