Articles on Process
How to Facilitate an Effective Retro
Does your product development team do a weekly retrospective? At Carbon Five, we think it’s the most important meeting of the week. Here are some tactical suggestions for facilitating a retro, so your team understands their challenges, celebrates their successes, and comes away with an actionable to-do list.
Pairing Retro
Back at my first job in tech, we paired 95% of the time. Many people were new to pairing. As it was my first job, I was relatively one of the more junior people on the team, which is an especially difficult position to be in for pairing. It was an incredibly intense experience for …
Happy Teams Build Great Products. Here’s How.
Ever feel like your product team is not working to its full potential? Here at Carbon Five, we’ve worked with hundreds of product teams, and we wondered what differentiated strong teams from struggling teams. Our curiosity drove us to create the Product Dartboard, a digital tool that helps teams identify their strengths, challenges, and blind …
Channeled Procrastination
I procrastinate. In high school it was a huge issue for me, because as a high schooler I was still inexperienced at it. I frequently found myself in last-minute mode, moving swiftly from one self-induced crisis to another. College wasn’t any better. The assignments were more spread out, but the due dates tended to be …
Carbon Five Wins Amplitude Emerging Product Leaders Award
We were honored to receive the award for Outstanding Product Agency in Amplitude’s Emerging Product Leaders Awards. This award is for the agency that provides clients the best product development, growth, or strategy support. At Carbon Five, product managers help clients to transform their vision into reality. We also build high-performing teams, mentoring client PMs …
Minimum Viable Process
If I mention the word “agile” to you, a couple of rituals common to agile methodologies probably come to mind. Daily stand-ups and iteration planning probably top the list, and you probably think of other agile concepts like user stories and estimating their complexity with an arbitrary number of points.
How to save 90% of your development budget
Carbon Five was recently brought in to build a new product with a planned budget of 6 months. As the first step, we conducted a few rounds of customer development to try and validate the concept. After a month of experiments by a product manager and designer, we ultimately recommended that the company not pursue …
Top Traits of Successful Non-technical Founders
As a digital product development consultancy that delivers more than 30 projects a year, we get to work with a lot of founders: technical and non-technical alike. Over the last 17 some-odd years, there are a few traits we see time and again in successful non-technical founders. And really, these six traits benefit anyone trying …
Tech Consulting: 2016 Year in Review
As a consulting firm that’s been around for 17 years, Carbon Five has a unique perspective on trends in digital product development. In this post we look back on 2016 and reflect on what we’ve seen in the industry, and where we think it’s headed. Here are the the top five trends we saw in …
Proposals and Processes in Your Professional Life – Carbon Five Santa Monica Talk Night October 19th
Another month, another talk night in Santa Monica! This month’s talks on October 19th cover the softer skills of a professional’s life such participating in conferences and running processes before they run into the ground. First, we are happy to have engineer and advocate Carina Zona! She’s in town to speak at the SCNA conference …