Blog

April 26, 2021

Greg Thomas

Lead By Effort

Sometimes you will get it right, other times you will get it wrong. In both cases, people will probably be watching, especially if you’re leading the team. Your example that you are trying to lead by will sometimes fall flat on your face, such is life, you try to do the best for your team, for your project and it doesn’t work out. When these situations crop up, it’s easy to say – “well that was dumb, I’m going to go back to telling people what to do, because when I try to show them, I mess it up.” I

April 26, 2021

Greg Thomas

Are you Leading to Sell?

Long ago, I was working with a company when one of the managers told me that the CEO was running the company to Sell not to grow. I didn’t understand it at the time but six months later the company sold. When you’re positioning a company to sell, what happens externally to it are very important and how it looks. You aren’t thinking about growth in regards to – we need to hire two more people to keep managing demand – instead its about, lets see what we can do with what we have and keep the cash on hand.

April 25, 2021

Greg Thomas

The New Vacation

Vacation, for me, was always book ended with a day of decompression on the first day of vacation and a day of preparation on the last day of vacation. The decompression was to get out all the remaining thoughts I had in my head as to what was going on at work, while the preparation was the day/night before to go through emails and get myself ready for what will be coming my way. In my first vacation as since, I have found that the decompression has taken an extra day or two to completely filter out while the preparation

April 24, 2021

Greg Thomas

Delivery Definitions

“It’s a prototype” “It’s an MVP” “It’s a Proof of Concept” “It’s an evolutionary product build” “This is the beta” Whatever it is you decide to call it, everyone on the team needs to decide what it is and who it is for. You need to define what you are delivering. One person having a different notion of what it is during the delivery of the project will only yield confusion during the work that is being done to deliver the final solution. You can switch what your delivery definition is but this should always, always be done as a

April 23, 2021

Greg Thomas

You Owe Them Something

Shipping code is a partnership between you and your customer. If you are late on something (for whatever reason), like any good partner you probably owe them a gimme, a goody, something extra. That little bit of UI trickery they were looking for that they didn’t originally ask for, give it to them. That back-end functionality that correlates their data, find the time and make it happen. No one is saying you need to give them everything in the world to make them happy. But you need to remember it’s a partnership, almost like a marriage, where there is give