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Leadership & Management
Monday Routines: C. Todd Lombardo, Chief Design Strategist at Fresh Tilled Soil
In the second installment of our Monday Routines series, in which software people like you recount their Monday rituals, we sit down with C. Todd Lombardo. Find out how C. Todd balances cyclocross, design sprints, food challenges, and jazz sessions on a typical Monday as Chief Design Strategist at Fresh Tilled Soil.
It Takes 6 Days to Change 1 Line of Code
How long does it take your team to ship code to production? Ed Weissman scripts a hilarious (and unfortunately typical) scenario where a critical one line change takes 6 days to ship due to complicated and inefficient processes.
Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time
Do you ever find yourself working long hours and lacking the energy to take care of yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally? Most of us respond to rising demands in the workplace by putting in longer hours, which inevitably take a toll on us. Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project and Catherine McCarthy show us how to be more productive and happy by expanding and renewing the 4 main sources of energy: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit.
Why This Opportunity Solution Tree is Changing the Way Product Teams Work
Teresa Torres of Product Talk outlines a novel approach to preventing common gaps in problem solving. Learn how to build and use an opportunity solution tree to guide product discovery and prevent fixation on one approach. It's incredibly simple and effective.
What Great Managers Do Daily
We know what traits make for great managers — they create trust, focus on strengths, and instill accountability. But how do great managers spend their time on a day-to-day basis? To find out, Ryan Fuller and Nina Shikaloff combined data from Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics product with employee engagement survey results from two Fortune 100 companies. See what makes managers of highly engaged employees different than the rest on a day-to-day basis.
Some tweaks to build employee loyalty
As founders and managers, concern about employee turnover is one of the things that keeps us up at night. A stable and productive team is critical for our success. In this article, Daniel Zimmerman of Wilmer-Hale explores some creative options to increase loyalty from employees. From back-loaded stock vesting schedules, to early sales for tenured employees, to ten year exercise periods, find out how companies like Snapchat and Airbnb are keeping employees incentivized to stay.
Too Personal: What to do when your One-on-Ones get too personal
Building rapport is critical to strong working relationships with our teams. We need to care about our team members and invest in their success for them to be fully engaged. But what do you do if that crosses over to being too personal?
Evolution of the Development Team
As a development team forms and matures, it goes through a number of evolutionary stages. And some of those stages can be pretty difficult. Ron Eringa takes his observations from years as an Agile coach and professional Scrum trainer and gives us his "Evolution Stages of the Development Team". What stage do you think your team is in?
Only Slightly Off-Topic
The Secret Life of Time
Alan Burdick shares his thoughts and observations on time in this deep and thought-provoking article from the The New Yorker. As a father of twins, this article hits close to home for me, especially this line: "A quiet half hour alone with one boy—by his request, no less—was a gift."
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