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Subscribe to Work LifeGet stories like this in your inbox Subscribe In psychology, an internal locus of control is a key predictor of life satisfaction. People who see themselves – not external forces – as in charge of their life outcomes feel more grounded, fulfilled, and empowered. This principle applies to our professional lives, too. But as an employee, it might feel like you don’t have much power to control what you spend your days working on. In her new book Managing Up: How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge, Melody Wilding demonstrates that we often have more self-determination than we think we do. Managing Up gives readers a map for shaping their career by building a strong relationship with their boss or manager. Part of that strategy is taking ownership: seizing projects and opportunities that can move your career forward. We sat down with Melody to unpack what it means to take ownership, what it can do for your career, and how to do it in an impactful way. What does it mean to take ownership at work? Related Article How to advocate for yourself at work By Lauren Parker In Productivity In Managing Up, taking ownership is the act of declaring that you’ll step in to resolve an issue or seize an opportunity – then following through on your claim. “Ownership is the courage to raise your hand and say you’ll take something on to make work better for everyone – even if it’s not in your job description,” says Melody. Does this sound scary? Well, pivoting to a more proactive approach to work can be intimidating! But today, we’re explaining how to take ownership in exactly the right way. By taking ownership of initiatives that interest you, you can take a more active role in building the career you want. You don’t need to wait around for someone to hand you that perfect project – you can start proving your abilities in the areas you’d like to expand into. If you’ve ever heard the saying ‘dress for the job you want,’ taking ownership is like a more powerful version of that same strategy because you’re doing the work, not just dressing for it. Not to mention it’s better suited for 2025, when plenty of talented people log on to work in their pajamas. Finding an ownership-ready challenge Melody has a simple rubric for identifying opportunities that are ripe for the taking: look for a triple win. “What’s something that has a career benefit to you, will feel important to your boss, and will also have a positive impact on the organization as a whole?” she asks. “Ideally, you’ll take ownership of a challenge that’s at the intersection of these three things.” You should also account for the working environment you’re in. For example, if you’re a new hire or your company is financially risk-averse, you may want to start by taking ownership of a project that would have fewer negative outcomes if you don’t succeed. Not sure where to look? Consider starting with: Things colleagues consistently complain about or seem drained by Areas where people are using inefficient workarounds What leadership discussions are focusing on and where future budget is being allocated 5 challenges and opportunities to own Related Article 7 sneaky ways friction is making your work life harder By Genevieve Michaels In Productivity Bothersome bottlenecks: Inefficiencies that stress people out and slow down productivity It’s taking forever to onboard new hires, so you propose and lead the creation of a centralized knowledge base with self-serve onboarding workflows Neglected needs: Unmet needs, projects, and priorities that are consistently being overlooked Your industry landscape has changed, and your company has spent months discussing new features that could help you stay competitive. You plan a series of cross-team prioritization discussions to start bringing them out of the theoretical stage Feedback patterns: What do colleagues, customers, and stakeholders keep saying they need more or less of? Customers keep coming to the support team with the same kinds of issues over and over. You propose a new service management tool that will let you create automated responses to these persistent issues, and oversee its implementation Upcoming projects: What priorities are coming up in the pipeline, and how can you proactively address them? Your organization is launching a full, rebranded website. You propose a launch strategy with industry influencers to get the word out and give your community context for this new direction Innovation opportunities: How can your organization reimagine or evolve its work to create better results? You notice a skills gap in your organization, so you develop a training program or partner with a local university to train interns 4 steps to taking ownership Storming into the CEO’s office unannounced with a bold new cost-cutting or money-making plan is unlikely to go over well. As you prepare to take ownership, here are four steps to build momentum around your idea, get stakeholders on board, and set yourself up for success. Build buy-in with pre-suasion You don’t want your boss or manager to be hearing about your project for the first time when you’re trying to get it approved. “Change makes people nervous,” explains Melody. “You’re likely to get immediate pushback if you haven’t tested the waters for your idea.” That’s why she recommends using a technique called pre-suasion, a term coined by psychologist Robert Cialdini. “This isn’t about manipulation or planting an idea in someone’s head,” she says. “The goal is to lay the groundwork so when you make a request to move forward, it feels like a natural next step.” Here’s how pre-suasion could sound in practice: Ask for feedback on how your organization is currently addressing (or not addressing) the problem, before bringing up your new solution Build urgency by talking about results competitors have created in the area you’re focused on, or why now might be the right time to act Mention that you’ve been researching potential solutions or strategies, even before you have something concrete to share Present your idea with the SCQA framework (Situation, Complication, Question, Answer) It’s important to be concise and focus on value when you’re ready to present your idea. “Very often, people either lead with too much backstory, or they problem-dump and focus on the issue and not their solution,” says Melody. “Either way, you risk stressing out leadership and losing their attention.” Instead, use the SCQA framework as an easy tool to make sure you’re sharing your idea convincingly. Here’s what it looks like in action: Situation: Context to help your listener understand the problem or opportunity “It’s been years since we’ve had a healthy talent pipeline. Everyone feels like they don’t have the headcount to get things done, even though there’s budget to hire.” Complication: Challenges or obstacles that stand in the way of taking action “Every department is doing whatever they can to find people – everything from posting multiple job boards to tapping personal networks to managers acting as informal recruiters. There’s no cohesion between job postings, and candidates we do attract are often unqualified.” Question: Your hypothesis for a worthwhile solution “I think we need a more organized, centralized strategy that makes connecting with incredible talent an ongoing business process.” Answer: How you propose putting that hypothesis into action to solve the problem “I’ve compiled this list of specialized recruiting firms that focus on our industry. Many are connected to local universities and other firms in our field. I think we should build a stable, long-term partnership with one of them and take finding candidates off managers’ plates.” Bring others along Even though you’re taking ownership, other collaborators will need to be involved to some degree. Taking ownership effectively is about striking a balance between individual initiative and maintaining a team player spirit. “The goal is to include the right people, in the right ways, without creating extra work or adding to their cognitive load,” says Melody. That will look different at different stages of the ownership process. As you work on your idea, consider bringing others along by: Asking for input on initial strategy via surveys or brainstorming sessions Inviting other perspectives with informal coffee chats as you develop the idea Keeping stakeholders in the loop on outcomes via regular Slack updates or 1:1s Pre-plan for challenges Very few great ideas become reality without any unforeseen challenges. Hurdles and uncertainty shouldn’t be a dealbreaker – especially if you anticipate them. Melody recommends planning for both internal resistance and less-than-ideal project outcomes. Reframe resistance and respond strategically “Don’t take resistance personally. It’s usually related to peoples’ natural fear response, not the quality of your idea,” Melody says. “You can even reframe resistance as a form of engagement. People have opinions, and are actively pressure-testing your idea.” Here are some possible ways you might respond to resistance: Try opening the discussion with an even more ambitious idea, so you can find common ground together that’s closer to your original plan Highlight how resistors’ own skills and talents could actually contribute to the outcomes you want Don’t be afraid to keep bringing up your idea (tactfully), even if your manager didn’t seem open to discussing it at first Play out and plan for the worst-case scenario “What would happen in the absolute worst-case scenario, like your plans totally flop and you embarrass yourself?” asks Melody. “If you play this out, you can come up with a bounce-back plan. You’ll likely also get a reality check that a negative outcome isn’t as bad as you fear.” Here are a few worst-case scenarios, and how you could plan for them: Your manager is completely unreceptive and won’t even listen to your idea, let alone give you the green light This could indicate you may need to apply for other internal or external roles to get the growth you want, if that option is available to you. Your initiative doesn’t get the results or ROI you promise, and you’ve wasted company resources You suggest easing into the project, and scaling up depending on initial outcomes. For example, you could start with a smaller budget or use freelancers instead of making a new hire As soon as you launch a new feature, your competitor comes out with a similar but more comprehensive version Plan ahead for the new feature to be reassessed and improved after four months based on user and stakeholder feedback Managing Up is available now. Connect with Melody Wilding on LinkedIn, and learn more about her books, programs, coaching, and speaking on her website. Subscribe to Work LifeGet stories like this in your inbox Subscribe The post How to take ownership of your work (and why you should) appeared first on Work Life by Atlassian. View the full article

Subscribe to Work LifeGet stories like this in your inbox Subscribe In psychology, an internal locus of control is a key predictor of life satisfaction. People who see themselves – not external forces – as in charge of their life outcomes feel more grounded, fulfilled, and empowered. This principle applies to our professional lives, too. But as an employee, it might feel like you don’t have much power to control what you spend your days working on. In her new book Managing Up: How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge, Melody Wilding demonstrates that we often have more self-determination than we think we do. Managing Up gives readers a map for shaping their career by building a strong relationship with their boss or manager. Part of that strategy is taking ownership: seizing projects and opportunities that can move your career forward. We sat down with Melody to unpack what it means to take ownership, what it can do for your career, and how to do it in an impactful way. What does it mean to take ownership at work? Related Article How to advocate for yourself at work By Lauren Parker In Productivity In Managing Up, taking ownership is the act of declaring that you’ll step in to resolve an issue or seize an opportunity – then following through on your claim. “Ownership is the courage to raise your hand and say you’ll take something on to make work better for everyone – even if it’s not in your job description,” says Melody. Does this sound scary? Well, pivoting to a more proactive approach to work can be intimidating! But today, we’re explaining how to take ownership in exactly the right way. By taking ownership of initiatives that interest you, you can take a more active role in building the career you want. You don’t need to wait around for someone to hand you that perfect project – you can start proving your abilities in the areas you’d like to expand into. If you’ve ever heard the saying ‘dress for the job you want,’ taking ownership is like a more powerful version of that same strategy because you’re doing the work, not just dressing for it. Not to mention it’s better suited for 2025, when plenty of talented people log on to work in their pajamas. Finding an ownership-ready challenge Melody has a simple rubric for identifying opportunities that are ripe for the taking: look for a triple win. “What’s something that has a career benefit to you, will feel important to your boss, and will also have a positive impact on the organization as a whole?” she asks. “Ideally, you’ll take ownership of a challenge that’s at the intersection of these three things.” You should also account for the working environment you’re in. For example, if you’re a new hire or your company is financially risk-averse, you may want to start by taking ownership of a project that would have fewer negative outcomes if you don’t succeed. Not sure where to look? Consider starting with: Things colleagues consistently complain about or seem drained by Areas where people are using inefficient workarounds What leadership discussions are focusing on and where future budget is being allocated 5 challenges and opportunities to own Related Article 7 sneaky ways friction is making your work life harder By Genevieve Michaels In Productivity Bothersome bottlenecks: Inefficiencies that stress people out and slow down productivity It’s taking forever to onboard new hires, so you propose and lead the creation of a centralized knowledge base with self-serve onboarding workflows Neglected needs: Unmet needs, projects, and priorities that are consistently being overlooked Your industry landscape has changed, and your company has spent months discussing new features that could help you stay competitive. You plan a series of cross-team prioritization discussions to start bringing them out of the theoretical stage Feedback patterns: What do colleagues, customers, and stakeholders keep saying they need more or less of? Customers keep coming to the support team with the same kinds of issues over and over. You propose a new service management tool that will let you create automated responses to these persistent issues, and oversee its implementation Upcoming projects: What priorities are coming up in the pipeline, and how can you proactively address them? Your organization is launching a full, rebranded website. You propose a launch strategy with industry influencers to get the word out and give your community context for this new direction Innovation opportunities: How can your organization reimagine or evolve its work to create better results? You notice a skills gap in your organization, so you develop a training program or partner with a local university to train interns 4 steps to taking ownership Storming into the CEO’s office unannounced with a bold new cost-cutting or money-making plan is unlikely to go over well. As you prepare to take ownership, here are four steps to build momentum around your idea, get stakeholders on board, and set yourself up for success. Build buy-in with pre-suasion You don’t want your boss or manager to be hearing about your project for the first time when you’re trying to get it approved. “Change makes people nervous,” explains Melody. “You’re likely to get immediate pushback if you haven’t tested the waters for your idea.” That’s why she recommends using a technique called pre-suasion, a term coined by psychologist Robert Cialdini. “This isn’t about manipulation or planting an idea in someone’s head,” she says. “The goal is to lay the groundwork so when you make a request to move forward, it feels like a natural next step.” Here’s how pre-suasion could sound in practice: Ask for feedback on how your organization is currently addressing (or not addressing) the problem, before bringing up your new solution Build urgency by talking about results competitors have created in the area you’re focused on, or why now might be the right time to act Mention that you’ve been researching potential solutions or strategies, even before you have something concrete to share Present your idea with the SCQA framework (Situation, Complication, Question, Answer) It’s important to be concise and focus on value when you’re ready to present your idea. “Very often, people either lead with too much backstory, or they problem-dump and focus on the issue and not their solution,” says Melody. “Either way, you risk stressing out leadership and losing their attention.” Instead, use the SCQA framework as an easy tool to make sure you’re sharing your idea convincingly. Here’s what it looks like in action: Situation: Context to help your listener understand the problem or opportunity “It’s been years since we’ve had a healthy talent pipeline. Everyone feels like they don’t have the headcount to get things done, even though there’s budget to hire.” Complication: Challenges or obstacles that stand in the way of taking action “Every department is doing whatever they can to find people – everything from posting multiple job boards to tapping personal networks to managers acting as informal recruiters. There’s no cohesion between job postings, and candidates we do attract are often unqualified.” Question: Your hypothesis for a worthwhile solution “I think we need a more organized, centralized strategy that makes connecting with incredible talent an ongoing business process.” Answer: How you propose putting that hypothesis into action to solve the problem “I’ve compiled this list of specialized recruiting firms that focus on our industry. Many are connected to local universities and other firms in our field. I think we should build a stable, long-term partnership with one of them and take finding candidates off managers’ plates.” Bring others along Even though you’re taking ownership, other collaborators will need to be involved to some degree. Taking ownership effectively is about striking a balance between individual initiative and maintaining a team player spirit. “The goal is to include the right people, in the right ways, without creating extra work or adding to their cognitive load,” says Melody. That will look different at different stages of the ownership process. As you work on your idea, consider bringing others along by: Asking for input on initial strategy via surveys or brainstorming sessions Inviting other perspectives with informal coffee chats as you develop the idea Keeping stakeholders in the loop on outcomes via regular Slack updates or 1:1s Pre-plan for challenges Very few great ideas become reality without any unforeseen challenges. Hurdles and uncertainty shouldn’t be a dealbreaker – especially if you anticipate them. Melody recommends planning for both internal resistance and less-than-ideal project outcomes. Reframe resistance and respond strategically “Don’t take resistance personally. It’s usually related to peoples’ natural fear response, not the quality of your idea,” Melody says. “You can even reframe resistance as a form of engagement. People have opinions, and are actively pressure-testing your idea.” Here are some possible ways you might respond to resistance: Try opening the discussion with an even more ambitious idea, so you can find common ground together that’s closer to your original plan Highlight how resistors’ own skills and talents could actually contribute to the outcomes you want Don’t be afraid to keep bringing up your idea (tactfully), even if your manager didn’t seem open to discussing it at first Play out and plan for the worst-case scenario “What would happen in the absolute worst-case scenario, like your plans totally flop and you embarrass yourself?” asks Melody. “If you play this out, you can come up with a bounce-back plan. You’ll likely also get a reality check that a negative outcome isn’t as bad as you fear.” Here are a few worst-case scenarios, and how you could plan for them: Your manager is completely unreceptive and won’t even listen to your idea, let alone give you the green light This could indicate you may need to apply for other internal or external roles to get the growth you want, if that option is available to you. Your initiative doesn’t get the results or ROI you promise, and you’ve wasted company resources You suggest easing into the project, and scaling up depending on initial outcomes. For example, you could start with a smaller budget or use freelancers instead of making a new hire As soon as you launch a new feature, your competitor comes out with a similar but more comprehensive version Plan ahead for the new feature to be reassessed and improved after four months based on user and stakeholder feedback Managing Up is available now. Connect with Melody Wilding on LinkedIn, and learn more about her books, programs, coaching, and speaking on her website. Subscribe to Work LifeGet stories like this in your inbox Subscribe The post How to take ownership of your work (and why you should) appeared first on Work Life by Atlassian. View the full article

When working in an agile or scrum environment, teams plan their work by creating a product backlog, a document that lists all the activities and deliverables that must be done to complete a project. Then, once a product backlog has been created, teams execute work in sprints, a short period of time from one to four weeks. Because of their short length, agile teams need to constantly prioritize the tasks defined in the product backlog through a process known as backlog refinement, or backlog grooming. What Is Backlog Refinement? Backlog refinement is the process of identifying and prioritizing the most critical product backlog items for an upcoming sprint, which is done by having a meeting among the development team, product owner, scrum master and other stakeholders where they review a set of backlog refinement criteria to identify and prioritize tasks, often referred to as user stories in agile frameworks. Product backlog refinement is obviously not a one-time endeavor, but an ongoing process between the product owner and the development team. It’s a place where they can collaborate to make sure the product backlog is clean and orderly. That can mean removing outdated user stories and tasks, adding new user stories that come from newly discovered insights or breaking larger user stories into smaller ones. You might reorder the user stories on your backlog, or better describe them to avoid issues later. Assignments and estimates might change and you can identify and remove roadblocks if possible. Project management software is able to capture this product backlog refinement meeting and represent the workflow visually in a kanban board. ProjectManager is a cloud-based work management software that has dynamic kanban boards that have custom workflows and task approval to set who has authority to approve and move tasks forward. And all this is done in real time that is collaborative to the core. Get started with ProjectManager today for free! /wp-content/uploads/2024/03/operations-implementation-kanban-150-cta.jpgKanban boards from ProjectManager for backlog refinement and sprint planning.—Learn More! You could look at backlog refinement as a means to a mutual understanding between the product owner and the scrum team. This understanding is focused on the product, of course, and what it will or won’t do. Then, you decide the amount of effort necessary to implement, as well as the order to do it. Backlog Refinement vs. Backlog Grooming The terms backlog refinement and backlog grooming refer to the exact same process. The difference between them is the term “backlog grooming” was originally used in the agile and scrum community, but it was replaced with “backlog refinement” due to concerns about unintended meanings and confusion brought by the former term. So even though “backlog grooming” might still be used informally, “backlog refinement” is now the official term encouraged by current agile and scrum best practices. How to Conduct a Backlog Refinement Meeting To better understand the concept of backlog refinement or backlog grooming, let’s define the main steps in a backlog refinement meeting. 1. Review Existing Backlog Items The first step in any backlog refinement meeting is to review the current product backlog items to determine whether they’re still relevant or not for the upcoming agile sprint. To do so, the agile team goes over the following backlog refinement criteria. Strategic Alignment: Each backlog item should support the product vision and business objectives. Aligning tasks with strategy ensures the team works on high-impact features. If an item no longer fits strategic goals, consider modifying, deprioritizing or removing it to maintain a focused and effective backlog. Required Effort: Estimating effort helps the team understand workload distribution and sprint feasibility. Using techniques like story points or T-shirt sizing, teams gauge how much work is needed. Accurate effort assessment prevents overcommitment, balances workloads and improves predictability in sprint planning. Business Value: Every backlog item should deliver meaningful value to users or the business. Prioritization should favor high-impact product features or project deliverables that enhance user experience, drive revenue or improve efficiency. Regularly reassessing business value ensures the backlog remains relevant and aligned with customer and stakeholder needs. Acceptance Criteria: Well-defined acceptance criteria clarify when a task is considered “done.” These criteria help developers, testers and stakeholders align on expectations, reducing ambiguity. Clear, testable acceptance conditions improve quality, streamline development and prevent unnecessary rework. Technical Feasibility: Assessing feasibility ensures backlog items are realistically achievable within technical constraints. This includes evaluating system limitations, required integrations and potential technical debt. Early feasibility checks help teams mitigate risks and identify necessary architectural decisions before development begins. Size and Scope: Backlog items should be small enough to complete within a sprint but still provide value. Large epics should be broken into smaller, manageable stories. Right-sizing backlog items enables efficient development, easier estimation and clearer progress tracking. Dependencies: Identifying dependencies between tasks, teams or external systems prevents bottlenecks. Dependencies should be addressed early to avoid delays and conflicts. Mapping out interdependencies ensures smoother workflows and better coordination between cross-functional teams. Risk Assessment: Understanding potential risks associated with backlog items helps teams prepare for obstacles. Risks may include technical challenges, regulatory concerns or changing business priorities. Addressing risks early allows teams to develop mitigation strategies, ensuring projects stay on track. Resource Constraints: Every backlog item requires resources such as time, budget and personnel. Evaluating constraints helps teams allocate resources efficiently and avoid overloading team members. Awareness of limitations allows for realistic planning and better decision-making during backlog refinement. 2. Clarify and Break Down Epics, User Stories or Backlog Items To ensure smooth execution, backlog items must be clear, concise and manageable. Large epics should be broken into smaller user stories that can be completed within a sprint. Refining details such as scope, dependencies and expected outcomes helps the team understand requirements, align on priorities, and estimate effort more accurately. 3. Add New Backlog Items (If Necessary) As business needs evolve, new backlog items may emerge. This step involves identifying and adding relevant user stories, technical improvements or bug fixes. Ensuring that new items align with strategic goals and are well-defined prevents last-minute surprises and keeps the product backlog dynamic and responsive to changing priorities. 4. Identify Risks Proactively identifying risks helps the team mitigate potential blockers before they become major issues. Risks can include technical challenges, resource limitations, dependencies or shifting business priorities. By assessing and addressing risks early, the team improves predictability, reduces uncertainties and ensures backlog items remain feasible within the sprint timeline. 5. Prioritize Backlog Items Not all backlog items hold equal value, so prioritization is key. This step ensures the most impactful, high-value items are addressed first. Using techniques like MoSCoW, weighted shortest job first (WSJF) or stakeholder input, teams determine what should be tackled in upcoming sprints to maximize efficiency and business impact. 6. Eliminate Unnecessary Backlog Items A cluttered backlog slows down decision-making. Regularly reviewing and removing outdated, low-value or duplicate items keeps the backlog lean and manageable. If an item no longer aligns with business objectives or has become irrelevant, it should be archived or deprioritized to maintain a clear and focused development roadmap. 7. Confirm Readiness for Sprint Planning The final step ensures backlog items are properly refined and ready for sprint planning. This includes verifying that acceptance criteria, dependencies and effort estimates are complete. By ensuring all items meet the “definition of ready,” teams can transition smoothly into sprint planning without additional clarification, improving sprint execution and velocity. 8. Incorporate Stakeholder Feedback Backlog refinement isn’t just an internal team process—it benefits from stakeholder input. Engaging product owners, business leaders, or end users ensures that backlog items align with real business needs and user expectations. Gathering feedback early helps refine priorities, clarify requirements and prevent costly rework, ultimately leading to a more valuable and customer-focused product. Who Participates in the Backlog Refinement Meeting? A backlog refinement meeting usually begins with the product owner showing the scrum or agile development team what product backlog items need refinement. This opens up a discussion between the product owner and the scrum team, which is moderated by the scrum master. Having said this, let’s explore the role and responsibilities of each of these participants in more detail. Product Owner The product owner leads the backlog refinement meeting by ensuring the backlog items are well-defined, prioritized and aligned with business goals. They clarify any uncertainties, make decisions on item priorities and ensure that the team understands the vision and objectives behind each item. The product owner also manages scope changes and adjusts priorities as needed. Scrum Master The scrum master facilitates the backlog refinement meeting, ensuring that it follows scrum practices and stays on track. They help the team maintain focus, resolve any process issues and encourage open communication. The scrum master removes any obstacles that might impede the team’s understanding of backlog items and ensures that the meeting environment supports collaboration. Development Team The development team actively participates in the backlog refinement meeting by providing technical insights and effort estimates for each backlog item. They help clarify requirements, identify dependencies and discuss potential challenges or risks. The team ensures that the backlog items are actionable, feasible and well-understood, enabling smooth planning for upcoming sprints. Sample Backlog Refinement Agenda Here’s a sample backlog refinement agenda that can help agile teams plan their agile sprints. Introduction and objective setting (five minutes): The meeting begins with a brief introduction and setting clear objectives for the session. Review current backlog (15 minutes): The team analyzes the existing backlog, removing outdated or irrelevant items. Prioritization (20 minutes): Re-prioritize backlog items based on project goals and current business objectives. New item introduction (15 minutes): Discuss and add new items to the backlog, ensuring they align with project needs. User story review and clarification (10 minutes): Examine user stories, clarify requirements, and ensure they are well-defined. Effort estimation (10 minutes): The development team provides estimates for the effort required to complete each item Risk assessment (five minutes): Identify and discuss any potential risks or concerns related to upcoming tasks. Backlog cleaning (five minutes): Remove unnecessary items and split larger tasks into smaller, manageable pieces Next steps and action items (five minutes): Summarize decisions made and outline action items for team members. Backlog Refinement vs. Sprint Planning Because backlog refinement is done before sprint planning meetings, they can often be confused with each other, but they’re two different processes. Backlog refinement involves reviewing and revising the product backlog to ensure items are well-defined, prioritized and ready for future sprints. This process involves the whole team in clarifying and estimating backlog items, but it’s not tied to a specific sprint. When planning a sprint, the scrum team is working on the priority items from the backlog and focusing on further detailed clarification, lightweight modeling, re-estimation, creating a sprint goal and sprint backlog. Benefits of Backlog Refinement Backlog refinement is a crucial ongoing activity that ensures the product backlog remains well-organized, prioritized and ready for sprint planning. Regular refinement improves team efficiency and enhances project collaboration. Here are some key benefits: Improved Clarity: Ensures backlog items are well-defined and understood by the team. Better Prioritization: Aligns backlog items with business goals, making sure the most valuable items are worked on first. Enhanced Estimation: Provides the team with an opportunity to estimate effort, ensuring more accurate sprint planning. Increased Efficiency: Helps identify dependencies, blockers and risks early, minimizing surprises during sprints. Stronger Collaboration: Encourages communication between the product owner, development team and scrum master, fostering team alignment. Backlog Refinement Techniques Backlog refinement is essential for maintaining an organized and prioritized product backlog. Best practices ensure the backlog is continuously prepared for successful sprint planning. These practices help teams clarify requirements, improve prioritization and ensure tasks are manageable, leading to smoother project execution and better alignment with business goals. WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) WSJF is a prioritization technique used to calculate the value of backlog items by comparing their cost of delay with their job size. This helps prioritize tasks that deliver the highest value in the shortest time. It encourages focusing on high-value, low-effort tasks first, optimizing both time and resources for maximum impact. Kano Model The Kano Model is a prioritization tool that categorizes features based on stakeholder engagement. It helps teams identify which features will delight customers, meet basic needs or provide little to no impact. This model allows product owners to make informed decisions about which features will drive the most customer value, guiding prioritization in backlog refinement. MoSCoW Prioritization MoSCoW prioritization is a technique for categorizing backlog items into four groups: must-have, should-have, could-have and won’t-have. This method helps teams focus on delivering the most critical features first while ensuring less important tasks are addressed later. MoSCoW is particularly useful for balancing stakeholder demands and optimizing resource allocation in a project. DEEP Criteria By having a product backlog refinement process you create an outcome that is DEEP, which is an acronym that was made up by Roman Pichler, a product management expert who specializes in digital products and agile practices. DEEP stands for detailed, emergent, estimated and prioritized. You want more detail for the user stories in your backlog. The adding, changing or removing of items will lead to new insights. Each item on the backlog is estimated and prioritized. INVEST Criteria The INVEST criteria is a framework for writing clear and actionable user stories. It stands for independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small and testable. By ensuring user stories meet these criteria, teams can make sure the work is clear, achievable and aligned with project goals. This practice enhances backlog refinement by making backlog items well-defined and ready for development. How ProjectManager Helps With Product Backlog Refinement ProjectManager is cloud-based work management for hybrid teams that are collaborative to the core and provides a single source of truth that keeps everyone on the product team on the same page. Real-time data helps you make more insightful decisions when in a backlog refinement meeting, which leads to more successful sprints. Multiple Project Views Kanban boards are the preferred tool when managing a backlog, but that can be done on a task list, too. People work differently and our tool is designed to accommodate various work styles with multiple project views. Other departments might use the Gantt chart, sheet or calendar to track the project. No matter which view they’re using, the data they’re seeing is current and in real time to keep everyone on the same page. /wp-content/uploads/2025/03/gantt-light-mode-screenshot-2025-compressed.png Get Real-Time Data with Dashboards Every project view feeds automatically into the live dashboard, which doesn’t require any time-consuming setup as you’ll find in other software. The real-time dashboard captures data and automatically calculates the information to display it in easy-to-read graphs and charts. The product owner can view six project metrics whenever they want to monitor the sprint and remove any roadblocks they find. /wp-content/uploads/2024/05/portfolio-dashboard-screenshot-lightmode.png Generate Timely Reports One-click reporting goes deeper into the data and helps the product owner make insightful decisions. Reports on time, tasks and more can all be filtered to show only what you want to see. Then they can be saved as a PDF or printed out and shared with stakeholders to keep them updated on progress. /wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Reports-Light-2554x1372-1.png Email notifications are automatically triggered whenever team members make a comment or an item on the backlog is updated. But you also have in-app alerts so you don’t have to leave your tool to stay updated. This keeps you working on your sprint and adjusting it according to the most current data, which boosts productivity. ProjectManager is an award-winning hybrid work management software that connects scrum teams as well as everyone else in the organization. It’s one tool that works in an agile, traditional and hybrid environment to keep everyone working together regardless of where they are or how they work. Join the 35,000-plus users at NASA, Siemens and Nestles who are already delivering success with our tool. Get started today for free! The post Backlog Refinement: A Quick Guide With Examples appeared first on ProjectManager. View the full article

For the four weeks ended March 2, pending sales were down 6.4% annually as prices continued to rise, pushing borrower monthly payments near their all-time high. View the full article

President Donald Trump appears to have backed off issuing an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education on Thursday, but is expected to do so soon, according to multiple reports including from the Wall Street Journal and NPR, who have seen a draft version and confirmed the details. The news comes a day after Linda McMahon was installed as the new education secretary, following her recent Senate confirmation. Here’s what you need to know. What is happening at the Department of Education? Dismantling the department has been a long time coming. In recent months, Trump has attacked it, calling it “a big con job,” while the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has slashed dozens of contracts; placed dozens of others on administrative leave; targeted its diversity programs; and gutted the Institute of Education Sciences, where many employees have been fired or suspended. Trump is all but guaranteed to face legal challenges, because only Congress can abolish federal agencies, and the administration’s push is just another example of how Trump is trying to cross the boundaries of his actual presidential power. Meanwhile, advocates and congressional leaders have been mounting a pushback campaign, including Republicans, whose districts rely heavily on federal funding from the Education Department. ​Educators, along with members of Congress, are also worried about what will happen to the department’s billions of dollars meant for our nation’s students and schools. So what does the Department of Education do anyway? Simply put, the Department of Education distributes billions of federal dollars to colleges and schools, and manages the federal government’s student loan portfolio. It also maintains and regulates vital services for our nation’s students, guaranteeing an education to low-income, homeless, and disabled kids, per the Associated Press. The department is the smallest cabinet-level agency, with around 4,500 employees. Polls show more than 60% of Americans oppose eliminating it. Interestingly, a majority of public K-12 school funding comes from the states, or locally, with only about 14% from federal funds. Universities and colleges, for their part, depend mostly on the department’s dollars for student financial aid and research grants, which have also been halted. Trump has tied the funding to his own political agenda, threatening to cut off federal money to all institutions that teach what he calls “critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content,” and favoring those who support his school choice programs and ending teacher tenure. View the full article

Intuit Mailchimp has announced a series of product enhancements, including a completely redesigned popup forms experience, now in beta. The new popup forms aim to help marketers effectively target and engage site visitors using branded, interactive forms for improved lead generation and customer growth. The feature allows businesses to leverage customizable, mobile-first designs to collect data directly from prospects, supporting AI-powered personalized marketing strategies. According to Mailchimp, the refreshed popup forms provide a seamless way for businesses to drive conversions with eight different offer types, including discount promotions, free shipping, newsletter signups, contests, and more. “Marketers are increasingly prioritizing ownership of their customer relationships and data, with lead generation as a crucial step toward long-term success,” said Fay Kallel, VP of Product and Design at Intuit Mailchimp. “Popup forms solve a top pain point for marketers and SMBs, allowing them to collect data directly from customers, creating a frictionless way to capture leads, grow their customers, and build deeper, more meaningful relationships. Compelling data capture provides the foundation for how marketers can leverage AI for more effective personalization, and we’re making it easier than ever for them to integrate this effective tool into their strategies.” A Revamped Approach to Lead Generation Mailchimp’s new popup forms feature unlimited design customization, providing access to over 80 fully-designed templates that businesses can modify to match their brand identity. The forms also include dynamic visitor targeting with custom filters and triggers, seamless zero-party data capture for customer profiling, and opt-in lead generation capabilities that can help businesses reduce acquisition costs and accelerate list growth. New Campaign and Upcoming Enhancements To promote the refreshed popup forms, Mailchimp has launched the “Popup Like It’s Hot” campaign. The campaign, developed by Mailchimp’s in-house creative agency, Wink Creative, includes a remixed version of an early 2000s hip-hop track to highlight the ease and effectiveness of popup forms. “Bringing this campaign to life over the iconic early 2000s hip-hop beat was an exciting challenge that pushed our creative boundaries,” said Jeremy Jones, Executive Creative at Wink Creative. “Our team, in collaboration with Breakfast for Dinner, leveraged a blend of still imagery and emerging AI technologies to produce something truly unique. This approach not only increased flexibility and efficiency in our creative process but also reimagined how we bring Mailchimp’s popup forms to market—delivering an innovative campaign that excites marketers about this powerful reinvention.” Mailchimp has also announced upcoming improvements to its integration with Meta’s lead ads portfolio. The update will allow for automatic syncing of new leads from Meta Business Suite—including Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram—directly into Mailchimp. Additionally, new features will include a simplified Customer Journey Builder, improved audience management with .xlsx Microsoft Excel file imports, and access to promo codes in the SMS editor for customers with SMS marketing plans. Image: Intuit Mailchimp This article, "Mailchimp Introduces Enhanced Popup Forms and New Marketing Features" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Intuit Mailchimp has announced a series of product enhancements, including a completely redesigned popup forms experience, now in beta. The new popup forms aim to help marketers effectively target and engage site visitors using branded, interactive forms for improved lead generation and customer growth. The feature allows businesses to leverage customizable, mobile-first designs to collect data directly from prospects, supporting AI-powered personalized marketing strategies. According to Mailchimp, the refreshed popup forms provide a seamless way for businesses to drive conversions with eight different offer types, including discount promotions, free shipping, newsletter signups, contests, and more. “Marketers are increasingly prioritizing ownership of their customer relationships and data, with lead generation as a crucial step toward long-term success,” said Fay Kallel, VP of Product and Design at Intuit Mailchimp. “Popup forms solve a top pain point for marketers and SMBs, allowing them to collect data directly from customers, creating a frictionless way to capture leads, grow their customers, and build deeper, more meaningful relationships. Compelling data capture provides the foundation for how marketers can leverage AI for more effective personalization, and we’re making it easier than ever for them to integrate this effective tool into their strategies.” A Revamped Approach to Lead Generation Mailchimp’s new popup forms feature unlimited design customization, providing access to over 80 fully-designed templates that businesses can modify to match their brand identity. The forms also include dynamic visitor targeting with custom filters and triggers, seamless zero-party data capture for customer profiling, and opt-in lead generation capabilities that can help businesses reduce acquisition costs and accelerate list growth. New Campaign and Upcoming Enhancements To promote the refreshed popup forms, Mailchimp has launched the “Popup Like It’s Hot” campaign. The campaign, developed by Mailchimp’s in-house creative agency, Wink Creative, includes a remixed version of an early 2000s hip-hop track to highlight the ease and effectiveness of popup forms. “Bringing this campaign to life over the iconic early 2000s hip-hop beat was an exciting challenge that pushed our creative boundaries,” said Jeremy Jones, Executive Creative at Wink Creative. “Our team, in collaboration with Breakfast for Dinner, leveraged a blend of still imagery and emerging AI technologies to produce something truly unique. This approach not only increased flexibility and efficiency in our creative process but also reimagined how we bring Mailchimp’s popup forms to market—delivering an innovative campaign that excites marketers about this powerful reinvention.” Mailchimp has also announced upcoming improvements to its integration with Meta’s lead ads portfolio. The update will allow for automatic syncing of new leads from Meta Business Suite—including Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram—directly into Mailchimp. Additionally, new features will include a simplified Customer Journey Builder, improved audience management with .xlsx Microsoft Excel file imports, and access to promo codes in the SMS editor for customers with SMS marketing plans. Image: Intuit Mailchimp This article, "Mailchimp Introduces Enhanced Popup Forms and New Marketing Features" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

There are nearly two million apps on the iOS App Store, and a lot of them aren't worth your time. That's why many of us, when considering a new app, turn to reviews: You want to see what other users' experiences were like with the app—whether they loved it, liked it, or loathed it. Personally, the current review system works fine for me. I scan some reviews, and generally get a sense of whether the app is right for me. If I'm feeling particularly analytical, I'll even adjust the filters, perhaps to see which reviews are most critical (so it's not just a bunch of fluff) or ones that are most recent, to see what customers thought of the latest version of the app. But it's 2025, which means one thing: AI. We can't continue to live in the past. We must embrace the future of artificial intelligence, so say the tech companies. Why do 30 seconds of scanning, when the AI can cut that work down to 20 seconds? Perhaps even 15? Apple's AI App Store review summariesWith iOS 18.4, currently in beta, Apple is testing AI-generated summaries for reviews in the App Store. According to Apple, these summaries pull from "highlights and key information" from reviews for apps and games and are updated at least once a week, if the app or game has enough reviews to support it. These summaries will appear directly beneath the rating for the app or game, under the heading "Reviews Summary." Apple says review summaries are currently only available in English for a "limited number of apps and games" in the United States. The company plans to expand the feature to more countries and languages over the year. Here's the thing about features like this: they're largely ignorable. If you love them, great! You can take a peek at the AI-generated summary and decide for yourself whether you'd like to read the reviews further. If you don't like them, also great! Scroll right past to the reviews. That latter approach is likely the one I'd take. For one, I don't trust AI to get the gist right, even if the situation is relatively low-stakes. But, like I alluded to earlier, I also don't think it saves that much time to read an AI summary versus scanning the reviews yourself. You might even miss some interesting insights the AI thought wasn't important enough to make the review, or see some nuance that went over the AI's, uh, "head." Apple is far from the only company to summarize reviews with AI. Google, Amazon, even NewEgg have all dabbled in this practice, so it's not like Apple is breaking the mold here. But it does slightly rub me the wrong way—if we start relying on AI to summarize content like this, who is the original content being written for? Hundreds if not thousands of people are writing reviews of their experience, but if you only read the summary, those people are really writing their reviews for the AI—not other human beings. iOS 18.4 is due out sometime in April. You can experience these summaries now if you install the beta, but if you'd prefer not to risk running temperamental software on your iPhone, you can simply wait until next month. View the full article

As an app designed to facilitate gay hookups, popular site Sniffies has had a limitation since it started in 2018—it was only accessible via web browser. Until Monday, when the map-based cruising site debuted its Apple-approved iOS app. Building an app that complies with Apple’s notoriously stringent content moderation—and total ban on apps that directly serve adult content—was a challenge for Sniffies, which wears its sexuality proudly. Its users, which it calls “cruisers,” do, too. Many users put nude images as their cover photos, meaning adult content is visible from the second the platform is opened in a browser. The company needed to tame the experience for Apple to get on board, without losing what most users come to Sniffies for: sex. “We needed to be very strategic about this, to get around Apple’s strict not safe for work content policies, but also keep the magic of Sniffies,” says Eli Martin, Sniffies’ chief marketing officer. “The key was giving cruisers control of the experience.” How Sniffies met Apple’s content safety standards Sniffies leadership weren’t begging to get on the App Store. Its web app format worked well, particularly for the men who aren’t out or are exploring their sexuality, who Martin says make up a core—and growing—part of its user base. But fans wanted a native app, and it was difficult to compete with the market’s heavyweights like Grindr without the App Store’s discovery tools. When they finally decided to make the move, the Sniffies team looked to bigger apps like Reddit and X, both of which host explicit content, as models. Similar to those sites’ apps, when you download the new Sniffies app, it is in “Vanilla mode” (internally, the company calls this “deep safe”). Anything explicit is blurred; to unblur the photos, users must follow a link to the browser version, where they can change their settings. Then, the app will respond to the changed settings and allow users to see graphic content. [Photo: Sniffies] “There was certainly back-and-forth with the App Store and figuring out how to make it work on both ends,” Martin says, estimating the process lasted about a year and a half. “It took way longer than we thought, but it seems like Apple was very open to us being a part of the store as long as we could meet the guidelines.” They had to make some concessions. Sniffies’ anonymous log-in function, which allowed users to enter with only a birthdate, won’t be accessible through the iOS app.(This anonymous log-in feature has left the door open to the abuse of minors, per The Information.) There’s a “friction” to the process of creating an account that will be necessary in the App Store, Martin says; users can’t just download and see the map. But there are also benefits: Some users report the map being faster, and the app’s notification system is now more robust than it was just with the web version. Preserving the cruising spirit While the company doesn’t yet know which audiences will gravitate towards which mediums, Martin has his suspicions. Those “DL and curious” guys, as he describes them, will likely stay on the webapp, not wanting to download something to their phone. (This is a problem with Grindr, he points out: Users download and delete the app, over and over.) But the iOS launch opens them up to a new audience: the users that were never going to navigate to the Sniffies link. This audience was loud. Martin recounts years of comments across the Sniffies social media, begging them to get in the App Store. His team is now going through each and every one of these comments, telling them to download. App users are also privvy to the larger brand world that Sniffies has built around its main offering. The company has invested deeply in its (often explicit) marketing, which spans an apparel shop, its Hush lifestyle blog, and its Cruising Confessions podcast. The company has also sponsors in-person events and parties, echoing the pushes from other dating apps. Even in the app store, Sniffies proclaims that it is “for cruisers, by cruisers.” Martin points out that the company’s marketing strategy is based on “foreplay,” teasing the app’s sexuality without being completely blatant with it. They can do that in the app store, too. But does Martin see access to a mainstream audience as a threat to the more clandestine nature of the web app that made Sniffies unique? “I personally am not too worried about that,” Martin says. “We’ve only seen better results for cruisers the larger we’ve gotten. The important thing is the culture. We’ve already set the groundwork.” View the full article

Big things coming from small beginnings might sound like a cliche, but it’s rooted in truth. Project managers understand that before embarking on large endeavors, it’s best to test the waters. The phrase for that in project management is a pilot project. What is a pilot project? We’ll get to that and the industries that use a pilot plan before initiating big, expensive and complex projects. We’ll then explain how to execute a pilot project plan, what should be included, the benefits of doing so and much more. What Is a Pilot Project? A pilot project is a small-scale, preliminary study or test run of a new concept, process, product or service before full-scale implementation. It helps organizations assess feasibility, identify potential challenges and refine their approach based on real-world feedback. The key characteristic of a pilot project includes being of limited scope. These projects are conducted on a small scale to minimize risks and costs, and this test phase is used to evaluate the effectiveness of an idea before full deployment. It’s a learning opportunity, which helps identify issues, gather data and make improvements, as well as mitigate risks by detecting failures early. This decision-making tool provides results that help stakeholders decide whether to scale up, modify or abandon the project. But beyond the pilot project meaning, it’s still a project. Whether used to test a new software system, launch new infrastructure or develop a new process before full adoption, it still requires project management software to reap all those benefits. ProjectManager is award-winning project and portfolio management software that has multiple project views to plan, manage and track pilot projects in real time. Project managers can schedule tasks, resources and cost but also link task dependencies to avoid delays and cost overruns, filter for the critical path to identify essential tasks and set a baseline to track progress in real time. The project team can use kanban boards or task lists to execute their work, while the calendar view keeps stakeholders updated. Get started with ProjectManager today for free. /wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Gantt-CTA-2025.jpgProjectManager’s Gantt charts schedule, manage and track pilot projects. Learn more What Industries Execute Pilot Projects? Many industries use pilot projects to test innovations, improve processes and reduce risks before full-scale implementation. Below is a brief overview of how pilot projects apply in different sectors: Construction: Pilot projects in construction test new building materials, techniques or project management strategies on a smaller scale before large-scale deployment. This helps in evaluating safety, efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Pharmaceuticals: Pharmaceutical companies conduct pilot studies in drug development and clinical trials. These small-scale trials assess a drug’s safety, efficacy and potential side effects before proceeding to large-scale testing and regulatory approval. Telecommunications: Telecom providers test new technologies, such as 5G networks, in select locations before nationwide rollouts. These projects help evaluate network performance, customer experience and infrastructure requirements. Manufacturing: Manufacturers use pilot projects to test new production processes, automation technologies and supply chain optimizations. This reduces waste, improves efficiency and ensures quality before large-scale implementation. Software Development and IT: In software and IT, pilot projects involve testing new applications, systems or cybersecurity measures with a small user group before a full rollout. This allows companies to gather user feedback, fix bugs and optimize performance. When to Execute a Pilot Project A pilot project should be conducted when an organization wants to test a new idea, process or technology before full-scale implementation. The ideal situations for executing a pilot project include the following. Introducing a New Product or Service When launching an innovative product or service to gauge market acceptance. To gather customer feedback before mass production or a wider release. Implementing New Technologies Before integrating a new system, software or technology into business operations. To test compatibility, functionality and user adoption. Improving Processes and Operations When optimizing workflows or introducing automation in manufacturing or service industries. To identify potential bottlenecks and make necessary adjustments. Reducing Risks in High-Investment Projects When a full-scale rollout involves high costs or risks, such as in construction or pharmaceuticals. To test the feasibility and avoid costly mistakes. Meeting Regulatory or Compliance Requirements When operating in highly regulated industries (e.g., healthcare, finance, pharmaceuticals) where compliance is essential. To ensure adherence to legal and industry standards before full deployment. Testing Market Demand and Feasibility When entering a new market or launching a product in a new region. To evaluate customer behavior, preferences and potential challenges. What Is a Pilot Plan? A pilot plan is a strategic guide that outlines how a pilot project will be conducted. It serves as a blueprint for testing a new idea, process or technology on a small scale before a full-scale rollout. The plan ensures that the pilot is well-structured and manageable and provides meaningful insights for decision-making. A well-developed pilot plan helps organizations minimize risks, control costs and identify potential challenges early. It clarifies how the test will be executed, how success will be measured and what steps will be taken based on the results. By running a pilot with a clear plan, businesses and industries can refine their approach, make data-driven decisions and increase the chances of successful implementation when scaling up. Next, let’s look at what makes up a successful pilot plan. /wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Pilot-project-example-featured-image.jpg Get your free Pilot Project Plan Example Use this free Pilot Project Plan Example for Word to manage your projects better. Download Word File What Should Be Included in a Pilot Plan? A pilot plan is essential for guiding a pilot project toward success. It outlines the purpose, scope, resources and evaluation criteria to ensure a structured approach. Below are key elements that should be included in a well-designed pilot plan: Goals and Objectives of the Pilot Project Clearly define what the pilot aims to achieve. Goals should be specific, measurable and aligned with the broader organizational strategy. Objectives help determine whether the pilot is successful and inform decisions on scaling up. Pilot Project Scope Define the boundaries of the pilot, including what will be tested, the timeframe and the target group or location. The scope ensures clarity and prevents the project from expanding beyond manageable limits. Resource Requirements Identify the human, technical and financial resources needed to execute the pilot effectively. This includes personnel, equipment, technology, and support systems required for a smooth operation. Estimated Cost of the Pilot Project Provide a financial estimate covering all necessary expenses, such as staffing, materials, technology and operational costs. A well-planned budget ensures cost control and financial feasibility. Stakeholder Identification and Mapping Recognize key stakeholders involved in or affected by the pilot. Mapping their roles, expectations and influence helps in effective communication and decision-making throughout the pilot. Key Deliverables and Milestones Outline the major outputs and milestones that mark progress during the pilot. These checkpoints help track performance, keep the project on schedule and make necessary adjustments. Pilot Project Success Criteria Define the benchmarks that will determine whether the pilot was successful. Success criteria may include performance metrics, user feedback, cost savings, or efficiency improvements. Lessons Learned Document Capture insights, challenges, and best practices from the pilot. This document serves as a reference for future projects and helps refine processes before full-scale implementation. Key Benefits of Conducting a Pilot Project A pilot project provides a controlled environment to test a new initiative before full-scale implementation. It minimizes risks, optimizes resource allocation and ensures better decision-making. Below are some key benefits of conducting a pilot project. 1. Confirms the Feasibility of a Full-Scale Project By running a small-scale test, organizations can determine whether the project is viable. If the pilot proves successful, it provides confidence to move forward with a larger rollout. 2. Helps Identify Unforeseen Risks A pilot helps uncover potential challenges that may not have been initially considered. Identifying risks early allows for proactive solutions, preventing costly mistakes in the full-scale implementation. 3. Allows to Gather Stakeholder Feedback and Requirements Stakeholders, including employees, customers, and partners, can provide valuable input during the pilot phase. Their feedback helps refine and align the project with user needs and expectations. 4. Validates Project Assumptions and Constraints A pilot tests key assumptions, such as expected performance, resource availability and operational constraints. This validation ensures that the project is based on real-world data rather than just predictions. 5. Helps Accurately Estimate Project Costs A pilot provides a more precise understanding of the financial requirements for full-scale implementation. It helps refine budget estimates, ensuring better financial planning and resource allocation. Pilot Project Plan Example The pilot project plan example below helps to better understand what a pilot project looks like in a real-life scenario. Imagine a battery recycling company that has developed an innovative method of extracting metals from used batteries with a low environmental impact and lower costs than traditional methods. /wp-content/uploads/2025/03/pilot-project-example-1.png The battery recycling company is trying to obtain a grant from the United States Department of Energy (DOE). To do so, the DOE has provided funds for the construction of a pilot recycling facility to further test the company’s technology and confirm its feasibility and scalability. How to Manage a Pilot Project With ProjectManager Managing a pilot project effectively requires the same tools needed to control a project of any size. It requires features to track progress, allocate resources and measure success. ProjectManager is award-winning project and portfolio management platform that helps teams streamline pilot projects with multiple project views and provides robust planning, tracking and reporting features. Robust Resource Management and Cost Tracking Tools Resource management begins with scheduling resources efficiently and tracking personnel, equipment and materials in real time. Then when onboarding, project managers can set their team’s availability, including PTO, vacation, global holidays and skill sets. This helps simplify the assignment of tasks to the right people at the right time. The platform includes cost-tracking tools that help monitor expenses against the budget to ensure financial control throughout the pilot project. These tools include secure timesheets that streamline payroll and track labor costs. With the color-coded workload chart, project managers get an overview of resource allocation and can balance workload to optimize team performance and prevent resource bottlenecks. /wp-content/uploads/2024/05/timesheet-lightmode-good-version-lots-of-tasks.png Real-Time Project Management Dashboards and Reports Managing resources is important to keep pilot projects on schedule and within their budget. When a baseline is set on the Gantt chart, ProjectManager can compare actual progress against the plan. For a high-level view of the pilot project or multiple projects, use the real-time dashboards that provide an overview of project status, key milestones and progress metrics on easy-to-read charts. Project managers can track performance indicators such as task completion rates, budget utilization and risk factors. Additionally, custom reports enable data-driven decision-making so stakeholders can assess the success of the pilot project. /wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Dashboard-light-mode.jpg Related Content For those who want to read more about managing pilot projects, below are some recent posts we’ve published on the topic. What Is a Feasibility Study? How to Conduct One for Your Project Feasibility Study Template Cost-Benefit Analysis: A Quick Guide with Examples and Templates Cost Benefit Analysis Template Project Initiation: How to Start Your Project Off Right ProjectManager is online project and portfolio management software that connects teams whether they’re in the office or out in the field. They can share files, comment at the task level and stay updated with email and in-app notifications. Join teams at Avis, Nestle and Siemens who use our software to deliver successful projects. Get started with ProjectManager today for free. The post Pilot Project: Meaning, Benefits and Example appeared first on ProjectManager. View the full article

Ironically enough, a divisive moment in the Oval Office last weekend seems to have brought the entire internet together. When Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky visited the White House on February 28, ostensibly to hammer out plans for a peace agreement between his country and Russia, he probably didn’t expect to get berated by both Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. The ensuing, historically fiery exchange appeared to catch him off guard. Similarly, most people who watched the spectacle play out on live TV may not have expected Vance’s role in it to explode into a meteor shower of memes among people of all political stripes. But that’s exactly what has happened. “Have you said thank you once” https://t.co/kCNfr59RAn pic.twitter.com/01mm34xg1u — New Liberals 🌐🇺🇦 (@CNLiberalism) March 1, 2025 Anyone wandering around X at just about any moment this week is bound to come across images of Vance’s boyish face enhanced to look cartoonishly cherubic. (The surrounding beard adds a perverse dissonance.) The meme pokes fun at how petulant some say Vance came across by getting angry at Zelensky’s insufficient gratitude over U.S. aid that Vance himself had nothing to do with. The archetypal version features an altered Vance sitting smugly in the Oval Office, with a caption that reads: “You have to say pwease and tank you, Mistow Zensky.” As a result, the word ‘pwease’ is now so associated with both the Zelensky meeting and the meme that followed, some X users now refer to Vance as ‘the pwease guy.’ The origins of the JD Vance meme actually predate the doomed Zelensky meeting by many months. It began last October, when Republican congressman Mike Collins tweeted a photo of Vance that had been digitally altered in a flattering way. X users noticed the “yassified” portrait and responded by going in another, decidedly less flattering direction. With ever-weirder alterations of Vance’s face last fall, the kindling for the “pwease” meme spread around the firepit of the internet. All it took was Vance going aggro in the Oval Office to light a match underneath it. For every 100 likes I will turn JD Vance into a progressively apple cheeked baby pic.twitter.com/WgGS9IhAfY — 7/11 Truther (@DaveMcNamee3000) October 2, 2024 Throughout this past week, the JD Vance meme continued to evolve, branching out into stranger spaces. It now includes pop culture figures like Pennywise the clown from It, the Teletubbies, and the oafish village boy holding a lollipop in Shrek Forever After, other political leaders including Kim Jong Un, but also increasingly esoteric and abstract variations. (Vance as Las Vegas’s The Sphere, anyone?) However, what may be most strange about the meme—which has gotten so ubiquitous many now claim to have forgotten what Vance’s face actually looks like—is its bipartisan appeal. Obviously, left-leaning social media users are into infantilizing the Vice President. Not only is it a chance to mock the opposition, but an indirect way to show support for Ukraine in their war with Russia. It’s no wonder popular accounts like anti-Trump media group Meidas Touch and even The Daily Show have gotten in on the action. Less obvious is why Vance’s supporters are also into the meme. Polymarket, a MAGA-friendly, Peter Thiel-backed betting platform has put Vance memes in multiple tweets throughout the week, for instance, and many of the Vice President’s fans suspect the hyper-online Vance is enjoying his own memedom. (At least one reporter’s account backs that up.) “actually i think it’s good that people are making me look insane” is a very funny way to play this https://t.co/IYHs4Q4hql pic.twitter.com/CJ0eC3NKZW — rat king 🐀 (@MikeIsaac) March 6, 2025 It’s unclear exactly why the online right has embraced a meme targeting one of their own. The most generous explanation is that they’re still ebullient from last November’s victory, and secure enough in their party’s current dominance to admit these images are funny. Another possibility is that the 4Chan-bred, meme-savvy faction of Trump’s base never much cared for Vance—either because of his former resistance to Trump or for more disgusting reasons—and are happy to throw him under the bus for the sake of some lulz. Some X users, however, claim their embrace of the JD Vance meme is a way to neutralize the left’s use of it. If Vance’s supporters are also in on the joke, the logic suggests, they can’t also be stung by it. (As when liberals repurposed the Biden-bashing “Let’s Go, Brandon” into the Dark Brandon meme.) While some X denizens seem pleased that the meme is bringing both sides together, others seem to see it as a zero-sum meme war. When the Never Trump conservative PAC The Lincoln Project tweeted Weird Vance after Tuesday night’s congressional address, one user responded, “It’s only funny when we do it,” and added a slur for good measure. View the full article

At the height of the summer of 2020’s “racial reckoning,” bright yellow paint filled the streets just north of the White House. Overnight, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had ordered a giant street mural to say “Black Lives Matter” in 35-foot capital lettering. That street art became the center of Black Lives Matter Plaza, and a few months later, D.C.’s City Council voted that the name and mural would become a permanent fixture of the city. Five years, two elections, and a large cultural shift later, Mayor Bowser has announced that BLM Plaza will be painted over. “The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” Bowser said in a statement published Tuesday. The move is one small piece of the Trump administration’s continued attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Volunteers painting “Black Lives Matter” on the street near the White House on June 05, 2020. [Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images] At a Wednesday press conference, Bowser told reporters that there were “bigger fish to fry” within the nation’s capital. She also confirmed to NBC that her decision came after talks with the White House, but she did not specify anything further. Bowser’s office did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment. Republican Rep. Andy Clyde introduced legislation Monday that would withhold apportionment funds from D.C. until Mayor Bowser renamed BLM Plaza to Liberty Plaza. However, Bowser said at the press conference that her decision had been made before Clyde introduced the bill. She added that a replacement mural will focus on America’s 250th birthday, and a new name would be decided after “citywide discussion.” Scholars at University of Illinois once argued that BLM Plaza is an important landmark that is a “powerful symbolic reinsertion of widespread social and civic support for Black struggle.” They wrote that it can be dignifying for people of color to see such affirmative support “in an area of the U.S.’ most politically prominent real estate.” View the full article

Google appears to be testing channel reporting functionality for Performance Max campaigns, potentially addressing a major advertiser criticism of the automated campaign type. Driving the news: Documentation about Channel reporting coming to Performance Max was reported by Kirk Williams, Founder of Zato, with Google Search Lead Tetsuo Konno tagged in the reference on X. A screenshot from the Google Think event in Amsterdam was shared by Arjan Schoorl showing apparent channel breakdowns on LinkedIn: Christopher Bell, Head of PPC at Kelkoo, claims a large advertiser account has already received access to the feature. Why we care. Since launching in 2021, Performance Max has faced sustained criticism for its “black box” approach that consolidates multiple Google channels without providing advertisers visibility into channel-specific performance. If Google provides insight into how budgets are distributed across its various channels this could enable better optimization and accountability. Between the lines. Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin has been asked about the feature but has not yet responded, suggesting the company may not be ready to announce the functionality broadly. What they’re saying. “I think Google is just testing the water to reassure customers when concerns are raised regarding high none-Shopping Traffic,” Bell said, indicating the feature may be designed to address advertiser transparency concerns. What we’re watching. If implemented widely, channel reporting would mark a significant shift in Google’s approach to Performance Max, potentially giving advertisers greater insight into how their budgets are being allocated across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and other Google properties. View the full article

Mark your calendars: It’s almost time to set your clocks ahead one hour as we “spring forward” into Daylight Saving Time this Sunday, March 9 at 2 a.m. Tired of changing your clocks? You’re not alone. Both President Donald Trump and senior adviser Elon Musk have said they want to end the annoying seasonal time changes, by making Daylight Saving Time (DST) permanent (meaning that after setting our clocks forward, we would not set them backward anymore). That’s in line with a 2023 YouGov poll that found nearly two-thirds (62%) of Americans want to end the practice, though only half prefer to keep DST permanent, versus keeping Standard Time permanent instead (meaning we would not set our clocks forward anymore). As president, Trump previously indicated support for such a change, tweeting in 2019, “Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is O.K. with me!” He seemed to reiterate his stance in December, posting to Truth Social that once he was in office, “The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate” the time changes, which he called “inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.” (Note: It’s not clear exactly what Trump’s stance was, as he wrote about eliminating “Daylight Saving Time,” not the time changes specifically. However, given his previous stance, many have interpreted it to mean eliminating the time changes.) On X, Musk posted a similar rallying cry, saying people want to “abolish the annoying time changes!” So far, the Trump administration hasn’t moved forward on the issue. However, health experts say Trump and Musk, as well as lawmakers that support making DST permanent, have it backward. Instead, they argue, Standard Time should be made permanent. Here, we break down some arguments for sticking with Daylight Saving Time versus Standard Time permanently. Health experts say stick with Standard Time The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) also wants to do away with the time change, but supports replacing Daylight Saving Time with permanent Standard Time, because it best aligns better with the sun and our natural circadian rhythms. “By causing the human body clock to be misaligned with the natural environment, Daylight Saving Time increases risks to our physical health, mental well-being, and public safety,” said the AASM’s Dr. M. Adeel Rishi, lead author of the academy’s position statement. “Permanent standard time is the optimal choice for health and safety.” Research backs that up, saying the one-hour change disrupts the body’s natural sleep-wake cycle, which regulates body temperature, hormone release, and alertness. That could explain why Daylight Saving transitions lead to a spike in traffic accidents. Keeping Daylight Saving Time permanently may make people happier In the 2023 YouGov poll, those in favor of making DST permanent said they preferred later sunrises and sunsets, giving them more daylight at the end of the day. The most compelling reason to make Daylight Saving Time permanent is that it seems to make people happier, with research showing seasonal increases in sun time were associated with decreased mental health distress. Where does Congress stand on the issue? Daylight Saving Time was originally adopted as a wartime measure in 1942 intended to maximize daylight hours in the summer, and has long been unpopular with lawmakers who tried to make the time change permanent with the now-stalled 2023 Sunshine Protection Act. The bipartisan bill, sponsored by then-Florida Senator Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State, passed unanimously in the Senate but failed to pass in the U.S. House of Representatives because lawmakers could not agree on whether to keep Standard Time or Daylight Saving Time. Do all states observe Daylight Saving Time? While Americans in most U.S. states change their clocks, Hawaii and Arizona are two exceptions, with both keeping to Standard Time. When is the Daylight Saving time change in 2025? Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. begins this Sunday, March 9 at 2 a.m. local time, meaning people will lose an hour of sleep but gain an hour of sunlight. It always starts on the second Sunday in March, and ends on the first Sunday in November. This contrasts with the U.K. and European Union, where it begins on the last Sunday in March (Sunday, March 30 at 1 a.m.) and ends on the last Sunday in October (Sunday, October 26 at 1 a.m). View the full article

As the spring gets closer and closer, I was excited to see a new trend on TikTok that claims you can easily clean fans—a pretty tedious chore—just by spritzing the machine and covering it with a plastic bag. I tried it out on two different fans today and the results weren't great. Here's what happened and what you can (and should) do instead. My attempt at the TikTok fan-cleaning hackFirst of all, here's how it's supposed to look and work when you use a cleaning solution and garbage or plastic bag to "clean" your fan: There are tons of videos like this on TikTok and they all look pretty effective, so I gave it a real try. Different creators recommend different cleaning solutions, like rubbing alcohol or dish soap, but I decided to fill my spray bottle with diluted Fabuloso, the same thing I'd clean the fan with if I were doing it manually. First, I saturated my tower fan with some heavy-handed spray, then put the bag over it. Nothing happened. No dust or dirt came out into the bag whatsoever. I decided to take this as a personal win, honestly, and chalk it up to my fan simply not being disgusting and dirty enough. The goal here is ostensibly to dampen the dust within the fan to the point that it becomes heavy and dense enough to actually be blown out of the vents. I simply didn't have enough dirt! Useless. Credit: Lindsey Ellefson My small table fan, however, definitely did; it was gross to even look at. I sprayed that one down, put the bag over it for a full 10 minutes, and... nothing. All the dirt was still visible when I removed the bag. None—and I mean none—came off. But worse, my fan got too wet and malfunctioned. It wouldn't turn off. That, I think is the primary problem with this supposed hack: You can't unplug the device like you normally would when cleaning something with electrical components, since you need it to be able to blow air in order to complete the trick. Unfortunately for me, my fan charges while it's plugged in, so even unplugging it did nothing. It had to run for an hour with water inside before it regained the ability to be turned off. I unquestionably damaged and/or broke it by doing this. Credit: Lindsey Ellefson In short, not only does this hack not clean the fan vents or blades, but it has the potential to damage your fan. I don't care how many videos you see of people appearing to pull this off successfully. It's not worth attempting. How to clean a fan insteadIn this case, it's best to do things the old-school way. Unplug your fan. On larger box fans, you should be able to unscrew and detach the front plate, giving you access to the interior parts while you plop the front plate into soapy water (your tub works great for this). From there, wipe down the blades with soapy water. If you can't do that or don't want to, just use a vacuum with a brush attachment to suck dirt and grime out through the vents and slats. Use soapy water to wipe down the exterior, including the cord, but don't get any moisture near where the cord connects or any of the buttons. They can be wiped with a plain microfiber cloth. Here's a more comprehensive breakdown. While I am sad that the nifty trick didn't work, I'm glad for two reasons: I can dissuade you from trying it, first of all, and my apartment smells great now that two of my fans have dispersed Fabuloso water through the air. It's the little things. View the full article

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: I work in an office with two full-time employees, a manager, and 80+ contract employees. Jane, the other full-time employee, and I both support the contract employees in vital, yet different ways. Let’s say that she schedules appointments, and I process payments. Each office in our company has a scheduler and a payment processor, and while both are technically hourly, each cohort has different duties and perhaps a different culture. Payment processors have many more responsibilities than schedulers, and both are occasionally asked to pick up an outside task or six. Here’s where things get tricky. Both Jane and I have had salaried positions, and Jane is from outside the industry in a larger, more corporate environment. We treat our jobs quite differently. There’s no time clock, but the payment processors tends to prioritize customer service to the contract employees/getting things done efficiently over keeping within eight hours. We frequently stay a little late and often put in a couple hours over a weekend (at home) so as not to return to an anxiety-producing avalanche of work. Depending on the time of year, I probably work 42-50-hour weeks, the latter during super busy times/events. My impression of the schedulers is that many (but not all) of them are the same. We don’t get overtime, but we get flex time, which admittedly I can forget to track/use. Jane, by contrast, leaves exactly on time (or early, according to some), sticks only to her assigned duties, and demands flex time as compensation for even 15 minutes spent outside her work hours. To be fair, she legally has the right to do this, but it feels quite different from our corporate culture. Jane gets a lot done within her daily hours but is unavailable outside that time, even for sudden crises. This is difficult for the contract employees, whose jobs are not locked into a neat 9-5, Monday through Friday routine. While they respect my personal time and space, the contract workers know that if difficulty arises, I will be there. Meanwhile, there was incident in which a contract employee came to Jane 40 minutes before the end of an early-release day with a task that would take at least an hour and she firmly said no. She was working from home that day and had no plans but felt it unfair to be asked at such late notice. The contact employee complained all the way up the chain of leadership and another of Jane’s cohort had to step in and do the project. This has led to some dissatisfaction and (unfortunately) comparison between us. Personally, I get where Jane is coming from – especially legally – but I also see that it fits neither company culture nor my personal work ethic. The company was incredibly good to me when I needed to take a long family leave, and the contract employees and management have been generous about sharing some of their bonuses. I know that Jane resents me for working beyond my eight hours and once reported me to HR for it. (They did nothing.) But am I setting a bad precedent? Am I being unfair to Jane? I am not intentionally trying to look better in the eyes of the contact workers or corporate leaders; I am just trying to do a good job and help the company along. Yeah, you’re probably setting a bad precedent, and also being a bit unfair to Jane! If you’re working for free as a non-exempt worker, you’re putting pressure on colleagues to do the same. You’re also exposing your company to legal liability, since they can be subject to fines and penalties for allowing you to do that. For what it’s worth, the whole set-up might be illegal. You said you get comp time instead of overtime, so I want to make sure you know that in the U.S. it’s illegal to pay overtime in comp time instead of in money. The exception is if the comp time is taken in the same work week that it was earned in. For example, if you work nine hours on Monday and take an hour of comp time on Tuesday to balance it out, and as a result your total hours for the week don’t go over 40, your company wouldn’t owe you overtime. But if you work nine hours on Monday and don’t take the comp time until a few weeks later, your company owes you overtime pay for all hours over 40 you worked in that original week. (Also, some states calculate overtime by the day instead of the week, meaning in those states you can’t even do the take-it-that-week plan.) It’s your prerogative if you prefer the comp time set-up and don’t plan to require your employer to follow the law … but in doing that, you’re making it harder for people like Jane who do rightly expect the company to meet its legal obligations to pay them. If it’s a problem that Jane refuses to be available outside of her scheduled hours, that’s something her manager should address with her. If the job requires occasional work outside of normal hours, they need to clearly explain that. (But then they also need to pay for that time. Any chance Jane is so rigid about never working outside of 9-5 because she knows she won’t be paid for it?) If you’re ending up with more than your fair share of the work because Jane refuses to stretch her hours and so people come to you instead, that’s something you should talk to your manager about as well. Maybe that means they talk to Jane about adjusting her availability (and paying her for it). Maybe it means that you get compensated at a higher rate in recognition of your greater contributions. I don’t know — but if it’s causing problems, that’s squarely in “talk to your boss” territory. Right now you’re framing this all as “Jane is out of sync with our corporate culture, and that culture works fine for the rest of us” … but when part of your culture is “we break the law,” that’s not really a good way to look at it. View the full article

The nomination of Jonathan McKernan to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau moves to the full Senate, where he's likely to be confirmed along party lines. View the full article

This webinar explores a structured approach to managing marketing campaigns from start to finish, focusing on practical tools and techniques that drive efficiency and impact. Ideal for marketing campaign managers and project leads, the session covers best practices for planning, executing, and measuring campaigns, with an emphasis on collaboration. Join us on Thursday, March 13th for From Strategy to Execution: Managing Complex Marketing Campaigns, and learn how to integrate key tools and methodologies, while ensuring your campaigns run smoothly and deliver measurable results. Our speakers will cover: Strategic Planning & Goal Setting Building a Collaborative Campaign Framework Data-Driven Decision-Making & Campaign Optimization Save your spot here! View the full article

Macy’s announced in its fourth-quarter and fiscal-year 2024 earnings report on Thursday that it expects another year of declining sales as the department store chain continues reshaping its footprint to focus on better-performing locations. The retailer projected fiscal 2025 sales between $21 billion and $21.4 billion, down from $22.3 billion last year—closely aligning with analyst expectations of $21.34 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. Macy’s net sales in the latest quarter fell 4.3% to $7.8 billion. Across the company’s brands—Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Bluemercury—comparable sales in the fourth quarter declined 1.1%. However, in owned and licensed businesses as well as its online marketplace, comparable sales inched up 0.2%, the highest increase since early 2022. For the full year, comparable sales were expected to decline between 0.5% and 2% year-over-year, with adjusted earnings projected between $2.05 and $2.25 per share. Analysts polled by FactSet had anticipated slight comparable sales growth and earnings of $2.29 per share, the Wall Street Journal reported. Closing stores, selling assets Despite the mixed results, Macy’s said it saw progress with its “Bold New Chapter” strategy. The company previously announced plans to shutter 150 stores by the end of fiscal 2026 (January 31, 2027), leaving it with 350 locations. These remaining stores are Macy’s “go-forward” locations, in which the retailer said it would be prioritizing investment. As part of this plan, Macy’s said it closed 64 stores in fiscal 2024, which it described as “non-go-forward” locations. The closures helped Macy’s bring in more money from real estate. For fiscal 2024, Macy’s made $144 million in “asset sale gains,” more than double the figure from last year, when asset sale gains were $61 million. The company noted in the earnings report that removing non-go-forward Macy’s locations contributed to current year asset sale gains. Additionally, Macy’s delivered an update on its “First 50 locations” strategy. As outlined in a company earnings presentation, the strategy involved selecting the top 50 performing stores across its network to implement new retail initiatives. Its goal was to improve staffing, product displays, and customer experience enhancements. So far, these stores have performed better than the bulk of the chain. Macy’s First 50 locations delivered a fourth consecutive quarter of comparable sales growth, up 0.8% on an owned basis and up 1.2% on an owned-plus-licensed basis, the company said. “As we enter the second year of our strategy, we plan to scale initiatives that are resonating with our customers to drive long-term profitable growth and further unlock shareholder value,” said Tony Spring in Thursday’s earnings report. Macy’s stock (NYSE: M) was flat at about $13.28 in midday trading. View the full article

QuantalRF's CPL antennas deliver 30 dB isolation in the UNII 3 to UNII 5 transition gap, which means 5-10 dB better isolation than the competition, the company says. The post QuantalRF says ‘Compound Planar Loop’ Wi-Fi AP antennas deliver better isolation, reduce costs appeared first on Wi-Fi NOW Global. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. When my wife and I bought our house two decades ago, one of the most exciting things about the process was finally having in-house laundry after spending our whole lives (almost literally) sitting in laundromats. The laundry center in the house wasn’t fancy—and it was small—but it represented freedom and we were excited. Of course, upon moving in, the laundry machine was instantly non-functional, so we had to scrape out the bottom of our bank account and buy a new one. And that machine has been humming along for 20 years, and might still be running when the sun swells into a red giant and destroys the planet. Considering that most washers and dryers last 10-14 years on average, that’s pretty good. This wasn’t pure luck, however—I’ve been single-handedly keeping our laundry center going with a combination of regular maintenance and some light repairs. What I’ve learned is that you can keep your washer and dryer operational much longer if you do some pretty basic stuff. Make sure the machines are levelYour washer and dryer are pretty active appliances—they generate a lot of motion and momentum while spinning heavy, wet clothes around. It’s essential that they be properly balanced and level, otherwise the drums will be off-kilter, causing increased wear and tear on the whole machine. When the machines are installed, their feet should be adjusted to ensure they’re sitting level and don’t rock from side to side. But you should also be checking your machines on a regular basis with a level—if the appliances aren’t level, it’s time to adjust them until they are. This only takes a few minutes and can really add to the lifespan of the machines. Read the maintenance instructionsYour washer and dryer came with a user’s manual, and your clothes generally come with basic cleaning instructions. You should read through both to know stuff like Detergent amounts. Using too much detergent can damage your washer over time as residue builds up inside the machine, leading to mold and other damage. Your user manual will give you a guide on how much detergent to use. Detergent type. Check if your washer is a high-efficiency model. If so, you’ll want to use a high-efficiency detergent. Otherwise your washer will struggle to clear out all those suds and the extra wear and tear will shorten its lifespan. The location of all the filters, drains, and dispensers—the stuff you’re going to need to clean and inspect going forward. Error codes and other maintenance and troubleshooting information that can go a long way to keeping your appliance functioning longer, because you’ll have some clue as to how to resolve basic problems. Clean the insidesA disturbing number of people I’ve spoken to believe your washer and dryer are self-cleaning because they are appliances used to clean things. While it might seem reasonable that a machine like your washer—which regularly soaks itself in soapy water—doesn’t need to be cleaned, this isn’t true. Cleaning your washer and dryer regularly will greatly increase both their effectiveness and their lifespan: For your washer, you can simply use some vinegar and baking soda in an empty load to clean it. You can also purchase cleaning products if the DIY approach doesn’t seem to be working. You should also clean out the filter and agitator and give the whole machine a good scrub, inside and out. For your dryer, you should clean the lint screen, the exterior vent and duct (you can buy drill-powered duct cleaners for this), and wipe down the interior drum. Clear the drain hosesThe hoses that drain out of your washer can become clogged with what scientists call gunk over the years. Believe me, the first time I took a look inside my washer’s drain hose my life changed, and not for the better. You can usually remove the drain hose without needing to open up the machine—it’s probably just clamped in place. Take it off and use your garden hose to blast clogs out of it with some water pressure, and your washer will have an easier time draining—resulting in dryer clothes and less wear and tear on the machine. Check your pocketsEveryone occasionally washes something they forgot in their pockets, and it might seem harmless (unless it’s your phone or something else allergic to water). But metal objects like coins, keys, or screws left over from your last DIY project can scratch drums, break stuff, and clog up your filters and drains. As a result, one of the easiest ways to keep your old washer and dryer humming is to always, always check your pockets before dumping stuff in the wash. And while we’re discussing metal objects, you should also probably not wash clothing with metal in it, like underwires—or even zippers. If you have to wash something with a zipper, you can minimize the danger by making sure it’s fully zipped-up. Don't over- or under-do itWashers and dryers are designed for specific amounts of laundry, and overloading or under-loading can cause damage to the machine: Washers should be run with full loads, but not overloaded. You can weigh your laundry and compare it to your washer’s capacity, which would be very accurate—but you’re probably OK just eye-balling things. Generally speaking, if you fill the washer up three-fourths of the way, you’re not overloading it. Anything less than half full is under-loading it, and both scenarios can cause damage and wear-and-tear to the machine. Dryers, on the other hand, are usually best run lighter. Keeping your dryer loads to about half the capacity of the dryer is a good practice—it’ll ensure your clothes dry more evenly and more quickly, and won’t stress the dryer as much (overloading a modern dryer can also mess with the sensors it uses to tell when clothes are dry). View the full article

The president’s chaotic policies are squandering a decent inheritanceView the full article

The trade association representing America’s largest gig companies is backing President Trump’s nominees to lead the Department of Labor—an endorsement that could shape the future of worker classification in the gig economy. Flex, the lobbying group founded in 2022 by names including Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash, said Wednesday it’s in favor of Lori Chavez-DeRemer to lead the department and for Keith Sonderling to serve as deputy secretary. “The Department of Labor has a key role in helping build a future-forward, modern economy,” Flex CEO Kristin Sharp said in a press release. “That includes supporting app-based independent work, which benefits millions of earners, consumers, and communities . . . Once confirmed, we look forward to working with these leaders to advance policies that continue the innovation and economic opportunities of the app-based platform industry.” Spokespeople for Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash did not respond to Fast Company‘s requests for comment on the nominations and Flex’s support. Instacart pointed to the Flex statement. Gig companies, at their core, rely on models that classify the workers who ferry people and goods at the click of a button as independent contractors rather than traditional employees. This allows them to keep costs low and aids them in their missions to turn profits, ultimately pleasing shareholders. If gig companies were forced to classify their workers as employees, labor costs would dramatically rise. A Trump-led Labor Department could also roll back workplace protections on wages, overtime, and collective bargaining rights. Policies around independent contractors often intersect with broader labor issues, such as whether gig workers qualify for benefits like health insurance or minimum wage protections—key points of contention between businesses and labor advocates. Still, certain lawmakers and advocacy groups are arguing that this new way of work deserves to have the same protections and classifications as full-time employees. Most of the efforts so far have fallen to cities and local governments. But the Trump administration’s picks could take a federal stance to update what it means to classify independent contractors. A more business-friendly stance at the federal level could embolden gig companies in ongoing legal battles and policy debates across states. “It’s almost highly likely that the Trump DoL will make it easier for companies to classify (many would say, ‘misclassify’) gig workers as independent contractors, and far harder for gig workers to get employee status,” John Logan, director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, says in an email to Fast Company. “Of course, the Labor Department is only one player here, albeit an important one: the ‘pro-business’ position of the Labor Department will also be used by platform companies in ongoing litigation at the state level and unions and companies will continue to fight this out in the courts and through state politics.” Chavez-DeRemer, who served one term as congresswoman in Ohio, was widely seen as a pro-worker pick. During her time in office, she seemed to support the PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act, which was extremely important to labor unions and could alter independent contractor classifications, and was endorsed by the Teamsters Union. However, Chavez-DeRemer appeared to have reassured Republicans during a Republican-led Senate committee confirmation hearing last month. She told members she was in full support of Trump’s agenda and walked back support of the PRO Act. “If confirmed, my job will be to implement President Trump’s policy division, and my guiding principle will be President Trump’s guiding principle,” she said. Sonderling’s position as deputy secretary, meantime, “is intended to reassure members of the business community, and groups that are hostile to organized labor,” Logan says. Sonderling served under Trump in the Department of Labor in the past and as a Republican commissioner on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In 2019, Sonderling issued an opinion letter that essentially said an unidentified company, whose workers appeared to clean residences, were contractors, not employees. Many argued that the move signaled the Trump administration’s broader approach to gig companies. “On the issue of gig workers, unions have consistently argued that workers should be classify as employees and not independent contractors; that they should be covered by the NLRA and other federal labor and employment laws and have the right to unionize and bargain collectively,” Logan says. “I do not expect they will have much joy on this issue under the Trump administration, even with Chavez-DeRemer as Labor Secretary.” View the full article

Elon Musk ally Michael Grimes has overseen shake-up of office doling out billions of dollars in semiconductor subsidiesView the full article

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