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  • Q&A on the Book Working Remotely

    In the book Working Remotely, Teresa Douglas, Holly Gordon, and Mike Webber share their experiences from working at Kaplan, a company that changed from being a brick-and-mortar company to becoming a predominantly virtual company.

  • Dealing with Psychopaths and Narcissists during Agile Change

    Psychopathic or narcissistic toxic employees can slow down the adoption of change in a company. Many of the techniques or practices you use with healthy people do not work well with psychopaths or narcissists. This article explores four key areas that can help a change consultant succeed when dealing with toxic people.

  • Overcoming Software Impediments Using Obstacle Boards

    Life is full of obstacles; there’s bound to be a few blockers along the way. In this article, Carly Richmond ponders the successes and challenges of adopting their first Obstacle Board. She will discuss how they integrated the board into their practice, and provide some useful tips on how you can apply the lessons they learned to your own implementation.

  • Dev & UX: How Integrating UX Improves Engineering’s Efficiency and Sanity

    User experience (UX) is often misunderstood. Many teams and workers believe it’s just sketching or laying out screens. Misunderstanding UX leads to problems in hiring, processes, team culture, product, and customer satisfaction. Today we’ll learn how to start improving all of these by seeing UX as it really is: engineering’s time and money saver.

  • Q&A on the Book Office Optional

    The book Office Optional by Larry English describes how employees from Centric work virtually within a culture that contributes to the business’s success and employee happiness. The stories in this book provide insights into how working remotely looks, building relationships and trust in a virtual environment, managing remote teams, and recruiting and hiring people for remote working.

  • A Five-step Guide to Building Empathy That Can Boost Your Development Career

    Empathy isn’t just a nice-to-have soft skill. It’s one of the top six skills required of employees in 2020 and beyond, according to Forbes. Learn why empathy is critical for developers in particular and explore these five steps you can take to cultivate empathy in your day-to-day: 1. Understand yourself, 2. Understand them, 3. Build comfort into conversations, 4. Learn how to listen, 5. Practice.

  • How to Build a Strong Beta Testers Community

    It is important to involve the real users at the early stages of your development cycle. A strong beta testers community not only improves your product, but also provides context, pain points and ideas while increasing loyalty and engagement. This article offers tips and tricks on how to build a beta testers program and a process of supporting the program with a modest allotment.

  • Q&A on the Book Retrospectives for Everyone

    The book Retrospectives for Everyone by Madhavi Ledalla explains how metaphors can be used to foster reflection and result in actions in agile retrospectives. The book provides examples of metaphors that can for instance be used to nurture teamwork, manage change, focus on objectives and personal reflection, and also provides recommendations for facilitating retrospectives beyond a single team.

  • Q&A on the Book Dynamic Reteaming (2-ed)

    In the 2nd edition of her book Dyanamic Reteaming, Heidi Helfand shows that having stable teams is generally unrealistic and that there are ways to effectively reform teams to achieve great outcomes. She explores different approaches to team formation and reformation and provides practical advice on how to create environments where team formation can adapt and evolve effectively.

  • Q&A on the Book The Improv Mindset

    The book The Improv Mindset by Bruce and Gail Montgomery provides the framework, activities, case stories, and data to help you apply improv in a business context. They show how you can deal with uncertainty by changing how your brain responds to change, as well as provide methods to systematically improve individual, team, and organization performance by leveraging the core principles of improv.

  • Retrospectives for Management Teams

    Engaging top management in a recurring retrospective approach can result in long-term value in organizations. Retrospectives can help management teams to explore how they collaborate and cooperate. They can find out whether they should change something and decide on action points that propel the team forward and make them more effective.

  • Scaling Distributed Teams by Drawing Parallels from Distributed Systems

    An effective distributed team’s characteristics are accountability, good communication, clear goals and expectations, a defined decision-making process, and autonomy with explicit norms. Ranganathan Balashanmugam spoke about scaling distributed teams around the world at QCon London 2020. In his talk he showed how we can apply distributed systems patterns for scaling distributed teams.

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