Tag: team
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Thinking beyond your team
Recently, couple of my teams decided to combine their codebases. It was essentially the same application, written twice over to do the UI for a wizard that went down 2 paths. Their backends do very different things. However, the customer sees a very similar interface. After having done the migration, there have been some gripes.…
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The Bear and shows about teamwork
I love TV shows that show great teamwork. They aren’t always easy to find. Most shows tend to focus on an individual character and their story arc. I’ve been watching The Bear recently and it is one of those. The Bear is about a restaurant that is in the brink of falling over. Most characters…
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Building trust at work
Today I met a friend who has left his job only months after joining. His team lead had huge trust issues. Everything had to flow through him. He made all the decisions. There was a lot of frustration when people were proactive. I’m surprised he spent that long in this environment at all. However, it…
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Companies Grow
As successful products increase in revenue, companies grow. Growth allows a company to improve their products, support more customers and create additional value-add services. Growing up isn’t easy. As a handful of engineers become hundreds, or even thousands, the added weight introduces many issues. These can often lead to the opposite outcomes of what growth…
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Wise words from a tall man: playing the long game
Vithun with some words of wisdom: vithun.com/posts/playing-the-long-game …the longer the game one is in, the more they have got to be able to let something go. And not just let it go, but take it off their mind and start from blank for the next thing coming their way. Reacting to everything is something one…
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Learnings from “Seeing like a State” by James C Scott
Seeing like a State inspects attempts of states bringing “administrative order of nature and society” that’s led to disastrous outcomes. It is an interesting window into inspecting how large, people based systems work at scale. High Modernism The book inspects state’s appetite to use “high modernism” to solve issues at scale. “High modernism is a…
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How to make remote work successful at your workplace?
You have to fully commit. The whole world is going “remote”. But, it is hard to tell if imany places are finding success in a more distributed working model. It is a tough transition. Much of it is because most workplaces continue to operate with the same way they’ve always had. Somethings need to change.…
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How to drive your teams to care more about operational excellence?
When an operational outcomes needs to be achieved, we are after a predictable and repeatable process. This means that we can’t approach the execution of these outcomes like a creative task, allowing makers to self-organise. “OpEx” is an area where rigidity helps. We can approach “Operational Excellence” on 2 fronts: Here are a few ideas…
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Attributing value to teams in large organizations
In a large tech company, there are layers and layers of teams that contribute to the success of a product or service offered. Many of these layers tend to only have indirect impact on customers. Teams that have a direct relationship with customers tend to have a lot of power. They bear the burden of…
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Do “basics” well
High performing teams are about interperson chemistry that is built on a foundation of the “basics”. Take sports for example. Learning to play a sport require you to learn the rules and develop basic skills to play. For soccer, it would be passing, tackling, lobbing and shooting. When you join a team, there’s drills, runs…