August 6, 2021
Ask them how they are doing. Tell a joke. Ask everyone a fun question. Poke fun at yourself. Learn something new about them. Your meetings have a goal, but the first one should always be – “we’re a team and we’re in this together” – make sure everyone always knows that.
July 29, 2021
Apart from the normal health restrictions, there is only one thing that worries me about going back to the office. That all the good habits we developed over the course of the last 18 – 24 months will be thrown away and we’ll go back to our old ways of doing things. Not hiring the best worker, but the best worker around here. Forcing people into meeting rooms that don’t need to be there. Awkward gatherings that no one wants to attend. Less empathy, more cohersion. Barriers that existed for many will rise up once again. I hope it doesn’t
July 20, 2021
If everyone is starting from different spots, then you are not starting together, you are starting apart. On a new project, getting the team onto the page is the hardest thing going. If you get it right, if everyone is on the same page, the delivery, the direction is clear as day. If you get it wrong, everyone goes off in their own direction and no amount of standups, scrums, meetings will bring them back. The team needs to know where they are starting from, always.
July 19, 2021
I’ve written on this topic before in a few places (actually quite a few times based on a quick search of this site). But I decided to expand on it a bit for a recent LinkedIn article. If you’re building software, if you want to build great software, you need to start with trust. To take from the article… Software Built on Trust starts with Development but it permeates it’s way through Product Management, Sales, Finance, everywhere the organization depends on that delivery. That’s what you can do when starting with the fundamentals of Software Built on Trust.
July 17, 2021
Bad News is not as good as good news. It is news nonetheless and not all bad news is truly bad news. Sometimes it’s an update – “we’re late on feature X because people have been away, this sprint we’re going to pour some people on in an attempt to catch up.” It’s bad, not good. But Bad News is never as bad as Ugly News. “We were late on Feature X, we didn’t want to tell you. We let it sit for too long and now throwing more people at it isn’t going to fix the problem, it’s just
