14 posts tagged “leadership”.
Throughout my career the one thing I've watched kill good products is a single word: resource.
Once a company calls its people resources, it starts treating them like resources. It adds them, rotates them, splits them across locations. The product is the first thing to suffer.
Yes, you want a team. The dynamic of that team decides far more than the org chart admits.
Read More →Our software craftsmanship group encourages new speakers to come and practise their talks.
One is coming up in August. At the start of every meetup we read aloud the code of conduct.
It can feel formal, but the repetition is the point. It sets the culture and reminds us who we want to be.
A question can be good and still land badly. The timing and the room decide.
Read More →A confident voice can ask a sharp question at the wrong moment and close a room down. In a meetup, the cost is one nervous speaker and a room that goes quiet. In a company, the same habit compounds, meeting after meeting, until the same few people decide what the team is allowed to say out loud.
You see the pattern at conferences first. The people who are confident keep speaking. The people finding their voice hold back. Over time the room narrows. The same voices return, the same ideas circulate, and the different takes never get a hearing.
Read More →Most engineering decisions are not proofs.
They are bets.
You choose a direction with incomplete information, under time pressure, and with trade-offs you cannot fully test in advance.
That does not make the decision weak.
It makes it real.
In a previous post, I wrote about how design by committee leaves engineering change unfinished. The deeper reason is simple: many organisations treat technical decisions as though they should be certain before the work begins. But most meaningful engineering decisions are not certainties. They are bets.
Read More →Engineering change often gets stuck for the same reason: design by committee. Not because anyone has bad intentions, but because the pursuit of alignment quietly replaces the pursuit of learning.
It usually starts with good intentions. People want alignment, consistency, and lower risk. So a proposed change gets pulled into more meetings, more reviews, more stakeholders. Before long, the goal is no longer to try something, learn from it, and improve it. The goal becomes finding one perfect solution for every team.
That is usually where momentum dies.
Read More →Strong opinions should be earned, not borrowed. If you want to propose a change, do the work first.
Understand the trade-offs before you walk into the room.
I see the same pattern again and again in software teams. Someone reads a blog post, watches a conference talk, picks up a new buzzword, or sees how a company like Spotify talks about working, and by the next meeting they are proposing that the whole team change how it works.
The idea often sounds compelling at first. But the moment you ask about the trade-offs, the case falls apart. There is no real research, no serious risk assessment, and no clear plan for what to do if the change creates new problems rather than solving the old ones.
That gap between enthusiasm and understanding is where teams get into trouble.
Read More →In my career, I have realised that the best companies celebrate each success in a genuine, informal way. They avoid contrived rituals that can feel like an artificial façade.
In these organisations, individuals willingly help colleagues reach shared goals.
Take Janet from my local Parkrun, for example.
Although she does not compete, she choose to find the time to cheer on each participant to achieve their goals... even on cold Saturday mornings.
Read More →I've been fortunate to work with some incredible leaders throughout my career.
These individuals have inspired and challenged their teams and driven them to achieve their full potential.
What truly sets a leader apart, however, is their ability to motivate and their willingness to fight for their team.
There's something special about a leader who fights for their team.
In this post, I'll explain what happens when a leader truly stands up for their team, sharing my firsthand experiences from a transformative project at Cambridge Assessment in 2007.
As an England football fan, I know the feeling all too well. The heartbreak of watching your team come so close, only to fall short at the final hurdle once again. It's now 58 years of hurt.
It's a mixture of emotions – frustration, disappointment, and knowing the team could have done more.
I've experienced a similar feeling in my work as a consultant.
As the English Football League nears the climax of another demanding season, leaders are confronted with the challenge of motivating weary players and handling the intense mental and physical pressures of chasing titles, securing promotions, or avoiding relegation.
As a Barcelona supporter, it might come as a surprise that I using Jose Mourinho, a figure often mired in controversy, who exemplified empathetic leadership during his reign at Inter Milan, leading to their historic treble win.
This post celebrates and thanks Joe Parry as he takes a well-deserved bow and steps down from his role as the head of the JavaScript & NodeJS Cambridge Meetup Group.
He has been an extraordinary leader who has dedicated the past ten years to fostering a vibrant community of Javascriptors in Cambridge.
You've probably heard someone quote Norm Kerths' Prime Directive during a retrospective
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
In my experience, engineering teams doing their best at that time inevitably end up having to shoehorn features as requirements change or new information becomes available.
In this post, I'll discuss why great products need strong foundations.
Read More →It can be a struggle, endlessly trying to convince your organisation to believe in your ideas and vision.
In this post, I'll share how I managed to do this.
Read More →In 2015 I was hired by Cambridge University Press to develop a web application providing digital access to over 35,000 books and 1.5 million journal articles, consolidating several smaller sites. The application would go onto have over 2 million users a day and generate £65 million in revenue per year.
It was a fantastic technical learning opportunity, but it was our culture and approach to product development that would teach me the most important lesson of all.
Read More →