Standard Operating Procedures are boring and the furthest thing from exciting but setting them up for your team will improve their performance significantly.
One of the most important aspects of building great product organisations is to design a system where builders thrive. A group of well-organized, ambitious yet humble, smart folks is an unstoppable force.
It's becoming increasingly important to keep your team motivated without using a "carrot and stick" approach.
Here are some of the reasons you should create a plan and layout your project before you get started.
Setting OKRs can help your team stay aligned and focused on common goals, especially as the organization grows. But formal goal setting can be surprisingly challenging to pull off, and many organizations struggle to get started.
A bit of background on our startup, Dataline. Until June 2020, our product was giving you access to your ad-blocked customer data on your analytics and marketing tools. What happened? We closed our seed round in mid-May 2020. Two weeks later, we were starting to have concerns about our product and vision. We understood that we were a vitamin rather than a painkiller. We spent the month of June exploring some new potential visions. How could we announce this to our new investors who had put money on our previous vision? What would they think of us? Would our team lose motivation, and would we lose any key employees? Of course, all these questions were in our head, but we knew it was best for everyone for us to pivot, investors included. This article is about how we handled the pivot with all the stakeholders - investors and team.
The barbell strategy is a valuable approach for companies looking to balance the need for innovation and stability in their software systems.
Speak at length about the importance of a healthy work-life, but then send emails late in the night
Robert Iger, now Executive Chairman of The Walt Disney Company is the former CEO of Disney. During his 15 years as CEO of Disney and as President of ABC Television prior to that, he led the company to amazing new heights. Under his leadership, Disney’s market capitalization increased from $48 billion to $257 billion. He oversaw the acquisition of Pixar in 2006, Marvel entertainment in 2009 and many more after that. He is the perfect exemplar of a leader who has proved himself over an extended period of time.
Learn how to do project estimation that removes deadlines and avoids stress from a successful software engineering leader.
A book review of ''The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change'' by Camille Fournier. Find out whether the book is right for you.
You know, that the software development process is not simple, sometimes frustrating, and exhausted with strict deadlines and requirements.
When your company scales from 10 to 50+ employees, you have to change your leadership approaches. Here are 8 valuable tips referring to team management.
Product team goals and structure transforms together with the entire business. Follow these transformations through every stage of the company’s growth.
Software development can be a complex area that can sometimes confuse even the best of us. While many equate it to writing code, software development includes much more activity and responsibility. There are numerous roles and methodologies that can impact almost every aspect of the business, from customer experience to revenue flow.
One of the most common mistakes early managers make is to focus on being a "shit shield". Learn why this backfires, and what to do instead.
Fixed price or Time and Material? What is the best pricing model for software development services? Or maybe there is a third option to consider? Let’s dive into the pros and cons of popular pricing models for software development.
When working in an agile development team, having effective communication is essential. In times of remote working, where teams are distributed, it’s important to ensure that all people on the team are aligned with the goals, sharing knowledge and risks when necessary.
1–1 meetings are a great way to connect and bring people closer. To make these meetings more effective, consider doing them frequently and adapting it and its recurrence according to the participants’ perception.
Founders and CEOs have a lot of tasks and responsibilities. Coaching the team, becoming a mentor for newcomers, and preparing for the end of the world.
When go on vacation or quit, you should ideally organize your work in a way that those who stay at work do not get lost in chaos. Here is a checklist for you
My experience creating a successful design team at a early stage startup by Aysha Samrin
Practical leadership tips for a tech lead of a software engineering team.
Product management is a specialized role with an intelligent blend of business, tech and user experience. A product manager is mostly tasked with the duty of successfully managing the development of a product from start to launch, above other tasks.
Hard-coded authorization leads to technical debt. Decouple your authorization decisions to be a more effective business.
WorkPatterns is a toolkit for people managers that guides 1:1s, continuous feedback, recognition, and goal setting.
Misalignment of Vision
This is a short guide from the Head of Project Management at Techstack, detailing practical steps for managing your time effectively.
How can development productivity be measured? And should it be measured at all? This story explores some key ideas behind this controversial topic.
An engineering manager is a technical leader responsible for managing and developing a team of engineers, ensuring quality output, and driving projects.
If you are responsible for your team’s CICD and DevOps tools, have you ever asked yourself if the tools you built are really making developers’ lives easier?
Why team retreats are becoming essential when working remotely:
TeamOut founder Thomas Mazimann
Useful tips on how to properly manage a team, for first time managers as well as, managers working with a new company or organization.
The hiring managers goal for onboarding new employees is to get them productive as soon as possible, using a 30-60-90 day plan.
As a Ukrainian company, "business as usual" has since lost its meaning. Here are some lessons we've learned under the immense pressure of a new normal.
In our rapidly evolving work-from-anywhere world, employee downtime and productivity are rising concerns.
To prepare for brainstorming, it is necessary to gather a team, acquaint all the participants with the rules of brainstorming, and also prepare questions.
Learning to lead and manage teams are essential skills for anyone looking to advance their career.
It’s hard for CEOs to manage the growing threat of cybersecurity across their businesses, especially considering more pressing company concerns. That’s why some forward-thinking business leaders are establishing frameworks for shared cybersecurity responsibility. In the article, Tamas Kadar, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at SEON talks about the operational benefits of adopting this approach.
I’ve been playing bass since I was 15. I play other instruments as well, but I have always been primarily a bass player.
An average scrum squad that has 5 developers, at least 4 of them will be suffering from burnout. Burnout affects 83% of developers.
Military minds understand their armies are really only as good as their sergeants. Sure an army needs officers, but often lower ranking officers are usually young and inexperienced. Though they outrank the sergeant, they lack the experience of real world execution. The sergeant, the non-commissioned officer, is also a leader of men. Their paths to this leadership position can be a much longer slog doing the same work as the mainline enlisted.
High-performing teams proactively develop their engineers to address the team's skill gaps, using methods such as tutorials, mentorship and stretch assignments
Every month, dozens of software development companies come up with hundreds of ways for distributed teams to cooperate efficiently, as if they were working side by side in an open-plan office—online collaboration tools, audio and video conferencing solutions, project management systems, time tracking applications, etc.
Learn how to manage technical debt in your codebase with this guide on the 4 types of tech debt, with examples. We'll look at how to fix each type of tech debt.
We live in a century of information. Information is everywhere. Look at your company’s everyday processes: HR involves information about current and potential employees; procurement managers search and analyze the data on goods and services to acquire the best of them; the marketing department processes information on current trends and the company’s products to develop the best offers that will work for your customers.
What happens if your development team is hit by a bus? A short explanation of the Bus Factor and how to hold its score at safe levels and why you should.
How will nonprofit workspaces be like in the future?
Software and hardware teams rely on each other. If they can learn from each other then benefits will be felt throughout an entire organization.
Over the span of a normal workday, a significant number of us perform activities in an assortment of fields that might put our wellbeing and welfare in danger. While our occupations may appear to be innocuous, the truth of the matter is that workplace injuries can and do happen anyplace. Hands on injuries bring about torment and enduring, just as overwhelming money related misfortunes for many individuals. Realizing the first means to take after a workplace injury is something each worker ought to
know about. Shockingly, most specialists are ignorant not just of the dangers natural in their activity, yet additionally of their privileges to remuneration for any business related injuries they endure.
The definition and content of activities of the software development manager can vary widely.
One of the key things that makes leaders effective is the ability to orient themselves. Leaders make their own problems. This post shares how to do that.
Due to COVID-19, companies have found themselves in the middle of the world’s largest work-from-home experiment. Many hail remote work as a blessing, allowing employees to continue working while practicing social distancing during this uncertain time.
How to apply UX design principles to develop supportive and efficient engineering cultures
Taking on a management role in engineering may be daunting at first. Here are some tips for getting through the initial period, based on my experience.
Finding a Scrum Master is simple and complex. There are plenty of people out there who call themselves “Scrum Masters”, but how do you know if the person you are hiring really is a great Scrum Master?
Is there a place for emotions in the tech world?
Managing the scale needs of API teams is a difficult task. Here is how Platform Ops can help.
Becoming a manager is usually one of the biggest challenges of an engineer’s career. We are usually used to algorithms and state machines, which are predictable and have specific outputs depending on the input.
With the advent of remote and hybrid work, one thing many employees and companies are trying to overcome is employee burnout. Is technology the solution?
People keep confusing agile with product development but they are different concepts. It’s important to make this distinction because it actually matters. It isn’t just semantics, the confusion is causing us all problems. Understanding this difference may fundamentally change the approach most organisations take to building digital products.
Alexei Dulub, CEO & Founder of PixelPlex, discusses consulting & custom development, power of value-driven teams, blockchain's prospects, and unattainable goals
In this article, you'll find some amazing techniques to improve employee engagement and mental wellness.
“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Almost any organization experiences one of the main problems with the personnel policy - personnel discipline. It is particularly relevant for large companies. Here are several unpleasant consequences that this problem leads to. First of all, these are quite tangible hidden costs due to insufficient production of goods and services, foregone turnover, loss of important customers, and other losses from the irrational use of working time by employees. Let's say an employee takes 15-20 extra minutes every day to be late, protract a lunch break, have smoke breaks, go home early, and other things. Shouldn't be too hard to calculate that eventually it all takes an entire working day from one working month. In reality, people spend much more working time on personal needs: up to 35%.
Having a remote team in the project will lower expenses and make hiring easier. It will lead to many operational challenges too. Let's see how to address them.
We hope that this article will become your guide to best practices that will help you build, grow, and manage a team that is fully remote and spread around the world.
COVID-19 made sure that even the staunchest opposition to remote working saw flames this year. It was a question of: Either you offer your team a chance to work from home or say goodbye to your small and medium enterprise.
In this story, we analyze what makes up the role of a technical writing manager, how to improve your skills, and how to be a brilliant leader.
Internal comms in tech can no longer be disregarded, regardless of whether you manage a small organization or employ non-desk workers worldwide.
Few reasons why people leave their jobs and several ways to save your current team during the Great Resignation.
In a world where the fight for talent is fierce incentivising your developers in non-monetary ways is key to retain your best employees and encourage them on.
When was the last time you felt like bolting out of the conference room either bored to death or incredible frustrated and feeling like your time was carelessly and disrespectfully wasted? We bet it was as close as yesterday. What, is happening now? Well, get out now!
The word control is very important for a leader who wants to generate a concrete result. Control plays a critical role in being productive.
As an industry, we need to work together more effectively, communicate clearly, and solve problems with less conflict. In short, we need stronger people skills.
Are you managing your projects and teams using Microsoft 365? Read on to find out how you can boost your team dynamics and achieve improved productivity!
Giving and receiving feedback is crucial to grow as a person, but it's not easy for everybody to take it. Here's an insight on the truth about feedback.
We don’t deserve the team we can’t inspire. Camaraderie, purpose, and appreciation need to become our priority.
Getting used to video conferences can take a while. However, here are some ways to improve video conferences at your nonprofit.
“Core hours” defeat the purpose of working — but what about ensuring that work is done?
Steve White | Working Together To Win Together
Our concepts of Lead Time and Cycle Time came from the field of Operations Management and Production Engineering. As such, I think it’s beneficial to all of us to maintain coherent with them and use the same semantics in Software Engineering Management as well.
Once you begin your startup business, then comes the toughest part! To sustain and grow to a leading organization by managing the same with some brilliant ideas. Many of the leading management gurus have written a lot about how to achieve the same.
It's important to make informed decisions that positively impact your organization. But how do you know when to rely on data and when to use intuition?
When you get promoted to a new manager, there are lots of questions in your mind.
After a year in people management roles, I discovered that people are the toughest part of it all. You can find perfect tools to automate your routine tasks or build fantastic processes causing you no trouble. You can get all other issues resolved, but the human factor will still be your biggest risk.
Being a manager at any post comes with a lot of responsibilities and accountability which cannot be shared, you are solely responsible for you and your team.
The moment you become a part of the corporate world, the term you get most familiar with is 'Project'. We can say that projects are the elementary part of the corporate world.
Customer Support is the team that keeps in touch with our clients. They deal with the requests and issues that connect our customers to the business — they are the bridge. Offering excellent customer support is as important as having a robust product. To lead this effort, Preply has recently hired a new Head of Support, Jean-Pascal Gribaudi. He used to manage a support team in Booking.com.
Never Trusting Anybody, and the Impact it Had on Me
Here are tips for choosing job levels when headcount planning.
Seasoned veteran or a novice, an entrepreneur needs to know survival is possible only through smooth coordination amongst various departments. Key-corner stone to smooth coordination amongst department is possible via services of skillful manager. The written piece here aims to outweigh and outline the need for star managers to smoothly operate both simple and complex tasks.
Even though a group of individuals is called a team, they are not. People do not know exactly which direction they are going and may pursue different goals.
Make feedback normal. Not a performance review. Delivering relevant feedback in the right manner is a top skill. Once mastered, it benefits the entire team.
Every single day, people head to work with the desires that they will have the option to finish their day by day undertakings liberated from accidents or some other wellbeing dangers. Positively, we as a whole have the right to work in protected and clean conditions. And keeping in mind that most organizations take measures to guarantee the wellbeing of their representatives, accidents will undoubtedly occur. In any case, there are approaches to guarantee that such accidents are limited and unfit to show genuine sick impacts.
Traditional cabinets — stuffed with contracts, vendor agreements,
onboarding paperwork, and other documents — are harming productivity even in 2020. According to Xerox, SMBs waste 46% of their time dealing with document management issues. In this article, I'll explain how you can maximize workplace efficiency by switching to an AI-enabled document management system.
I wasn’t a big fan of managers in my decade long programming career. I took pride in my accomplishments as a developer, the individual contributor. After all, I was the one making things happen or part of the team that made things happen. We built features, fixed critical issues and in my view, only reason business existed was because developers worked hard.
Offshore outsourcing, in the broad, is continuing to grow – according to GSA, 70% of companies surveyed suggested that they would outsource more in 2020, with half of those suggesting a big increase in outsourcing.
Project Management Institute claims that one out of four organization’s projects failed outright. The numbers are far from being encouraging.
If you struggle with team collaboration, then this article will show you how to use 8 powerful team collaboration strategies to put your team on the same page.
It is good to have a scrum master involved in your agile process, but what makes a great scrum master? In this article we look to break down the fundamental pieces to becoming the best scrum master you are capable of being. First, we must define what a scrum master is.
How to build a proactive and happy engineering team? What should you know to manage and lead the team of engineers more effectively? Here we’re going to share the startup guide with the helpful tips to make you a better manager and leader.
Brief thoughts about micro frontends, how they can be best used when building websites and when the best situations to implement them are as well as drawbacks.
At first glance, tracking employee time seems pretty straightforward. Your employees simply denote the hours they were at work on a timesheet, or punch a time clock and turn their time cards in at the end of the week or month. What could go wrong?
Agile, Flow, and a Filter
In this article, you’ll find 8 proven ways to become a better manager.
For software quality-assurance testers and engineers, acquiring new skills has never been more important. However, according to the O * NET Career Portal, the number of QA jobs is expected to grow modestly over the next decade - if "faster than average" —7%, so this growth will not match the skyrocketing demand for information-security practitioners and software. Developers.
Wondering how to increase your remote team's productivity? These tools will help.
As a manager, without a system in place to measure yourself and actively monitor how you’re doing, you can't identify all the areas that you need to improve on.
If your project is considering PaaS, then you may be worried about how this change might impact your team—and rightfully so. Switching to PaaS often results in major shifts in roles and responsibilities.
That technology is here to stay is an obvious duh. If and how well-prepared companies are to deal with the constant need to increase investments in technology, that’s not as simple. Another obvious axiom is that software engineers and developers are highly valuable resources. Weather having more or putting the ones you have to better use is the best approach, that is less obvious.
Mobile and web applications are worth investment as their use can help you achieve various goals, for instance, improve customer service, increase the conversion rate, provide security of sensitive data, automate manual, routine, and repetitive activities.
A tribe of Cannibals arrives at New York City.
Ted Lasso's leadership style is rarely seen in media.
What traits can we learn from Ted to make us successful leaders?
For most managers, it is possible to have weekly meetings to bang out issues and team-building exercises to create harmony, but as a remote manager, this is not possible, and the lack thereof can be über-frustrating at times.
How to tell between important and unimportant and don’t get lost in data smog.
Companies can run for many years without strategy sessions, and be fine. Yet if they start doing that – they will inevitably see greater success and growth and just overall business improvement. Albina Zhdanova, the COO of Tools for Brokers, shares their insights into organizing a productive strategy session.
By knowing what motivates Gen Z employees, managers can better manage and retain this amazing young generation of talent.
Productivity is a volatile thing in the office. It comes and goes. Just like there are ups and downs in life, some days are more rewarding than others at the workplace too. There will be times when your team would get in a slump and you will have to jumpstart them back to life.
Managing remote teams during the pandemic is never easy. Learn how to maximize the efficiency of your global engineering teams.
What can you learn from team management mistakes every CTO has made? We take a look at the common pitfalls CTO’s fall into when managing the IT team.
Filling in and submit timesheets are tedious. Today there are timeless software and tools that capture all employee activities.
To be the best of the best, Super Bowl championship teams need an elite level of consistency, trust, a culture of success, goals, measurement, and rewards.
Code reviews and the pull request are the basic building blocks in many software engineers’ life (The Workflow). They prevent bugs, mistakes, and help distribute the knowledge around a code base in small units of changes. They are, also — and specially code reviews — more an art than a science, and so everyone makes mistakes here. Things as random as the relationship that different contributors have between them, influence whether something is approved, overlooked, ignored or requests changes.
Every person at some point in their career may need to ask themselves “Do I really want to be a manager?” The question may seem straightforward, but the answer is not. It requires digging deeper and finding answers for ourselves without relying on what others believe is the right thing for us to do.
My last job in Brazil before moving to the UK was at ThoughtWorks. While I didn’t agree with everything that they did there (OMG… Java, please no! ^_^’’’) there is one thing about ThoughtWorks that is incontestable: they are very good with processes.
Patrick Campbell goes over why you shouldn't treat your team like children.
Managing Guidance From The Diary of an Amateur (not anymore) CEO Who Runs a Six Million Revenue BusinessWhy invent the wheel when someone has already invented a bicycle? Whether in business or any other category, learning from others’ experiences increases your chances of success along with saving you time, resources, and money.
In this article, you’ll discover why communication is a critical skill for a manager and seventeen skills to improve communication at work
Project reporting has never been easier. Trello is a website that will host your company’s day-to-day tasks. It’s a platform that provides project management.
Implementing change in any organization is a task of herculean proportions. But in this guide we explain how to manage change through the Kubler Ross method.
I always ask myself this question — What is a good developer?
I have always enjoyed healthy disagreements about my own ideas and opinions at home and at work. They give me a peek into so many unique perspectives and help me see how different the world is around us. I do not agree with everything people say, but I am definitely open to hearing them around.
Books are the best resource for sharing knowledge in a not-assisted way. They go deep into a topic, or more briefly over a bunch of them. Although, as a Software Engineer, I learned a lot from blog posts, tweets, and conference talks, it was books that prepared me for the Tech Lead role.
Today, we are going to compare Slack and Discord - perhaps, most popular team communication platforms and figure out what is the difference between them and which one can better solve your daily business tasks. We will also share from our experience, which tool we find better suited to specific Upsilon’s needs.
Project management is a complex field in software development. Sometimes you, as a project manager, feel like they are responsible for everything. Since your performance directly affects the success rate of the entire project. Project managers not only manage tasks but, most importantly, thoroughly guide the team toward the project goals. Being a great project manager requires interdisciplinary approaches and the ability to master both hard and soft skills. Let’s have a closer look at three essential competencies for the project manager to be successful.
How many times have you felt that it would have been better to contemplate the project requirements? How many times did you feel like including that “one” particular feature/function could have saved it from failure? Hold on to the thought right there! Do you think a System Requirements Specification could have played a pivotal role in success?
Before the 2000s, software development was mostly done in a Waterfall approach. This meant that a software project would be shipped after going through a few long stages such as analysis, development and QA, just to name a few. This led to slow software development cycles and, consequently, improper decisions were made in the early stages of the lifecycle, leading to poor or unfit software.
No strategy can help an organization thrive if the people in the organization aren’t resilient to change and chaos. Setbacks and challenging situations - a missed deadline, a lost deal, a failed project, a bad strategy - are everyday affairs at work, and only those who learn to get past them can grow professionally and personally.
Disconnect and poor communication are key challenges of managing a remote or hybrid development team. As a hybrid team, we share tips on effective management.
As you attempt to derive growth strategies for your field service business, it is important to focus on the right things.
Just five years ago, remote work was considered to be the way of the future, but only the distant future. Most specialized web publications predicted a rise in the popularity of telecommuting, but only in ten years’ time. However, this future arrived much earlier.
Today, I am going to cover why I consider data science as a team sport?
Engineers need feedback so they can improve skills and deepen knowledge. According to the editor of the Inc. Magazine, Jeff Hayden, traditional metrics can be misleading, as they do not always offer a clear result. Evaluating the work of staff used to be difficult, before Git Analytics tools, such as Waydev came up with a data-driven approach to engineering leadership to help you bring out the best in your engineers.
Why it is sometimes confusing to read about product management and why I wrote this guide: I actually wrote this guide in reaction to reading some other product management guides. I noticed that a lot of the guides I read were from pms at larger companies and didn’t actually have what I thought were the core pathways, skills, and experiences regarding product management. The guides did have a lot of tangential anecdotes, a lot of the typical hr-approved talking points of larger companies, and a lot of “check out this cool thing we did.” I tried to write this guide like something you’d hear after getting that Google pm drunk at a bar after the conference instead of hearing his talking points during the conference.
When many keen entrepreneurs start out on the path to growing their business, they are often guilty of making one huge mistake more than any other. Unfortunately, because this error is so ingrained in our very being, it’s not something that we recognize straight away, which means it happens over and over again.
From the desk of a brilliant weirdo #1: If you’re having a hard time getting your team on the same page, I want to let you know that you’re not alone.
Defining link building is easy. It’s getting other websites to link back to your site. It sounds easy, right?
Amy Tom talks to Matt Groves, the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Couchbase, and Brant Burnett, the Systems Architect at CenterEdge Software.
