Category: people

Categories
behaviour patterns people team work

Location, location, location of the Engineering team

Where’s the team? Is it in house? Why is it remote? People are interested. They have a right to know. However, I am always interested to find out what’s behind the question.

My data sample is small and built from my experience as CTO and working on consulting projects. So I am biased. Nevertheless, I think once you find more about the person asking the question you can correlate their view fairly accurately to the perceived right answer.

If the person is a recruiter or a talent manager, commonly the view is that in house creates better team dynamics and creates more hiring work which people with local hiring experience are more comfortable with.

If the person is from a finance department, the outcome is diagonally different. The cost, time to market and scale play a big part as to what good looks like.

Is the person is a CEO or an investor, there is no given right answer usually as there is awareness that not one answer fits all situations. And usually the strategic decision about the team make up is taken considering many variables but primarily where can I hire the best people to grow my business fast.

Finally, if the person is an engineer, she or he won’t care. Why? Because engineers want to work with the best engineers, making location irrelevant.

Having managed teams of 2 people to 60+, I think what’s important is how one is organised, what processes are followed and how well work is documented and tracked.

Usually default opinion backing the in house teams option is hidden behind poor communication, undeveloped technology strategy, immature operating model and incomplete documentation (stories, roadmap, tests). Lack of any of above is not a good enough reason to pick any option. Don’t miss on top talent for being lazy.

Categories
behaviour people

The Problem With Feedback

The author of the Atlantic article argues: The proliferation of ratings systems doesn’t necessarily produce a better restaurant or hotel experience. Instead, it homogenizes the offerings, as people all go to the same top-rated establishments. Those places garner ever more reviews, bouncing them even farther up the list of results. Rather than a quality check, feedback here becomes a means to bland sameness.

Categories
hacks leadership people process startup strategy

Lessons Learned Running Tech Consultancy

Needless to say that advice here is relevant in 2018 as it was in 2012:

  • Everyone starts on fulltime salary
  • Process is very important
  • Not a fan of remote working setup (I agree 100% unless it gives scale and capability hard to hire locally)
  • Business development ways:
    • Writing blog posts
    • Giving presentations to general tech audiences (more beginners than experts)
    • LinkedIn
    • Referrals
    • Being found on Google
Categories
behaviour Google people team

High performance teams – what Google learnt

The NY Times article says: Project Aristotle’s researchers began searching through the data they had collected, looking for norms. They looked for instances when team members described a particular behavior as an ‘‘unwritten rule’’ or when they explained certain things as part of the ‘‘team’s culture.’’ Some groups said that teammates interrupted one another constantly and that team leaders reinforced that behavior by interrupting others themselves. On other teams, leaders enforced conversational order, and when someone cut off a teammate, group members would politely ask everyone to wait his or her turn. Some teams celebrated birthdays and began each meeting with informal chitchat about weekend plans. Other groups got right to business and discouraged gossip. There were teams that contained outsize personalities who hewed to their group’s sedate norms, and others in which introverts came out of their shells as soon as meetings began.

After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams.

Categories
behaviour leadership people startup team

No ego

Hiring, hiring, hiring. I’ve been hiring for the last 6 months non-stop. Before leaving my job I had to hire new CTO and a team of 6 in India as part of my handover.

At my new startup, I am setting up a team and I started hiring even before I started. I talked to freelancers from Upwork, super contractors in London, AWS solution architects, many outsourcing agencies from 20 to 200 staff in Serbia, Ukraine,  Belarus, Holland, South Africa., LinkedIn contacts, Twitter followers, CTOs from London, Israel and Belgrade… and many recruitment consultants.

I posted jobs on job boards from LinkedIn to local job sites in Eastern Europe. I interviewed many candidiates in the first to final rounds, reviewed not as many CVs (engineers don’t know how to write CVs), built submitted code, performed many coding tests, talked to many managers. The key to success is to forget your ego and find value in candidates for the particular role you are hiring for. Forget your ego.

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behaviour hacks people

+ 80 IQ points

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Alan Key

Categories
leadership other people support team tools work

Bridging Tech-Business gap

Best way for Tech to bridge gap with the Business is to be helpful and to ensure that tech works 100% of the time.

How to be helpful? Organise knowedge sharing sessions with functional teams (finance, for example), focus on their needs and their core apps, show them how to use the tools to make their job easier. Do this to establish a baseline of Tech knowledge across organisation.

If you are a smaller business or have a developed support function, follow up with one to ones that can be between a few minutes to 30mins. Check user set up, show tools shortcuts, explain new tools use case. Use a check list to ensure consistency.

100% useful/works: Needless to say ensure that Tech works by making common tasks seamless: login, email, change password, file sharing, system updates, printing.

Categories
leadership other people team work

Get others involved

Add business users and other team members (data ops, for example) to stand ups. Resolve conflicts quickly, directly address bottlenecks while creating a sense of common team spirit.

Categories
other people work

Feedback

If you speak directly and confront problems directly, give feedback directly, take pleasure getting feedback, you’ll learn quickly, you’ll earn respect of others and you’ll solve problems more quickly. Clive Schlee, CEO Pret A Monger

Categories
behaviour decisions other people

Be yourself

Be yourself; because everyone else is taken. Oscar Wilde