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Decision-Making in Autonomous Teams
Why do we need this?
One of the most difficult aspects of a leader’s role is striking the right balance between giving direction and encouraging teams to make decisions independently. While experience may suggest that a particular approach is likely to be the most effective, it’s unlikely to be successful unless the team commits to it. There’s also a chance that better solutions exist, and given the right environment, teams will often discover these for themselves. Building that environment and providing their teams with just enough direction is where a leader really adds value.
Moving to a Startup: The Changing Role of Dev Manager
Moving from the corporate world to a startup can be an exciting and rewarding experience. As a technical leader, there is a lot to adjust to in terms of what the new environment demands from the role. That said, there are a number of valuable lessons that can be applied from the corporate world. Having made the move myself, I was invited to discuss this on the latest episode of the Venturi’s Voice podcast. Recorded in November 2017. Thanks to Andy Davis and the team for having me on the show.
Agile Estimation For Distributed Teams
The teams I’m working with use Planning Poker to estimate the size of user stories. This has proved to be an extremely useful activity, and we rely on it to plan upcoming work. In the past, we used special card decks for this, which worked well when everyone was based in the same room. However, with team members now distributed across two continents, this quickly became less effective.
To address this, we initially tried running the sessions over a conference call, using group chat channels to record votes on the items being discussed. However, the quality of estimates noticeably deteriorated as a result, with less confident developers waiting to see what others thought before voting, and outliers not always being discussed. With distributed IT teams becoming more prevalent, a number of online Planning Poker tools have been developed. Since none of the available offerings quite met our requirements, I set about building our own. The key features of this version are: