Articles for category: Drive

February 14, 2023

Greg Thomas

Coding is the easy Part

Meeting with people. Negotiating requirements back and forth. Deciding which languages and frameworks to use and why. Investigating customer problems you’ve never seen before. Working with Sales on features that aren’t there. Figuring out new UI/UX schemas. Organizing your work. All of the above is much harder to do than writing the code that comes from these interactions.  Don’t underestimate the value of sitting down with someone to understand their point of view and their needs before you start dropping code.

February 10, 2023

Greg Thomas

The Big List

Everyone knows about the Big List. The Top 10 Most Requested Features by Customers. The Top 5 Biggest Pain Points in our Software. The 7 Bugs that keep recurring. The 9 Test Cases that always Fail. The 4 Requirements that must be part of every story. Pick your list, but it’s a list, it might be big because of how many things are on it or big because of how important they are.  Whatever the reason, it’s a big list, an important list. The hard part is getting everyone aligned to the list so we are all moving in the

February 9, 2023

Greg Thomas

When to Break a Cycle

Cycles are great to get into, they are predetermined, we know the outcome, and we can see the start, middle, and end – they are awesome at helping generate predictability and visibility into what we are doing. But they can go bad, they can wear you down, and they can take you down the wrong path simply out of habit. When we transition from intent and action to auto-pilot in our systems we fall into the trap of – “this is how we’ve always done it” – which is a defense mechanism to the cycle you are in, not a

February 7, 2023

Greg Thomas

The Training Investment Dilemma

Incremental training investments will ALWAYS beat out the week-long conference, the half-day marathon leadership session, the full-day retreat – those are still good “things” to train at, but they are not the training that will push you forward. Kobe Bryant gives a great talk on this (less than 2 mins).  I’m not advocating for getting up at 3am to train, but the message is pure and simple – you put in 30 minutes today, that’s 30 minutes you didn’t put in yesterday – you keep putting in that time 3 – 4 days over the course of a week, that’s

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