Spencer Varadi
I apply the science of how teams perform to the mess of how teams actually ship.
What is I/O psychology
Industrial-organizational psychology is the scientific study of how people perform at work. Your standups, retros, sprint goals, and roadmaps are all attempts to coordinate human behavior. I/O psychology studies the mechanisms that make those attempts succeed or fail.
About Spencer
I started in industrial-organizational psychology: the scientific study of how people behave at work. Not the motivational-poster version. The research version. Goal-setting theory, team dynamics, cognitive biases, incentive design, leadership models. The stuff that predicts whether a team ships or stalls.
I moved into product delivery because the gap was obvious. Companies spend millions on tools and rituals while ignoring the one variable that explains most of the variance: how their people actually make decisions together. I build delivery systems that account for the humans in the loop.
I don't sell a framework. I apply decades of organizational research to your actual team, your actual constraints, your actual work. The blog is where I show the receipts. Every article connects a peer-reviewed finding to a pattern you have probably lived through.
Latest
Industrial-organizational psychology isn't HR fluff. It's a century of research on how teams perform, decide, and ship. Here's what it means for product delivery.
Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance research explains why private agreements evaporate — and how to design forums where commitments actually stick.
Goal-setting theory isn't motivational fluff. It's one of the most validated findings in organizational psychology — and most sprint goals violate every principle.