Articles for category: Initiative

Software Leadership Series: The Manager Minimum

I wrote this article on Medium a while back called the “Software Manager Minimum”.  At the time, I was writing about the bare minimum you need to be doing as a manager and leader on a software team in order to keep your team moving forward. In this I boiled it down to three questions you should always be asking yourself on a daily basis; What’s the Pulse of the team? How are we doing?  Where is everyone at?  Are we overloaded?  Where do they need my help? What do they Need? Are we constrained on human or technical resources? 

November 28, 2022

Greg Thomas

Processes Change

The process, the plan, the path you had laid out for today, that’s been working for the past few months, that after a constant back and forth you got everyone on board, for now, needs to change. It doesn’t mean the process didn’t work, it doesn’t mean the changes were bad. It means you’ve now outgrown them and now you need something else to keep managing yourself and your growth. If processes stayed the same forever, you’d still be using a bib every time you eat spaghetti, but they don’t, you grow, and they change. It’s not a bad thing.

November 27, 2022

Greg Thomas

No One Notices the Preparation

They aren’t supposed to, that’s the idea of preparation, you do it solo. You choose the task. You choose the priority. You make the changes. You choose what’s next. You decide where you need to go. The only person that notices is and will be you.

November 26, 2022

Greg Thomas

If it was Easy, everyone would be doing It

It’s easy to do the things that don’t challenge you, don’t push you, don’t force you to rethink what you are doing, and give you that boost of what you are good at. It’s much harder to realize you’re not good at everything, that one thing you are struggling with, you are struggling with for a reason because it’s not easy. That “thing” you working on, you might be the only one working on it and everyone might be staring at you wondering why you are working on it, because it’s tricky, because it’s tough but in the end you

November 25, 2022

Greg Thomas

The Anticipation of the Event

Event planners have it tough.  They put everything they can into making something go off smoothly, perfectly, without a hitch and along the way something always goes wrong or off the rails. The secret is that they never let anyone know that something has gone wrong, they never show it on their face, they roll with it, they recover and they move on.  There is a degree of experience worked in there as well as they look for cues to respond to in advance when they are about to happen. We all need to channel our internal event planner on