If you're remote, ramble
A tip for remote teams of 2-10 people. Create a personal “ramblings” channel for each teammate in your team’s chat app of choice.
Read more [stephango.com]
Posts tagged with team
A tiny taxonomy of meetings
Ideally every meeting should be categorised in advance so that everyone’s going in with the same expectations.
Read more [adactio.com]
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Choosing where to spend my team’s effort
– frederickvanbrabant.com - submitted by Frederick Vanbrabant
It’s the start of a new fiscal year. Strategy season. That time when all the grand ideas come out and everyone is still hopefull.
Over the years, I’ve settled into a structure that helps me define projects that not only link to the strategy above but also looks at my own team’s enviroment, I thought I’d share it here.
Read more [frederickvanbrabant.com]
Impact, agency, and taste
Many of the most effective people I’ve worked with also do the most metacognition, i.e., reflecting on their own (and their team’s) work and thought processes, and figuring out how to improve them.
Read more [www.benkuhn.net]
All-hands planning meetings are probably a waste of time
Spicy headline, but good food for thought!
Read more [mikeveerman.substack.com]
Why Agility–not Agile–is the Best Tool for Project Management
– tighten.com - submitted by Jamison Valenta
There are a many ways to organize software projects, each with their pros and cons. I’ll break down a few common methodologies, and share smarter ways of working that enable your team to remain flexible.
Read more [tighten.com]
No code reviews by default
At Raycast, the dev team only requests code reviews when they think it's necessary.
Read more [www.raycast.com]
A Project Manager’s Top Tips
– tighten.co - submitted by Jamison Valenta
Just as each workday is a little different, the same can be said about digital projects. Some digital projects are big and require large teams, months of collaboration, and brand new everything to bring them from beginning to end. So what’s a project manager to do?
Read more [tighten.co]
Working Through A Pandemic
– tighten.co - submitted by Jamison Valenta
Tighten employees share encouragement for anyone struggling through the pandemic.
Read more [tighten.co]
Queuing up in meetings
Distributing speaking time can be tricky when meeting face to face, but it is usuallly worse in virtual meetings. Especially those spanning long distances.
Read more [hiddedevries.nl]
Introducing monthly playlists from team Spatie
At Spatie, each one of our team members loves music. Scattered across our office are a couple of HomePods. Everyone in our team is free to stream his favourite music for others to hear (of course at an acceptable volume so everyone can still work).
This is a great way to discover music. In my mind, any automated algorithm that picks music for you is trumped what your friends and peers suggest to you.
Because of the pandemic, this way of sharing music with each other was lost. That's why our team will from now on create monthly playlists. The process is easy: every month we will choose a theme for the playlist and each team member picks two or three tracks.
The first theme is "Late Night Something" (it's not "late night coding" because not everyone on our team codes.
Here's our playlist on Apple Music. And here is the same playlist on Spotify.
Here's at the Spotify embed so you can listen from your browser too.
How We Work (at Tailwind)
Adam Wathan recently started hiring the first employees of his brand new company. On Basecamp he shared how they work.
Read more [public.3.basecamp.com]
Builders and architects: two types of programmers
My colleague Brent wrote an interesting piece on how different people with different personaliteits can work together.
Read more [stitcher.io]
A Micro-Manager’s Guide to Chilling Out
Don't try to manage your colleagues too much.
Employees want to be managed by people who empower them, not manage every bit of their day. The better you get at hitting the right balance between oversight and autonomy, the more likely you are to win long-term fans who will advocate for you as your career progresses.
Read more [forge.medium.com]
Nobody really owns product work
A nice insight by Basecamp engineer Jonas Downey.
Whatever ownership you have over an individual contribution is immediately forfeited the moment you commit the code. At that moment, the work becomes part of the ever-evolving organism that comprises a software system.
Read more [m.signalvnoise.com]
Sharing learning via code
Konstantin Kudryashov, one of the speakers at the upcoming Full Stack Europe conference, makes the case for sharing new insights early.
When you build new feature as a team, and it requires a lot of new learning, do not hoard new knowledge in your head. Instead, incrementally commit each unit of learning into working code. Hide that partial logic behind a feature flag. The feature would be incomplete, but work-in-progress outputs will expose meaningful and demonstrable progress. To increase team’s awareness of outputs, add links into the feature tracker or documentation.
Read more [stakeholderwhisperer.com]
Unslacking Tideways Company
Benjamin Eberlei wrote a post on why and how he got rid of Slack in his company.
We have moved away from Slack at Tideways over the last three months, because I found Slack is already annoying, even with just a four person team (plus the occasional freelancer). For me, it disrupts deep work phases and knowledge lost in the depth of chat history.
Read more [beberlei.de]
Good Product Team / Bad Product Team
Marty Cagan, who held jobs at eBay, AOL, Netscape and HP, describes the most important differences between good and bad product teams.
What I’ve learned is that there is a profound difference between how the very best product companies create technology products, and the rest. And I don’t mean minor differences. Everything from how the leaders behave, to the level of empowerment of teams, to how the organization thinks about funding, staffing and producing products, down to how product, design and engineering collaborate to discover effective solutions for their customers.
Why you should be giving your developers 20% time
On the Tighten blog Samatha Geitz sums up the benefits of giving developers one day of "free" time a week.
About a year ago, Tighten officially implemented a "20% time" policy for its developers. This means that, on any given week, we only bill our clients for 32 hours of developer work; for the other 8 hours, developers can work on whatever projects they’d like to (as long as they can readily come up with an explanation of how it benefits the company in some way.) ... Here are some reasons that you may want to consider experimenting with a policy like this
https://blog.tighten.co/give-your-developers-20-percent-time
How to create custom git aliases for a project
In a short post on his blog Joeri Timmermans explains how to create per project git alias that can be shared with a team.
http://www.pix-art.be/post/how-to-create-custom-git-aliases-for-a-project