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Crisp's Blog
Company blog · blog.crisp.secareerbusinessproductivity
Crisp's Blog is the company blog at blog.crisp.se, writing about career, business and productivity. Since 2010, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 45 times, most often “Making sense of MVP”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Crisp's agile team-structure posts, mostly the Spotify model whitepaper and Henrik Kniberg's diagrams. One commenter called a tools illustration brilliant.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
From the Crisp Consultants
Most-linked posts?
- Making sense of MVP6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-01-25
- Scaling Agile at Spotify (2012) [pdf]5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-09-16
- Making sense of MVP – and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable (2016)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-12-12
- Good and Bad Technical Debt (and how TDD helps) (2013)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-10-13
What Hacker News says?
I've been a subscriber to Google Play Music for a few years, initially I think my choice rested on being able to upload from my personal library, which was more significant back in the days when there was much less parity in music service catalogs - this was circa no Beatles. Then they added the youtube tie in where you don't get youtube ads - very valuable. I agree with the general UI complaint, it isn't great. To…
Comment linking /2012/11/14/henrikkniberg/scaling-agile-at-spotify
on “Spotify Form F-1”Submitted Good and Bad Technical Debt (and how TDD helps) (2013) as a story · 35 points
HN discussionI still build out everything required to realise the vision, and that usually takes at least months to build. There's an analogy in startups that you should build a great skateboard first if your vision is to build a better car, but I just don't agree. If you have a vision for a better car then you need to deliver a better car, not a skateboard, because, well a skateboard just isn't a car. https://blog.crisp.se/2016…
Comment linking /2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp
on “It’s Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done”Submitted Scaling Agile at Spotify as a story · 9 points
HN discussionWhen I read things like "anti-if" I recall this brilliant illustration that I saw several years ago - http://blog.crisp.se/henrikkniberg/images/ToolWrongVsWrongTo...
Comment linking /henrikkniberg/images/ToolWrongVsWrongTool.png
on “Destroy All Ifs – A Perspective from Functional Programming”Submitted Making Sense of Product Discovery: Two Playbooks Anyone Can Use as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'm not against JavaScript (or any other languages running in the browser for that matter). Ironically, when I started doing this I was a full time frontend dev. For me this was just a "hack" to significantly improve my browsing experience. While I'm not advocating people doing the same, I disagree with the sentiment that absolutely everything is an app and static documents being an archaic concept. One of my gripe…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Making-sense-of-MVP-.jpg
on “Shoelace 2.0 release: UI toolkit that works with all frameworks or none at all”Submitted 10 kanban boards and their context as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe funny thing is that they have many teams each doing a tiny part of the app's UI, and proudly advertise this model as a best practice: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScal... Baffling how you can have so many engineers working on a music player, and it ends up worse than Winamp or Mediaplayer from 25 years ago.
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf
on “Audiobooks on Spotify”Submitted The highest leverage Product Discovery activity that your team can do as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttp://blog.crisp.se/2017/02/19/maxwenzin/reactions-on-no-ce... and http://dna.crisp.se/docs/index.html
Comment linking /2017/02/19/maxwenzin/reactions-on-no-ceo-by-bbc
on “No CEO: A Swedish company where nobody is in charge”Submitted What Is an Unconference? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt can be difficult to do the guild structure in such a small organization. Not impossible but difficult, as many different people tend to play a diverse set of roles. At least, that's how it's been in my career. Prove me wrong! Edit: here's a classic from Spotify, which is much larger but potentially relevant: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScal...
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf
on “Ask HN: Guild/Studio structure for Software Engineers?”Submitted Making sense of MVP as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA few that I follow on a semi-regular basis: https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com http://highscalability.com http://techblog.netflix.com http://www.natpryce.com https://8thlight.com/blog/ https://www.percona.com/blog/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com http://blog.crisp.se/author/henrikkniberg https://m.signalvnoise.com https://dannorth.net/blog/ https://codeascraft.com
Comment linking /author/henrikkniberg
on “Ask HN: Good tech blogs to read”Submitted Scaling agile at Lego as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSpotified basically means your company decided it was Agile™ and forced the Spotify model on teams so essentially now you’re a cargo cult. https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScal... Our problem at the moment is we have no processes/documentation because we’re Agile™
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf
on “My Foreword to “The Art of Agile Development””Submitted Making Sense of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe Spotify model is about how people are arranged. It has nothing to do with development methodology or work tracking. From the whitepaper introducing the Spotify model ( https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScal... ): > [Squads] are a self-organizing team and decide their own way of working – some use Scrum sprints, some use Kanban, some use a mix of these approaches.
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf
on “Do we need a Scrum Master forever?”Submitted Team barometer, a self-evaluation tool to measure if a team is improving as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere are some typical things that apply to just about any software project that you can try. Avoid feature creep by writing down the exact list of things you need to do, and if you come up with more ideas, put them on a separate list. Try to build a Minimum Viable Product, which is a vertical slice of the most minimal version of your product that works.[1] If that doesn't work out, build some feature-complete tech…
Comment linking /2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp
on “Tell HN: My project is turning into a death march”Submitted How a team of 2 kids and adult rookies won a Robot Sumo competition as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making sense of MVP as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making sense of MVP – and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Product discovery tools as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Good and Bad Technical Debt (and how TDD helps) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Good and Bad Technical Debt (and how TDD helps) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Still not automating tests? Here’s why you should (again) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Agile Product Ownership in a nutshell as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stop using differentiated salaries as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
