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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.

Jun 28, 2020 - 4 min read
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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.

Jan 5, 2018 - 2 min read
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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.

Aug 15, 2016 - 2 min read