The Pragmatic Strategist

We Never Called it "Cyber Monday"

I’ve been feeling nostalgic this week. After so many years in ecommerce, supporting catalogers and retailers whose year entirely revolved around the Christmas season, I am almost at a loss for what to do if I’m not running around putting out fires from Thanksgiving weekend up until the week before Christmas. Strange as it seems [...]

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Writing Requirements – What vs. How

It’s been a long time since I’ve written much about my long-standing discipline. As I’ve been focusing more and more of my energies on entrepreneurial endeavors, the details of project management have not been forefront on my mind. That recently changed, however, thanks to a client project. In the development of a new startup, a [...]

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Scrappy Swimlane High Level Overview

Much thanks to Sherry Lowry from Bridging Futures for this picture. As with all items of this type, it’s eerily familiar enough to be both hysterical and cringe-worthy for those of us who make a career out of this. (Click on the image to see the details.) Send to Facebook

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Language, Innovation & Social Media for Business – Sam Lawrence at Interactive Austin

The former CMO of Jive Software, Sam Lawrence, spoke to a crowded room at Interactive Austin this morning. His message was on the lessons needed to specifically apply in order to make social media work in your business. How We Say What We Say One of the challenges social media evangelists face is based on [...]

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20/20 Hindsight – Getting Your Start in a Startup

People who did not meet me until at or around my 25th birthday would never believe it, but in school, I was the Queen of Slackers. Truly. School was too easy, too routine and I spent too long doing it to be able to breath new life into the experience. I could dodge classes, do [...]

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Why Agile Isn't Just for Development

It’s been years since the evangelism for Agile development started truly gaining momentum. Super sexy buzzphrases phrases like “reduce time to market,” “improved ROI,” and “lower development costs” have all been invoked to support the case for adopting an Agile methodology over the old-school Waterfall approach. The fact is, most experienced professionals have lived through [...]

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Three Questions to Ask (& Answer!) Before Starting a Customer Blog

In a recent conversation with a friend, we were discussing corporate blogging efforts to engage existing customers. After reading Joshua-Michele Ross‘ post recently, on the Wells Fargo/Wachovia merger blog, I was excited to see yet one more company prepare to engage customers in this forum. That is, until we started talking in more detail. It [...]

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