Blog
Thoughts on product planning, visual thinking, and building better teams.
Sprint Planning Belongs in the Backlog, Not the Meeting
The two-hour sprint planning ceremony exists because the backlog isn't ready. Fix the backlog and the meeting shrinks to twenty minutes — or disappears entirely.
How to Add a Stokik Skill to Your Codebase
A skill file embedded in your repo teaches every Claude Code or Codex session how to use Stokik correctly — which project to use, how to create tasks, when to ask questions.
How to Connect Claude and Codex to Stokik with MCP
Use Stokik's MCP integration to let Claude, Codex, and other agents execute from a project plan, work inside a codebase, and record progress back to Stokik.
The Work That Lives Between Projects
Every product team has two roadmaps: the one on the canvas, and the one accumulating in Slack, email, and customer tickets. The second one is usually larger.
Dependencies Are Invisible in a Backlog
A backlog is a flat list. Dependencies are a graph. Every time you plan in a backlog, you're reading a map with half the roads removed.
The First Card Is the Hardest
The blank canvas is the hardest moment in planning — not because there's nothing to say, but because there's no structure to react to yet. That's the problem Stoker is designed to solve.
Draw First, Write Second
Most planning starts with a blank document. That's the wrong starting point. Structure comes before prose — and the teams that get this spend less time writing and more time shipping.
Your Spec Is Not Done When You Publish It
Writing the document is the easy part. The hard part is keeping it true as the plan changes around it — and that requires a different relationship between the doc and the work.
How to Use Spaces Without Recreating Your Org Chart
Spaces are for grouping projects — but group by the wrong thing and you end up with a folder structure nobody navigates. Here's what actually works.
The Week Before Quarterly Planning
Most quarterly planning sessions fail in the days before they happen, not in the room. Here's how to set up the pre-work that makes the session worth having.
Real-Time Canvas vs. Shared Docs: What Actually Helps Teams Align
Shared documents brought teams closer. Real-time canvases go further — here's the practical difference and when each one wins.
Why Live Collaboration Changes How Product Teams Plan
Real-time presence on a shared canvas isn't a gimmick — it removes the coordination tax that slows async planning down.
Stop Scoring, Start Seeing
RICE, WSJF, and weighted priority matrices feel rigorous but produce numbers that tell you what you already decided. Visual roadmapping offers something more honest.
Why Your PRDs Get Ignored (and How to Fix It)
Most specs go unread not because they're badly written, but because they're in the wrong place. Proximity between plan and document changes how teams engage with written context.
How to Manage Scope Creep Before It Manages You
Scope creep kills timelines quietly. Here's a visual approach to catching it early and keeping every stakeholder on the same page.
Async Planning for Distributed Teams That Actually Works
Synchronous planning meetings don't scale across time zones. Here's how to run effective async planning that keeps everyone aligned without the 9am-for-someone standups.
Your Roadmap Needs Relationships, Not Just Order
Ranking features by priority misses the most important question: what does each feature depend on? Here's why dependency mapping belongs at the centre of roadmap planning.
Why Visual Planning Beats Linear Lists for Product Teams
Linear backlogs hide relationships. Canvas-based planning surfaces them. Here's why the switch matters.
How to Run a High-Signal Planning Session in 60 Minutes
Most planning meetings produce lists. The best ones produce shared mental models. Here's a process that works.