The Comeback

Episode highlights
[1:00] Failure is very personal
[3:00] Wait, was that even a failure?
[6:00] Failure isn't always apparent in the moment
[10:00] We need to fail in order to evolve

About the program hosts—

Brett Harned is one of the founding voices of the growing digital project management community. He launched the Digital PM Summit in 2012, and over the past decade has since hosted and spoken to audiences globally. His first book Project Management for Humans was published in July 2017, and his podcastSprints and Milestones launched in April 2018. His wealth of successful online classes, a YouTube series, and numerous bylines further underscore his experience in digital PM consulting.

He applies his breadth of knowledge and experience to help clients solve complex challenges around people, process, and culture. Brett served as Vice President of Project Management at award-winning web design agency Happy Cog and as a senior PM at global digital agency Razorfish. As a project manager, strategist, and consultant, he’s led capital campaigns, managed enterprise website redesigns, and produced new iOS and Android products for Zappos, MTV, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pfizer, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Harvard University.

Greg Storey brings a wealth of industry experience and wisdom to his work as a founder and leader gained through 25 years of experience in the industry. His work with agencies, medium-sized companies, and enterprise organizations like IBM, USAA, InVision, Stanford University, Sundance Film Festival, AMC Theatres, and BBVA Compass has given him a unique and valuable perspective on what makes design successful in a variety of conditions. He’s a willing collaborator ready to partner across teams and loves to break down silos and build people and teams. Greg is known for bringing unique perspectives to problems that help get teams unstuck.

Greg is an active leader in the digital community, providing leadership for Dribbble, Creative Mornings, and Amazing People Design List communities. In 2011, he co-founded the Bureau of Digital, a supportive community for studio owners, operators, design and project management leaders. He is the co-host of the podcast Sprints & Milestones and is a co-author of the book Remote Work for Design Teams. To date, Greg’s single best achievement is the direct mentorship and growth of hundreds of designers worldwide.

Our Sponsors

Thank you to the fine folks who help us make Sprints & Milestones!

Audience Ops for producing this season of Sprints & Milestones

Resource Guru for sponsoring this episode

Episode highlights:

[2:00] Meet Wil Reynolds
[4:00] The first time in Wil Reynolds' life that he didn't want to go to work
[6:00] Personal failure or business failure?
[8:00] The long pause
[11:00] It's really hard to determine the lesson learned here
[14:00] "People are basically good, man. We just give all the attention to the assholes"
[18:00] "I'm making my mom proud."

About our guest

Wil Reynolds, CEO and Vice President, Seer Interactive

Wil started Seer Interactive in 2002 as a one-man operation out of his living room. Today, Seer is home to over 200 team members across Philadelphia, San Diego, and Remote.

In his free time, Wil hangs out with his wife Nora, sons Rio and Niko, and serves Philadelphia’s homeless and runaway youth at Covenant House, where he participates in a yearly sleep out.

He has worked across every vertical, including pharmaceuticals and hospital systems to Ecommerce and SaaS. With over 15 years of experience doing and talking about digital marketing, he loves to speak at conferences about the future of search and tends to lead our agency into thinking through different lenses.

His pet projects these days revolve around using big data tools to look at search, how to bust silos between divisions, and helping tell the tough side of running a growing agency on his YouTube. 

Our Sponsors

Thank you to the fine folks who help us make Sprints & Milestones!

Audience Ops for producing this season of Sprints & Milestones

Resource Guru for sponsoring this episode

Episode highlights:

• [2:00] Meet Scott Berkun
• [4:00] The story begins on a product team at Microsoft
• [5:00] An escalating volcanic eruption!
• [7:00] Calling a time out
• [9:00] Lessons learned: anticipation and facilitation
• [13:00] Being bold and obnoxious as a facilitator
• [17:00] Scott Berkun's thoughts on failure

About our guest

Scott Berkun, bestselling author and speaker

Scott Berkun is a bestselling author and popular speaker on UX design, innovation, leading teams, public speaking and other subjects. He’s published eight books, including  How Design Makes The World, The Myths of Innovation, Confessions of a Public Speaker, and The Year Without Pants. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Guardian, Wired magazine, USA Today, Fast Company, National Public Radio, CNN, NPR, MSNBC and other media. His popular blog is at scottberkun.com and he tweets at @berkun.

Our Sponsors

Thank you to the fine folks who help us make Sprints & Milestones!

Audience Ops for producing this season of Sprints & Milestones

Resource Guru for sponsoring this episode

Episode highlights

• [2:00] Get to know Galen Low
• [3:00] Introducing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Toxic Masculinity
• [8:00] The team gave him a nickname
• [10:00] Brett & Greg D discuss their toxic traits
• [16:00] Is expressing emotion at work okay?
• [25:00] Galen's definition of "failure"

About our guest

Galen Low, Co-Founder of The Digital Project Manager

Galen is a digital project manager with more than a decade of experience delivering human-centered digital transformation in government, healthcare, transit, and retail through client services and business development.

Having finally discovered a use for his radio-announcer voice, he is now helping professionals lead teams and deliver projects ahead of the digital curve as the Co-Founder, Community Lead, and Podcast Host of The Digital Project Manager.

• [1:00] Meet Margot Boomstein
• [3:00] Margot's story kicks off with a new project
• [5:00] She's falling in love
• [8:00] Things start getting Gilligan's Island bad
• [9:00] More red flags
• [12:00] She's falling out of love
• [13:00] How do you try to turn a situation around?
• [20:00] Keeping your heart in it
   

About our guest
Margot Bloomstein, Brand and content strategist, author, speaker, and facilitator
Margot is one of the most prominent voices in the content strategy industry. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap and the industry mainstay Content Strategy at Work: Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project. She is also the principal of Appropriate, Inc., a brand and content strategy consultancy based in Boston.

For more than 20 years, Margot has taught workshops, keynoted conferences, and advised marketing teams around the world, earning a reputation for asking thoughtful questions and bringing teams together in productive, creative work. She developed the popular message architecture-driven approach to content strategy and created BrandSort, a tool embraced by consultancies to help organizations clarify their communication goals. Her clients include the American Montessori Society, Harvard University, Fidelity, Lovehoney, Mailchimp, Scholastic, Sallie Mae, Timberland, and the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority. A participant in the inaugural Content Strategy Consortium and featured speaker at SXSW, Margot advises Women Talk Design, a platform for speakers in design. She also teaches in the content strategy graduate program at FH Joanneum University in Graz, Austria. Margot lives outside Boston and lectures around the world about brand-driven content strategy and designing for trust.  

Episode highlights:

• [3:00] Whitney explains her point of view on failure
• [5:00] Whitney looks at her past self and begins the story
• [7:00] Book ideas abound
• [9:00] More ideas, more confusion
• [11:00] She ghosted
• [12:00] The fallout
• [19:00] Have you been ghosted?

About our guest

Whitney Hess is a coach, writer, and designer on a mission to put humanity back into business. She believes empathy builds empires.

Whitney helps progressive creative leaders design their careers and accelerate their missions. Her techniques help people gain self-awareness, identify blind spots, navigate obstacles, and bring their whole selves to their work.

For more than a decade, Whitney was a user experience consultant making technology easier and more pleasurable to use. She has been recognized for her work with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Foundation Center, Seamless, Boxee, and WNYC. She is named as a co-inventor on a U.S. patent with American Express.

Whitney is a two-time graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, with a Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction and a Bachelor’s in Professional Writing and HCI. She is a Certified Integral Coach through New Ventures West and a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coaching Federation. She writes on her blog Pleasure & Pain, co-hosts the podcast Designing Yourself, and speaks at conferences and corporations worldwide.

A native New Yorker, Whitney currently lives in Maine with her partner Fredrick Selby. They are in the early stages of planning their circumnavigation.

“There is so much growth and so many great things to experience when you go ahead and say ‘yes’ to change. You say yes to the universe. You say yes to the fear. You let go of all the things you've been holding on so tightly. It’s really okay. It's better than okay.” - Tracey Halvorsen

Listen to this episode to hear how Tracey took that grenade and used it to reshape how she lives and works, and came out the other side feeling stronger than ever. It's a deeply personal and life-changing story that comes with many lessons.

Episode highlights:

• [3:00] Introducing the "shit sandwich".
• [6:00] Tracey drops, "If you want real change, you kind of have to change yourself."
• [8:00] Tracey talks about defining—or redefining—herself.
• [14:00] If you're feeling it, it's real.
• [21:00] Brett and Greg discuss their grenades, and how people help with recovery

Episode highlights:

• [3:00] Crystal's first story about a missing projector begins
• [8:00] Brett is asks, "wait, what's the failure here?"
• [10:30] Crystal dives into a story about a toxic manager who wants to play a game of telephone
• [14:00] We talk about the value of observing the situation before acting
• [16:00] Being your true self helps you to manage and diffuse situations
• [19:00] Crystal shares her favorite Maya Angelou quote, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

About our guest

Crystal J. Richards, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM 
Crystal is the Principal and Owner of MindsparQ™, a talent development consulting firm dedicated to helping organizations better their teams' skill sets in project management, communications, and leadership.  

Crystal’s focus is to train people to be better project managers so they can consistently deliver projects with clarity, confidence, and courage. She maintains an online community on project management and better leadership practices.  To learn more about the community, go to www.themindsparq.com/community.   
 

Episode highlights—

• [2:00] Welcome back...to failure. Er, a new focus.
• [4:00] The lessons that failure presents span industries and roles. We can learn a lot from one another's experiences.
• [6:00] The connection between Seasons One and Two.
• [8:00] Shocker! We both fuck up, too, and we'll talk about that.
• [9:00] We're so lucky to have Audience Ops producing this for us!

About your Hosts—

Brett Harned is one of the founding voices of the growing digital project management community. He launched the Digital PM Summit in 2012, and over the past decade has since hosted and spoken to audiences globally. His first book Project Management for Humans was published in July 2017, and his podcast Sprints and Milestones launched in April 2018. His wealth of successful online classes, a YouTube series, and numerous bylines further underscore his experience in digital PM consulting.

He applies his breadth of knowledge and experience to help clients solve complex challenges around people, process, and culture. Brett served as Vice President of Project Management at award-winning web design agency Happy Cog and as a senior PM at global digital agency Razorfish. As a project manager, strategist, and consultant, he's led capital campaigns, managed enterprise website redesigns, and produced new iOS and Android products for Zappos, MTV, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pfizer, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Harvard University.

Greg Storey brings a wealth of industry experience and wisdom to his work as a founder and leader gained through 25 years of experience in the industry. His work with agencies, medium-sized companies, and enterprise organizations like IBM, USAA, InVision, Stanford University, Sundance Film Festival, AMC Theatres, and BBVA Compass has given him a unique and valuable perspective on what makes design successful in a variety of conditions. He's a willing collaborator ready to partner across teams and loves to break down silos and build people and teams. Greg is known for bringing unique perspectives to problems that help get teams unstuck.

Greg is an active leader in the digital community, providing leadership for Dribbble, Creative Mornings, and Amazing People Design List communities. In 2011, he co-founded the Bureau of Digital, a supportive community for studio owners, operators, design and project management leaders. He is the co-host of the podcast Sprints & Milestones and is a co-author of the book Remote Work for Design Teams. To date, Greg’s single best achievement is the direct mentorship and growth of hundreds of designers worldwide.

Did you know that Brett and Greg are working together again? Check out loupecollective.com and reach out if you want to partner!

Season One of Sprints & Milestones was all about the principles of digital project management, taken from Brett’s book Project Management for Humans. We released seven episodes full of discussion and stories about our experiences leading projects. It was very much about us, but really it’s for you. In our final episode of the season, we respond to questions submitted by listeners.

Several questions about project leadership came in, so we sat down to share our two (sometimes different) perspectives. At the direction of our listeners, we cover:

• The PM career path
• How to scale your PM tasks on projects of varying sizes
• Questions to ask PM candidates in job interviews
• How to develop trust with a team
• Managing people without being their “manager”
• And more!

And before you go, please take a few minutes to give us some feedback! Rate us on the iTunes store, and send us feedback via twitter or email at sprintsandmilestones@gmail.com.