Most software teams—at least among those I’ve worked with—are product delivery teams. They add value by making the product, or by making the product more useful to people. But there … Continue reading The value of an improvement team
Category: Working practices
Dealing with difficult conversations
I’ve written before about how online, text-based conversations can easily get tense, stressful, and often escalate into unpleasantness—Slack, Teams, and so on are great in some ways, and terrible in … Continue reading Dealing with difficult conversations
“How can we stop this happening again?”
It’s an unavoidable reality that bad things happen. I work a lot with software engineering and systems operations teams, and there have been too many times when someone had detected … Continue reading “How can we stop this happening again?”
Motivation through user appreciation
Most teams I’ve ever worked with are full of individuals who are intelligent and dedicated. But sometimes there is a concern from (often senior) people outside the team that there … Continue reading Motivation through user appreciation
Interviewing users you know
Sometimes I find myself joining a team and introducing the idea of user research, a part of product discovery. I urge my teams to speak to users in carefully-planned interviews, … Continue reading Interviewing users you know
Assuming the best intent
With more text-based communication as we work from home there is more room for misunderstanding and stress. Slack, Microsoft Teams, and the like allow communication without the subtleties of facial … Continue reading Assuming the best intent
Stimulating disagreement produces better solutions
When I create workshops there is a type of activity that’s common to many of them, which is people writing ideas on sticky notes and then putting them into categories. … Continue reading Stimulating disagreement produces better solutions
State the problem for any solution
We often have good ideas about things to improve and how to improve them—introducing a new tool, changing the way we do something, adjusting a procedure, and so on. But … Continue reading State the problem for any solution
Embedding apprecation
We may claim our organisation has a culture of this or that, but how can we be confident? What is the tangible evidence? Our organisational culture is a mix of … Continue reading Embedding apprecation
The chisel stage and the sandpaper stage
Once upon a time I was speaking to a software developer who was explaining why he wasn’t taking the kind of care in his work that he would have liked … Continue reading The chisel stage and the sandpaper stage
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