Want me to talk with your team? I charge $100/person ($2500 max) for corporate events, less for non-profits and public channels. Contact me if you’re interested. View examples of past public talks below.
The Agile in Action with Bill Raymond Podcast (June 13, 2023)
Eric Brechner joins the podcast today to discuss how you can manage team or personal work using Kanban. Throughout the discussion, Eric and Bill Raymond share stories and examples that explain best practices and guidelines you can use to deliver teamwork more effectively.
The Lean Effect: Leading Agile teams at Microsoft and coaching today’s Agile leaders (May 6, 2021)
Eric Brechner shares how he managed development for Xbox, Windows, and Azure engineering services and the Xbox.com websites. He told us about his transformation from writing hard code to leading a team. We discussed how they ran self-directed multidisciplinary teams who worked together shoulder to shoulder, how they breakdown into individual tasks, and how they fit together with those individual tasks as a whole. Finally, he shared challenges he faced to deploy agile into a software development company.
Peer presentations (Dec 24, 2020)
Presenting your interests and ideas to peers can be fun and rewarding, but it’s also intimidating and time consuming. What should you talk about? How do you avoid embarrassment? What if you get nervous? How do you prepare? Eric Brechner, a professional career coach, will answer these questions and more in a simple presentation format that you can replicate.
Masters of Technology – Interview with Eric Brechner (Oct 2, 2020)
Learn about his management philosophy. Advice for new Development Lead and Managers. How to set up a vision and make sure it flows down. Advice for Dev Lead and Dev Manager. How to move to DevOps. Best Practices of Engineering. How to transition your organization to DevOps, How he hire? Worst Management advice, the best management advice he got etc
Sources of Insight – How to Land Your Next Job with Skill (Sep 10, 2020)
Imagine if you could hear directly from somebody somebody with experience who has consistently helped people launch, land, and level up their careers, in the best of times and the worst of times. That’s Eric. Eric is extraordinary in his results and generous with his insight and advice.
If/else podcast – Scrum vs. Kanban: With Guests Ken Rubin & Eric Brechner (Nov 4, 2019)
On this episode of if/else, host Mayuko Inoue explores a choice faced by many software development teams: which agile methodology should they use?
Developer On Fire – Eric Brechner – Responding Honorably (Aug 5, 2019)
Eric Brechner talks with Dave Rael about software, management, relationships, family, boundaries, expectations, and responding honorably to mistakes.
Devonomics Episode 2: Eric Brechner from Microsoft XBox Engineering (Dec 5, 2017)
Eric Brechner (a.k.a. “I.M. Wright”) is our guest on this episode. Eric is a director of engineering for XBox at Microsoft and discusses with us engineering systems and how to wow customers who are internal to your company. He also talks about leadership, team culture and how DevOps teams can use their infrastructure to get close to customers and how to get off of the 24×7 fire-fighting hamster wheel.
Channel 9 – Managing Software Development – Eric Brechner (May 18, 2017)
Here are some questions we asked Eric in this interview:
- How you setup vision, goals and boundaries for your team
- What are your top three priority on the job?
- The worst advice you heard about management
- The best advice you heard about management
- The best book you read about management
- What exactly you look in a candidate
- What questions you asked on phone interview
- How you hire? What is the secret to get hired in Microsoft?
- How you manage sometime big ego’s and highly competitive and highly intelligent people?
- How you manage people some time more qualified than you?
- What is your suggestion to Developers who want to become a Development Manager?
- The worst part of your job?
- The best part of your job?
- What you like about Microsoft
Talks at Google – Agile Project Management with Kanban (Jun 24, 2015)
There’s a way to organize your work, stay focused, avoid mistakes, and be hyper-productive that you can learn in five minutes using sticky notes and markers. It’s been used by Toyota to make cars, by Xbox to build software, and by individuals to maintain sanity. It’s called Kanban, and Eric Brechner, an Xbox development manager, has been using it with multiple teams for the past four years.
Eric’s new book, Agile Project Management with Kanban, has a quick start guide, with illustrations and online spreadsheets to get you productive fast. Other chapters help you estimate work, meet deadlines, deploy results, evolve from Scrum or traditional Waterfall, and integrate Kanban into large projects. Attend this talk in person, and you’ll create your own Kanban board, applying this simple technique to the work you do every day.
Microsoft Talks – Agile Project Management with Kanban: Eric Brechner Presentation (Jun 18, 2015)
There’s a way to organize your work, stay focused, avoid mistakes, and be hyper-productive that you can learn in five minutes using sticky notes and markers. It’s been used by Toyota to make cars, by Xbox to build software, and by individuals to maintain sanity. It’s called Kanban, and Eric Brechner, an Xbox development manager, has been using it with multiple teams for the past four years. Agile Project Management with Kanban, has a quick start guide, with illustrations and online spreadsheets to get you productive fast. Other chapters help you estimate work, meet deadlines, deploy results, evolve from Scrum or traditional Waterfall, and integrate Kanban into large projects.
Microsoft Press Blog – Kanban anti-patterns (Apr 2, 2015)
If you think you know Kanban already and aren’t seeing the benefits of continuous value delivery, simple planning and estimation, tight customer connection, inherent quality guarantees, focused scope, and reduced meeting times, then you’re probably falling into one of the seven Kanban anti-patterns.
Shaping Software – Lessons in Software from Eric Brechner (Dec 9, 2009)
Shaping Software is a blog written for anyone who wants to improve software success, hosted and curated by J.D. Meier.
ICSE 2005 – Journey of enlightenment: the evolution of development at Microsoft (May 2005)
Proceedings. 27th International Conference on Software Engineering
OOPSLA 2003 – Things they would not teach me of in college: what Microsoft developers learn later (Oct 2003)
18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications