Dual-Track Agile is an IT development methodology where figuring out what to build is as important as the building process. You start with a discovery track to find out if a product idea is good and if it makes sense to build. Successful findings from the discovery track are added to the backlog of the delivery track.

Job Stories are great because it makes you think about motivation and context and de-emphasizes adding any particular implementation. Often, because people are so focused on the who and how, they totally miss the why. When you start to understand the why, your mind is then open to think of creative and original ways to solve the problem.

A lot of people are — understandably so — very confused when it comes to innovation methodologies, frameworks, and techniques. Questions like: “When should we use Design Thinking?”, “What is the purpose of a Design Sprint?”, “Is Lean Startup just for startups?”, “Where does Agile fit in?”, “What happens after the <some methodology> phase?” are all very common questions.

When your team struggles with shipping, you need practical steps you can apply here and now. Not just an ideal. Cycles are good. We work in cycles at Basecamp. But in addition to cycles you need three other practices to ship on time and in good health.

For every step along the way, we have different plays — tools, methods, frameworks. Depending on the situation, we can choose the most appropriate way to get the job done.

The ‘Double Diamond’ process maps the divergent and convergent stages of a design process. Created by The British Design Council, it describes modes of thinking that designers use.

In this exclusive interview, Golden describes how to build high-impact, modular teams driven by actual needs. He walks through the decision-making framework that he uses to allocate the hottest of commodities: engineers. And he explains why — when everyone is working toward a clear company objective — having teams that expand and contract actually keeps you aligned.

This article goes through the framework Dropbox developed for keeping the growing company on the same page through the product development process.

An inside look at the specifics of how Basecamp decides what to do and then decides how to do it.

On the PM team at Asana, we’re always thinking about how we can create a great working environment that makes the best of everyone’s super powers. We want to be fast moving and open to risks while also maintaining a high quality bar and consistency across the customer experience.

There’s been lots written about how Internet businesses should build software, from books like The Lean Start-Up, and posts from Google Ventures, but not many examples where startups open up their process and show how it really happens.

Scrum is a management and control process that cuts through complexity to focus on building products that meet business needs. Management and teams are able to get their hands around the requirements and technologies, never let go, and deliver working products, incrementally and empirically.

Kris Gale, VP Engineering at Yammer, joined us recently for First Round CTO Summit and blew everyone away with his talk on "why the traditional engineering organizational structure is dead." He's now back for round two with a new piece on how features can create complexity cost in an engineering organization.

In an exclusive First Round CTO Summit talk, Tom Conrad — the company’s CTO since 2004 — broke down how the company figured out the exact right things to build fast and literally demanded buy-in from stakeholders (albeit with fake money, as you’ll see).