Developing leadership in a startup team
A startup team is always against the clock, always delayed. Developing leadership skills in a startup team is critical for its success. An excellent way to develop leadership skills is to read The Lean Startup book. Recently, I’ve finished up […]
What exactly is the Waterfall methodology?
Embrace Waterfall Staying away from the concept of “Waterfall” is what is preventing your engineering team from moving faster. I’m sure you don’t even dare to use the word because of all the bad press it has. The Waterfall methodology […]
Tech meetings ROI
A tech meeting can quickly become a sunk cost. Gather your 10 engineers team and talk non-stop for 2 hours about something they don’t care about. You will be wasting 20hs worth of development. One way to measure a meeting’s […]
Tech with no maintenance cost
A two-year software project, with 4 full-time -remote- engineers, could cost between $800k-$1M. If you heavily use AWS, you could be in the $5-$10k/month operational cost. There is a myth, feeding by the never-ending tech improvements, that you won’t have […]
The 3 levels of Done
When a new feature is close to a deadline, and you ask the question: “how are we doing?” There are three levels of done you can get: The developer’s done: it means the feature is code completed, but potentially untested, […]
Story points don’t work
We’ve been riding the agile wave for too long. Let’s face it: story points don’t work. In every single dev team I was part of, we’ve used story points as an alias for time units (hours, days.) – no shame […]
War rooms
“(…) war rooms are spaces where key people get together to solve a difficult problem” What Is an “IT War Room”? In software development, war rooms are used to solve P0 emergencies, crisis management, or project’s overdue. War room sessions are […]
A simple priority system
The key reason why your projects are delayed, your support team is slow, and overall your company doesn’t seem to make progress is a lack of a priority system. Prioritizing tasks, tickets, cards, goals, etc., its not a matter of ordering […]
Moving as fast as the slowest runner
Imagine that your team is in a race, and everyone is tied together. All the runners should arrive at the goal at the same time. Until the slowest/last person reaches the goal, nobody wins. This is especially true in software […]
Deadlines create technical debt
We were in the last stretch to ship a redesigned, reengineered, microservices-based analytics product. After a 6-months design phase, we were coding the last microservices to ship the product. It was a year-long project, and obviously, we were behind. We […]