It can become a habit that you always need to lead the team, you always need to be there, and you always need to be the one calling the play. Depending on where your team is at, this is completely acceptable, especially when they are new and have to learn everything around them. But as they grow (which will happen and MUST be one of your top goals), your leadership style will need to change…
A feature is a collection of requirements that need to be delivered as part of a product. The requirements that form a feature can generally be broken down into stories that form the scenarios which are used by the feature and/or they can simply be the use cases for which a feature can be handled – both are very similar. In short, I like to think of it in this way – it’s a big…
You are going to make good decisions, and you are going to make bad ones. You will not always get it right, no one has a hundred percent success rate. But you need to make a decision. Not making a decision, and spending more and more time arguing about the pros and cons is not helping your team, it’s confusing them. Make a call, admit when it’s wrong, don’t flaunt it when it’s right, and…
“We’ve been delivering based on our fires over the past two months.” That’s what you hear when you are focused on customer issues, in triaging the immediate and getting the fixes out the door before asap, where the customers are beating down the door to get your code to work. And you’ve probably been successful at this, but you can only do it for so long, there are only so many times you can plan…
The team meeting is the most hallowed of all meetings. It is a gathering of the minds of your team and the greatest opportunity for you to lay out the plans for the week and hear from your team about what they are doing, where they are struggling, where help is required, and most importantly where you can reassure them. Don’t ever show up unprepared for a team meeting, it’s your single, greatest tool in…