Allison Shifman Chartier

Don’t bury core functionality under a mountain of procedure. Let the structure reveal the mental model. Show us the job the code is really doing. Reading and re-reading Patterns, Principles and Practices of Domain-Driven Design by Scott Millet and Nick Tune. Still working on living up to it.

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Agile got one thing right. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools." I've been saying "people and process first, technology second" for years. Turns out the Agile Manifesto beat me to it by two decades. But here's what I think most teams miss: This isn't permission to skip process entirely. It's a sequence of operations. I've seen it play out dozens of times. A team reads "individuals over processes" and decides documentation is bureaucracy. Workflows are overhead. Just let smart people figure it out. Then they scale from 5 to 25 people and everything breaks. The reality is — the Manifesto isn't anti-process. It's anti-rigid process. People inform process. Process shapes technology. Skip a step and your stack becomes a monument to assumptions no one validated. Last year we worked with a Series B company where the sales team had built 47 custom Salesforce fields "because Agile means flexibility." No one used 40 of them. Pipeline reviews took 90 minutes because no one could find the data that mattered. Their tech stack had outpaced their process maturity. The tool wasn't the problem — the sequence was. Empowered teams still need structure. But that structure has to flow from how people actually work into the systems that support them. The question isn't process vs. no process. It's whether your people and process are actually feeding your stack — or just decorating it. How do you balance flexibility with repeatability in your org? #RevOps #ProcessDesign #SaaS #Agile

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early adopters buy into your roadmap  not always your v1 show your checklist and where youre headed and then knock it down one item at a time trust is the feature that makes missing product features tolerable earn belief with visible progress

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AI in Agile isn’t a revolution. It’s WD-40. Everyone’s hyping AI like it’s a new team member. But let’s be honest - it’s not replacing your Scrum Master or running retros with a robot. What it can do? Quietly reduce friction. Think of backlog grooming. AI won’t transform it - but it might gently whisper, “Hey, this story’s been rotting in the backlog for 45 days.” That’s not disruption. That’s maintenance. Standups that feel like status theater? AI could spotlight real blockers before you even speak. Less calendar clutter, more clarity. Stakeholder updates? AI won’t craft the perfect narrative. But it can translate tech babble into business language - so you don’t rewrite the same update three different ways. This isn’t AI with a cape. It’s AI with a clipboard. #Agile #AI #Productivity #Leadership #ExecutionOverHype

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At Capital One, design research helps shape our builds. In this Q&A, Jen Cardello, our Head of Research and Design Operations, shares her ideas on the importance of "learning velocity" and creating experiences that are useful and usable. Check it out https://bit.ly/3H76X0G

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When I started with Pega (just 2–3 years into my career), I kept annoying my peers and leaders with one question: “Okay, but what does this look like in 3–5 years?” Everyone was excited about how fast we could ship with low‑code. I was excited too. But I also saw how easy it was to bypass guardrails, take shortcuts, and push refactoring “to later”. And I knew “later” almost never comes. I remember raising flags about long‑term maintainability, compliance scores, branch hygiene, and clean rule structures when I was still a junior. Most people nodded, then went back to the urgent release. Features were visible. Technical debt and governance risk were invisible… until a critical change request or production incident exposed them. Now add AI into that picture. AI can make full‑stack and low‑code teams move 6–8× faster, but it also multiplies whatever governance you already have. If your guardrails, review practices, and documentation culture are weak, AI accelerates you straight into technical and comprehension debt – the point where the team no longer truly understands the system it owns. That’s why I resonate so much with the idea of AI inside a governed platform model (like Pega’s rules and guardrails), instead of AI “on the side” just generating more code. Speed is easy. Long‑term clarity, control, and change‑ability are the real differentiators. I’ve been repeating the same message since my junior days: short‑term wins are great, but if we don’t design for long‑term, we’re just borrowing from the future at a very high interest rate.

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How a 9th Grader Used Scrum to Conquer an English Project—Twice as Fast What if your teen could cut their project time in half—and actually enjoy the process? That’s exactly what Noah did using a simple Scrum board. For a major 9th-grade English assignment, he kicked off Day 1 by breaking down the entire project into clear, visual tasks. From article writing to comprehension slides, everything had its own sticky note and column. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, he had one clear goal: “Finish in one week, not two.” By creating a backlog and organizing it into "To Do," "Doing," and "Done" columns, he built a system that made each step feel doable. Pro Tip from Noah: “Once I see all the work laid out, it doesn’t feel impossible—it feels like a game plan.” This is the power of mini-Scrum: clarity, ownership, and momentum. Follow along this week as we share his daily board updates—and if you want to empower your teen to manage school with confidence, check out the book he wrote to teach them how. 👉 Follow us on LinkedIn for the series and visit the Scrum For Teens to learn more! #ScrumForTeens #ParentingTips #StudentSuccess #TimeManagement #HighSchoolHacks #ScrumInSchool

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Weeks of UX cycles. Endless requirement docs. Multiple handoffs. Now? One conversation with AI → A working app. From Specs to Apps in Seconds: The Gen AI Shortcut to Software — Faster, Cheaper, Smarter For decades, product owners and business users had to document requirements, create functional specs, and collaborate endlessly with UX and dev teams before an app came to life. Today, AI-driven code generation tools are rewriting this story. By talking to an AI agent, business stakeholders can now generate working apps — complete with UI, backend logic, and database schema — in a fraction of the time. This isn’t just speeding up development. It’s reshaping the very role of product owners, UX teams, and the SDLC itself. To know more, follow the below link https://lnkd.in/g-drW2Du

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