Essentials for Building and Leading Highly Effective Development Teams

DevConf 2018 (Krakow, Poland)

Individually creating software to get the tasks done is the easier part of the whole story compared to doing it as a development team. From conflict resolution between the team members to deciding what features goes into the product, the team needs to make countless of decisions everyday and I bet you want to do this fast in order to hold on to your business’ competitive advantage.

As being a Technical Lead to a software development team, I’ll share my experience in this talk on what the essential principles are for building and leading a fast-paced, customer-centric and effective software development team. By the end of the talk, I hope to leave you with a few ideas that you can experiment within your own teams.

Transcript

1. Essentials for Building and Leading Highly Effective Development Teams Tugberk Ugurlu @tourismgeek tugberkugurlu.com #DevConfPL Platinum Sponsor 26-28 September 2018, Kraków, Poland
2. Cześć! I’m Tugberk ! I love creating products and making an impact on people’s lives ❤ You can !nd me at @tourismgeek # 3
3. 4 I work at Redgate as a Technical Lead as part of a software development team !
4. 287 Redgaters and counting 18 years old 202,000 customers 100,000 cups of coffee each year 91% of the Fortune 100 use our tools 4m website visits each year 1147 product releases last year 68 User Groups sponsored About Redgate
5. 6 The Goal of the development team? https://flic.kr/p/38vYmN
6. 7 Solve the right problems for the business and users https://flic.kr/p/38vYmN
7. “ effectiveness (n) the degree to which something is successful in producing a desired result 8
8. 9 https://flic.kr/p/53Aj6D Effectiveness !== Efficiency
9. “ efficiency (n) Act of performing or functioning in the best possible manner with the least waste of time and effort. 10
10. “ TL;DR; Being effective is about doing the right things, while being efficient is about doing things right. 11 https://bit.ly/2jk5MPw
11. How do we know that we are doing the right thing? For our users and business 12
12. There are two aspects here
13. Objective setting https://flic.kr/p/pXTZRB
14. Execution https://flic.kr/p/kpEQBi
15. Objective setting
16. TODO: Add purpose, team picture here Sense of purpose https://flic.kr/p/h39XM8
17. Where do we go from here? https://flic.kr/p/6itRpW
18. https://a.lupu.pro/612/the-art-of-assumption-making/ Humans make assumptions
19. Assumption Mapping
20. Assumption Mapping
21. How does this have an impact on the effectiveness?
22. Validation techniques 23
23. Qualitative Information that can't actually be measured
24. 25 Talking to Users https://flic.kr/p/UD5grg
25. “ If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. - Henry Ford (maybe?)
26. The Mom Test http://momtestbook.com/
27. JTBD (Jobs-to-Be-Done) People buy products and services to get a “job” done. https://www.intercom.com/books/jobs-to-be-done
28. Quantitative Information that can be measured and written down with numbers
29. Hypothesis Driven Development 30
30. A User Story As a student or professional, I want to search for language schools so that I can find the best school suited to my needs based on schools’ price, location and other criteria. 31
31. What’s wrong here?
32. 33 https://flic.kr/p/8ZBm3K https://flic.kr/p/8s1FYZ Confident Statement!
33. “ Hypothesis: A supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.
34. Hypothesis We believe that a language school search capability will result in users engaging with the search form to find language schools based on their criteria. We’ll know that we have succeeded when 40% of users use the search, out of at least 50 unique users. 35 https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/how-implement-hypothesis-driven-development
35. Would users engage with the search functionality on the site? 36
36. 54 Unique Users 2 days experiment ~5 Searches Per session 37% Searched Out of unique number of users 37
37. Heatmap view of the users engaging with the site 38
38. “ Would users engage with the search functionality on the site? 39
39. YES!
40. Let the Uncertainty be Your Friend: Finding Your Path in a Wiggly Road https://vimeo.com/275529797 41
41. Execution
42. Again: How do we know that we are doing the right thing? For our users and business 43
43. You know only if you have an empowered and caring team! https://flic.kr/p/qM2oUL
44. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team https://amzn.to/2DAb048 45
45. You as the leader ! Your impact is amplified as a leader
46. Let’s do an exercise… https://flic.kr/p/9ih49W
47. The leader is an enabler!
48. Your life as a software developer
49. Technical leadership is so much different http://bit.ly/2KxsBsi 50 https://flic.kr/p/s6fgYK
50. Shared ownership within the team http://bit.ly/2y2tJRf
51. Opinions vs. principals
52. Opinions vs. principals
53. How do you scale leadership? https://bit.ly/2N6itr5 54
54. Keep Talking to your team https://flic.kr/p/nbM2uu
55. Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood https://amzn.to/2R5fG51
56. Flexibility matters! 57
57. Situational leadership (SL2) There isn’t one cookie-cutter approach to leadership
58. Know the rules of the game https://flic.kr/p/f5Hq
59. Understand your domain and embrace the business as a whole http://amzn.to/2EhtzKB
60. Strive for Understanding the impact: Measure! http://amzn.to/2nZkydV
61. Lead by example https://flic.kr/p/ed4NcB
62. Balance is the key
63. Again, your impact is amplified as a leader! http://amzn.to/2o0yR2a
64. THANKS! Any questions? You can reach me at: @tourismgeek tugberk@outlook.com Presentation template by SlidesCarnival