Is your team stuck in endless debates, struggling to agree on what makes your product stand out? Enter the Six Thinking Hats framework — a simple, powerful tool for cutting through the noise and unlocking clear, creative group decisions. 👒 In our latest article, we break down: ➡ What each “thinking hat” represents (facts, feelings, risks, opportunities, creativity, and process) ➡ How this method helps teams explore EVERY angle of a challenge — without talking over each other ➡ Practical tips for making sessions focused, productive, and (yes!) even fun ➡ Common pitfalls to avoid to get the most out of the framework Whether you want to boost creativity, speed up decision-making, or finally get everyone on the same page, this method can help. 👉 Dive into our article to see how you can put the Six Thinking Hats to work for your team: https://bit.ly/47T6okM

Recently, we started a conversation about how one of the core workflows actually runs at a company - step by step, with the people doing the work. Nothing formal. No diagrams. Just a discussion. Once we got into it, the team started spotting things right away. + Manual work that didn’t need to be manual. + Steps being repeated without a clear reason. + Tools that were slowing things down because no one had challenged status quo. And something interesting happen the next day, a few team members stopped by with more ideas. They had been thinking about the process overnight and came back with ways to simplify and improve it. That’s the part that stuck with me. The waste was there, but the spark to fix it came from inside the team once they had the space to think and talk through it together. It was a reminder that the best ideas often come from the people closest to the work. And that improvement is not just about systems - it’s about building the capability and habits to make progress visible, actionable, and shared. Before we automate, it’s worth asking: Have we made it easy for people to spot what’s slowing them down?

🚀 Ever feel like you're navigating developer performance based on gut feeling alone? It's a common challenge for engineering leaders to have objective, data-driven conversations about team dynamics and individual contributions. We're excited to announce a powerful new tool to solve this: The Keypup Team Benchmark Dashboard! This isn't about micromanagement; it's about empowerment, coaching, and building a high-performing, balanced team. Our dashboard gives you a clear, comparative view of individual developer contributions alongside aggregated team-wide statistics. With the Team Benchmark Dashboard, you can: 📊 Gain Comparative Analytics: Instantly see how individual contributions—like PR cycle time, review workload, and issue throughput—stack up against your team's average. No more guesswork. 🎯 Identify Key Contributors & Blockers: Easily spot your top performers who can mentor others, and identify developers who might be struggling or overloaded so you can offer targeted support. 💬 Facilitate Productive 1-on-1s: Walk into performance reviews and check-ins armed with objective data, leading to more constructive, impactful conversations about growth and improvement. ⚖️ Ensure Fair Workload Distribution: Visualize how work is spread across the team to prevent burnout and ensure that knowledge isn't siloed with a few key members. The ideal tool to move from subjective feedback to data-informed leadership. It's time to unlock a new level of understanding about your team's health and performance. #EngineeringAnalytics #DeveloperProductivity #TeamBenchmark #EngineeringLeadership #DevOps #TeamPerformance #DataDriven https://lnkd.in/ewrkayiy

One number won’t tell the whole story. A shiny dashboard doesn’t mean your process is healthy. Metrics work when they: ✅ Are tied to real team goals ✅ Feed into retrospectives and planning ✅ Encourage curiosity, not blame Otherwise, they’re just noise. https://lnkd.in/dAY2-Pg4

Manual, repetitive tasks can bog down your creative team - for example, removing backgrounds across hundreds or thousands of images. Cloudinary Image tackles this bottleneck with powerful automation. It's about freeing up creative talent to focus on what matters, not tedious one-off edits. A must for any team drowning in manual tasks. See the core problems we solve:

One thing I’ve learned in every sprint refinement session is that feedback isn’t criticism - it’s collaboration in motion. During a recent refinement, a developer raised a valid concern about a workflow I’d proposed during documentation. Instead of seeing it as pushback, it became an opportunity to revisit the logic, simplify the user journey, and ensure the technical feasibility aligned with business goals. That back-and-forth reminded me that effective collaboration isn’t about being right; it’s about staying aligned. The best outcomes often come from open conversations where everyone is focused on the same goal: building something that works for both the user and the system. #BusinessAnalysis #AgileMindset #SprintRefinement #TeamCollaboration #FeedbackCulture #ContinuousImprovement #WomenInTech #MargaretBuraimoh #RemoteBA #OpenToCollaborate

One of my favorite exercises as a PM is story mapping, a deceptively simple yet powerful tool that transforms how teams think about building products. It helps teams: - Build clarity by seeing the full user journey & not isolated tasks - Spot risks and dependencies early before they turn into blockers - Collaborate better as everyone aligns on the same big picture

Much of my work involves helping teams make sense of how they plan and deliver - the conversations, visualisations and small habits that keep everyone aligned and moving forward. Over time, I’ve noticed certain techniques consistently stand out. They work across contexts, they scale up or down easily and they help teams focus on the right things. Those are the ones we’ve started capturing as RAFTs – Rapid Agile Forecasting & Tracking techniques. Each RAFT comes directly from client experience - it’s something we’ve used, tested, refined and seen make a difference in real-world settings. Writing them down has helped me reflect on why they work and how they can be adapted for different teams. Some of them are deceptively simple, like Story Mapping, which helps teams make work visible. Others, like the Community Onion, is a way to rapidly identify and prioritise the groups we need to consider when designing our Product/Service solutions. They are all designed to replace heavier, more traditional techniques with something faster, lighter and more collaborative. The goal isn’t to add new theory, it’s to document what’s already working and make it visible and ready for others to build on. You can find both of these techniques (and more) in our growing RAFT Library at Agile CoLab. I’d love to hear how others have used similar approaches or what’s worked in your own teams. 👉 Story Mapping - https://lnkd.in/gbQ2w-p8 👉 Community Onion - https://lnkd.in/ggAfzbJE #RAFT #AgileCoLab #AgileTechniques #AgileCommunity #AgileLeadership

Perfection is the enemy of progress. Especially in workflows. I’ve seen teams delay launches for months, trying to build the “perfect” system. And when they finally roll it out? The team resists, because the real world never matched the ideal plan. Here’s what works instead: Launch a simple V1 that solves the biggest pain point. Gather feedback quickly. Iterate and improve. That’s how workflows grow with the team instead of being forced on them. Because at the end of the day, a system that exists—and works—is infinitely better than the “perfect” one that never leaves the whiteboard. V1 > Invisible. Always. #WorkflowDesign #AdoptionStrategy #BusinessProductivity #WorkSmarter #Mondaydotcom

We built the processes, dashboards, and templates. It worked… until it didn’t. Every small change started to feel like moving a mountain. The team was aligned, but not alive. What we actually needed wasn’t “more optimization.” We needed right-sized systems—just enough structure to make the next decision obvious. The shift we made: From “track everything” → measure what moves decisions From “perfect processes” → lightweight defaults you can bend From “control” → clarity and cadence The best systems don’t trap teams. They teach teams how to move together—lightly. If this sounds familiar, what’s one process you could shrink by 50% this week?