Leadership & Strategy

Solving Budget Problems by being Creative

When faced with budget constraints, such as hiring freezes or restrictions on buying or renting tools, creativity and a can-do attitude can help to find alternatives. Thinking outside the box and keeping the goal in mind can help to avoid being bogged down by budget constraints.

“There are no bad days.”

This article discusses how to be a pillar of positivity and radiate optimism as a leader. It suggests leaving bad moods at home, celebrating wins, and starting and ending meetings with something positive. It emphasizes the importance of staying positive in and out of the office, as it will have a positive effect on those around you.

When Engineers Struggle To Adapt To Rapid Changes

Chartboost, a tech company, has experienced rapid growth and change over the past 7 years. This has caused some engineers to struggle to adapt to the changing demands of the company. As a result, the company has become more conscious of hiring people who can adapt to change and are comfortable with the company's vision. The manager has also taken steps to ensure they have a good sense of what is coming up in the future.

Simultaneously Transitioning Two Offices from Waterfall to Agile

A consultant was brought in to roll out Agile to a 50 person engineering team across two offices. The consultant worked with the VP of Engineering and Product to develop pods aligned to business objectives, and then brought in a consultant to each office for 2 days of Scrum Master training. The consultant then provided coaching and guidance for each team for two months, and worked with the executive leadership team to set expectations around adoption and velocity. The lessons learned were that it is important to start with one team/pod that has practiced Agile before, and to roll out Agile to teams one at a time, allowing each team to adopt to Agile at their own pace. It is also important for all team members to have training and it's best if the team can do the training together.

How To Work Effectively with Distributed Teams

This article discusses the challenges of distributed teams and provides guidelines to help manage them. These guidelines include separating work streams for different locations, building personal relationships, negotiating and compromising, giving notice for changes, and treating documentation as part of the product. Additionally, it suggests defaulting to asynchronous communication and revisiting and revising working guidelines regularly.

Improving Collaboration Through Plans Of Attack

To improve collaboration between teams in different locations, a process was implemented where Plan of Attacks (POAs) were published on a public channel. This gave people from different locations the chance to see what their colleagues were working on and provided a checklist for people to go through. Although the process has helped with team visibility and cross-formation, there are still issues with engagement with the tool. To address this, people are now explicitly asked to tag three people on their POAs to ensure at least three people review the documents and provide comment.