Articles for category: Leadership

July 13, 2022

Greg Thomas

Where your Debt Lies?

Every application has some level of Technical Debt. Some of it exists in our tracking systems, but most of it exists in our minds, slack channels, or forgotten conversations we have with each other, later to be forgotten when we start on something else. One of the hardest jobs of being a Software Manager is being able to enunciate where your team’s debt is and push the work that needs to be done, to get done, to make it better. It’s not a glamorous job and not everyone always wants to hear from you when you talk about it often

July 10, 2022

Greg Thomas

The Team Leads

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 from that of their leader to that of their coach and then to their mentor. If you are reticent to let them lead in the

July 1, 2022

Greg Thomas

What is a Feature?

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 thing we want to give to our customers that cannot be delivered in a single sprint, BUT we want that big thing delivered to our

June 30, 2022

Greg Thomas

Leaders Make the Call

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 move on.

June 24, 2022

Greg Thomas

Planning by Fires

“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 by the fire until they become little hacks, little pieces of debt that will turn into the next fire. This is why, after the fire,

© 2025 Rambli by Greg Thomas. All rights reserved.