COLAB INSIGHTS
Welcome to our CoLab Insights - a space for sharing ideas that matter.
Here you’ll find thought-provoking articles, practical tools and downloadables designed to help leaders and teams perform at their best.
We’d love to hear your perspectives too.
3V NPS: Baseline performance in 90 seconds
Most senior leaders can identify their busiest teams. Very few can tell you which ones are high-performing.
Sprint Planning: Starting the Sprint right
Sprint Planning is where the team comes together as one. Not a collection of individuals with separate tasks, but a team with a shared goal, a shared plan, and a shared commitment to deliver.
When it works, that's exactly what it feels like.
Innovation Days: Creating Space to Experiment
When too much repetitive work, meetings, dependencies and quality debt slow everything down, teams stop improving. They get stuck in delivery mode with their heads down, working the same way they always have, with no time or creativity to step back and ask if there is a better way.
3V: A Performance Framework for High-Performing Teams
I created 3V over a decade ago to help agile software teams move beyond velocity as their only measure of success. The idea was simple: if you only measure speed, speed is all you'll get - and you'll pay for it in every other dimension of performance.
Value Buckets: A Fast Way to Measure Value
Ever stood in front of a big backlog of initiatives, maybe 50+ all sized but no idea which will deliver more value?
Leaders want strategic alignment, stakeholders are convinced their initiative is critical and Product Owners are trying to maximise the value of the work their teams deliver.
Relative Sizing: Estimating Without the Pain
Remember those "guess how many lollies in the jar" fundraisers? Despite best efforts, everyone's guess was wildly wrong. But if you asked people to compare two jars and say which has more? They'd nail it every time.
Product Landscape Canvas: Setting Your Product Boundaries
Ever found yourself in a conversation where someone asks "What exactly is your product?" and you're not sure how to answer?
3V Coaching Plan: Connecting Coaching to Performance
When my coaching becomes reactive, it loses its power.
Often my teams are busy, their leaders stretched, and as a coach I unintentionally end up responding to the noise rather than focusing on the work that will truly lift performance.
3V Performance Poker: Ensuring Team Alignment
If you’ve ever tried to talk about performance in a team and ended up with everyone nodding politely but thinking completely different things, this one’s for you.
DevOps Maturity Model: A Roadmap, Not a Report Card
If you feel like your team is constantly putting out fires despite having a CI/CD pipeline in place, you aren't alone. DevOps is a journey, but it often feels like navigating a dense forest without a map.
Brutal Prioritisation: Finding the Real Musts
Why is it that when you ask your stakeholders to prioritise the backlog, suddenly everything becomes a “Must”?
Back to Basics with Scrum Events
Scrum is one of the best-known agile frameworks. Almost every team has heard of it and many will say they’re “doing Scrum.” But are they really?
Community Onion: Seeing Beyond the Obvious
Ever been halfway through a piece of work and realised everyone has a different answer to the question: “Who is our customer?”
Story Mapping: Making Work Visible
Ever found yourself lost in the detail?
You’re about to start a new piece of work. Leaders want forecasts, the team wants clarity, and stakeholders want confidence. Instead, everyone’s staring at a flat backlog, drowning in tasks with no real sense of why.
Two Years of CoLab Book Club
Two years ago, I started the CoLab Book Club. It was a tricky time in Wellington and I was keen to find a way to support positive, group connections. I wanted to create a regular moment where people could easily come together, learn and share ideas.