Topics that made the cut:
Mentoring Others
- Transitioning to manager, mentoring others is part of that
- Can’t screw it up, if you have a willing partner who needs advice. Just requires transparency and honesty, and commitment to time
- You know you’ve done well if they stop talking to you.
- mentoring vs coaching?
- Explaining the why is important when you coach
- coaching as managing learning, mentoring as transferring expertise, habits
- On transparency, what do I have to offer? What would you like to get stronger in?
- Also amazing what you learn
Hybrid Planning
(Planning across organization, multi-company)
- Complicated, looked for books and resources
- When you have a scrum team, you want low overhead, collaborating quickly
- have to have a plan to get there, the parts come together
- Within an effort, a project.
- changing from throwing documents over the fence
- plan the path you can see to, all the boulders on the way, put them out there to think about them
- Have to convey what you don’t know, focusing change
- timbox thing, deliver as much as you can get done
- you can’t know everything
- keep the communication flowing
- understanding problems is hard
- people move into agile because they are sick of project plans, more about changing the mindset
- key person is product owner, reframing how you deliver value
- (why is the team huge and spread?)
Expressing opinions about how we work vs actively influences others to work differently
- ok with “here is how I see things” vs “you should change”
- Ask them to try it for one task, one story, one sprint (then lets talk about it)
- Retrospectives are an opportunity to change (e.g. quality is a problem, lets try pair programming to up the quality)
- Try in small pieces
- [change is hard, needs an advocate]
Refactoring
- Want to get things done
- Select and area of the code and turning refactoring into a project (infrastructure projects)
- We didn’t refactor as we go, e.g. this area of functionality as you go (“just get it done fast”)
- Refactoring as skunkworks
- Refactor as you go (vs as a project)
- features are shiny
- communicating value in effectiveness
- Shared aesthetic of what good code is
- Unacceptable to leave them in a bad state
- Takes just one person making a mess (broken window theory)
Setting yourself targets
- How to set yourself targets
- appropriate sized targets, actionable
- targets, estimates, commitments
- stretch goals
- Don’t know what an effective way to get better
- Talk to an expert, mentoring, club
- concrete goals, e.g. X games of Go, attending club regularly etc.
Communication to executive management
who only think in scope, schedule, budget
- executives have different needs, haven’t found an effective way to communicate to them
- How communicate to each need and style?
- can talk in terms of value provided
- How do we keep value in front to get buy-in and communicate effectively
Favorite way to relax?
- Sinking into to something away from people (books, movies, games, puzzles)
- Sports
- Scheduled relaxing – have to hit the minimum relaxing time or ‘cracks appear’
- Something creative that has nothing to do with work
- Need to “fill the well”
Still tired with 7+ hours sleep as a parent
- managing your energy
- going to bed ritual
- Spend time on passion
- Doing too many things at once
- (light quality, winding down)
- (allergies)
- (diet, stress)
- (rythms + interuption, lights)
- (learning)
Infrastructure projects
how to explain business value to executives
- optimization, neutralization, and differentiation (to executives)
- once you build it its debt, support
- How do you make projects
- Talk about costs
- Talk about options
- slack, momentum, efficiency
- TDD, build cleanly to minimize the need for later
- focused on minimum product instead of minimum viable product
- end at monolithic huge debt platform that ties you down
- need to not talk at the level of features and implementation to execs and customers
- (issues and risk)
- (wall of requirements – decision makers should have to hang each printed requirement (or story) on their wall)
Silos in development
- DB group, Ops group, Product group, Dev group, App development, etc each with managers.
- Can’t work in agile teams with separate managers
- Specific skillsets are problematic
Product owners
- How do discuss true value
- Seems like product owners don’t really talk to owners to decide priority
- often wonder “how did they prioritize the work?”
- Can we get past “I own the backlog, trust me”?
- Could be trust problems, why do you need to know?
- How do we talk about brush-strokes across an entire area vs going deep
- The reverse problem can be moving on without polish and finishing everything
- Product owners aren’t well connected to clients (in this case, product owners are developers)
- (Does this work end to end with the customer?)
Special thanks to Colin for taking notes.