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Culture & Methods

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.

Ben Linders Teresa Douglas Holly Gordon Mike Webber
on Nov 05, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Erich Bühler
on Nov 03, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Carly Richmond
on Oct 29, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Ben Linders Larry English
on Sep 30, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Ryan Thomas Vasudha Prabhala
on Sep 11, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Lilia Gorbachik
on Sep 04, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Heidi Helfand Shane Hastie
on Aug 22, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Ben Linders Bruce Montgomery Gail Montgomery
on Aug 11, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Ben Linders Kamil Puk
on Aug 05, 2020
Culture & Methods

Working Remotely: Good Practices and Useful Resources

As the impact of COVID-19 continues around the world, many people will be experiencing a sustained period of remote working for the first time. To help you, we’ve collated good remote working practices and resources and will continue to do so as more emerge. While remote working may appear straightforward, there are common issues that come up as you shift to this way of working.

Shane Hastie Charles Humble
on Jul 23, 2020
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Think for Yourself

The book Think for Yourself by Vikram Mansharamani provides a balanced approach to working with experts to help us deal with uncertainty. Instead of outsourcing our thinking to experts, we should tap into appropriate expertise when needed. Multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches can be used to see the whole picture and stay on top of things.

Ben Linders Vikram Mansharamani
on Jul 21, 2020
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Agile Conversations

The book Agile Conversations by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick explores how productive conversations can change the way organizations develop software. It provides techniques and exercises that can help you gain insight into communication and collaboration issues and improve your day-to-day conversations, achieving valuable business results from your agile team.

Ben Linders Douglas Squirrel Jeffrey Fredrick
on Jul 14, 2020