We’ve all have been there: trying to become more productive and improve the way we work. If you are looking for a way to limit the “work in progress” answers received from your colleagues and achieve better results, here is a tool you can experiment with: the Kanban board. What is the Kanban board A kanban... Read more
Is technical leadership important? Even in a modern, agile / lean / software craftsmanship company? My experience says it is not only important but the key to the improved performance of developers. Whether we’re talking about a team technical lead, a software architect, a CTO, or an informal leader, I often see the need to understand their... Read more
Grzegorz (Greg) Albrecht, speaker at Product Leaders 2017, got interviewed by our colleague, Steliana Moraru, Event Manager. Read on to discover his professional experience, lessons learned and challenges met along the way. Steliana: You have a professional background that spans from product manager to startup founder to venture partner. Share with us a... Read more
This is a guest post by Ralph Roosmalen Scrum versus Waterfall. Management 1.0 versus Management 3.0. Automated Testing versus Manual Testing. Estimation versus No Estimations. SAFe versus LeSS. So many different opinions on all kind of topics and it seems like people always want you to choose between left or right, up or down etc. When... Read more
Richard Omollo, UX Designer Booking.com and speaker at Product Leaders 2017, just got interviewed by our colleague, Monica Obogeanu, product manager at Mozaic Labs. Read on to discover his professional experience, lessons learned and challenges along the way. Monica Obogeanu: Snooping through your LinkedIn profile, I noticed you have a wide & varied experience. Please tell... Read more
One of the first techniques I learned as a beginner Product Owner was user story mapping. I immediately found it was easy to understand and apply. What took a while longer was appreciating its true power – identifying all the situations where it can be applied. In the eventriX team, we use it to keep... Read more
We are committed to champion software excellence and challenge the current practices. Our aim is to constantly improve: business, product, and teams. That’s why, in this last month we carefully selected pieces of advice, practical ideas for you & your team to improve and grow. For you to easier access them, we present you the... Read more
I’m a developer. We’re not well known for our communication skills; at least I know I had my problems. Most of them came from the fact that my natural tendency is to ignore emotional cues and stay on facts. In many cases, that works fine. Sometimes, though, it creates unnecessary friction and can upset people.... Read more
Throughout my software-development years, giving and receiving feedback has proven to be an important tool. It helped me drive the projects forward and improved my skills as a developer. In this article, you can find out why it’s important to give feedback to your colleagues, and, more importantly, what are the proper means to provide... Read more
You can’t just give someone a creativity injection. You have to create an environment for curiosity and a way to encourage people and get the best out of them. Ken Robinson The ability to create something new, to get new business started, break boundaries with bold ideas or redefine the existing standards are among the... Read more
Guest post by Ralph van Roosmalen Imagine this: You are working as a manager at a company, you work there already for years and things are not going bad but you know there is room for improvement. You heard about Scrum, Agile, the Agile Manifesto… and you decide to learn more about it. You visit a few conferences, attend... Read more
The question of How to keep your team motivated pops up in various discussions with managers. The reasons vary, but with the increasing generation gap (think Millenials are coming), learning this is a process that requires adjustment. Feedback helps us adjust the work behaviour and keeps the motivation level high. Gathering knowledge across a couple of years,... Read more
This article was published first in Today Software Magazine, no 16. Below it’s the full version. The authors are Alexandru Bolboaca and Adrian Bolboaca. In 2001, a group of people unpleased about the state of software development gathered in a mountain ski resort from Utah. One thing leading to another, they started discussing about the industrial methods applied at the... Read more
Challenge the way you work. Stay happy & productive! My colleagues, advising or coaching teams to be happy and productive, listen and learn constantly about the challenges they have during the day-to-day activity. In the next series of articles, we share with you practical solutions to common challenges encountered when developing software products, as well as new techniques to help... Read more
How do you feel at the end of a product demo? Happy? Energized? Ready to celebrate? Does this feeling last? My colleagues and I have seen our share of Scrum Meetings. We wrote previously about the Daily Scrum, and decided to focus on demos this time. Many of the demos we’ve seen had issues, and some... Read more
A simplistic idea started spreading for the past years in Romania, and I’ve met it to a lower extent in other European countries as France, Germany, UK, etc. Companies noticed they have a developer crisis. The simplistic solution: the universities and the industry should produce more developers. I believe this solution to be completely off... Read more
Improvement ideas for future actions come from lessons learnt. Perfection game is one of the techniques used to express our opinions. It is a non-violent and action-focused technique, that can be used to get feedback. It can also be used as a retrospective technique or to help teams to self organize. Here’s how it goes: Each interested person... Read more
“The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been” — Henry A. Kissinger How does a technical leader act in a company with empowered teams? I believe all leaders must attend to five fundamental duties: demonstrate character, clarify direction, solve problems, increase motivation and develop people. This blog post describes the fifth duty: improving... Read more
In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can. — Nikos Kazantzakis How does a technical leader act in a company with empowered teams? This blog post is part of a series that tries to answer that question. I believe all leaders must attend to five fundamental duties: demonstrate character, clarify direction, solve problems, increase motivation... Read more
Recently, I participated in an experiment for Product Development. It was during a weekend, in the mountains, with a team of 8 persons from Bucharest Agile Software Meetup Group. We didn’t know each other very well and we have not been working together before. Our misson was to develop a product in a day and... Read more