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Notes on doing better work.

Short, practical reads on building, shipping, and working together without unnecessary process.

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Paperwork Team

Backlog Expiration Rules That Keep Teams Focused

Backlog rot is what happens when nobody has permission to delete tickets. Expiration rules fix this by forcing honesty about what matters.

Process Leadership Anti-PM Backlog
Paperwork Team

When Process Becomes Performance

When your agile ceremonies exist to impress stakeholders instead of helping the team, you've hit ceremony theater. Here's how to tell.

Process Communication Standups Agile Anti-PM
Paperwork Team

Jira vs Linear vs neither: what if the whole category is wrong?

Jira is too much. Linear is just right. But what if the whole issue-tracker category is solving the wrong problem? What if your team doesn't need to track issues at all?

Jira Linear Anti-PM
Paperwork Team

Small teams don't need project management. They need shared awareness.

Your 6-person team doesn't have a project management problem. You have a shared awareness problem. The fix isn't a better tool — it's a simpler system.

Small Teams Anti-PM Team Coordination
Paperwork Team

Post-agile development: what comes after Scrum fatigue

Agile won. Then it got captured by consultants, SAFe certifications, and enterprise tooling. Post-agile development keeps the principles and ditches the ceremony.

Scrum Agile Anti-PM
Paperwork Team

Linear alternatives for teams that want even less

Linear is good. But if you landed here searching for Linear alternatives, maybe what you actually want is less project management, not a different flavor of it.

Linear Small Teams Anti-PM
Paperwork Team

Scrum fatigue is real: symptoms, causes, and what comes next

Your team groans at the word "sprint." Retros feel performative. Story points are a joke. That's scrum fatigue, and it means your process has outlived its usefulness.

Scrum Agile Anti-PM
Paperwork Team

What developers actually want instead of Jira (spoiler: not another Jira)

I asked 50 developers what they'd use if Jira disappeared tomorrow. Not one of them described another project management tool. Here's what they actually want.

Developer Experience Jira Anti-PM
Paperwork Team

Team coordination without project management: the anti-PM playbook

Project management software assumes you need to manage projects. But most small teams don't have projects — they have priorities. Here's the anti-PM playbook for staying coordinated without the overhead.

Small Teams Anti-PM Team Coordination
Paperwork Team

You don't need a simpler Jira. You need to stop using project management software.

Every year a new tool promises to be "Jira but simpler." The problem isn't Jira's complexity — it's the assumption that your team needs project management software at all.

Developer Experience Jira Anti-PM
Paperwork Team

Backlog rot: the silent killer of engineering teams

Your backlog has 300 tickets and nobody believes in any of them. That's backlog rot — and it's quietly killing your team's ability to focus on what matters.

Anti-PM Backlog Engineering Culture
Paperwork Team

The Complexity Trap

When things feel messy, teams add rules. Most of the time that makes delivery slower.

Productivity Process Anti-PM Backlog