In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Steve Persch of Pantheon about supporting open source communities and leading technical teams.
Key Takeaways
- Communities need to be nurtured and supported
- The open source community is based around the idea that you can build on the knowledge of others
- Leadership technical teams can be challenging and there are some simple (but not easy) things that can be dome to be better at it
- The goal should never be to follow a brand or methodology slavishly – it should always be about solving customer problems and delivering business value
- Successful projects happen as a result of the people who work together, not the technology used
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Show Notes
- 00:24 Introductions
- 02:05 Getting into a community role
- 02:22 Come for the code – stay for the community
- 02:47 Describing Drupalcon
- 03:19 The story of Drupalcamp 2012 and the impact it had on Steve
- 04:21 Proactively seeking opportunities at Pantheon
- 04:42 Pantheon’s engagement with the community
- 04:54 Steve’s own experience using Pantheon
- 06:14 The Pantheon Hero’s program – amplifying the stories of people in the community
- 07:19 What’s special about the open source community
- 07:24 You can build on the knowledge of others
- 07:32 Examples of how Steve leveraged open source to be more effective in his role
- 08:28 Tough challenges in technical leadership
- 09:08 Exploring how to lead someone with vastly deeper technical knowledge than you have
- 09:58 Explaining the context of the specific project
- 10:32 The benefit of having time and funding to scope work effectively
- 11:10 Describing an agile structure for the project
- 11:40 “Agile guilt – did I agile wrong?”
- 11:57 Achieving business outcomes is more important than following a specific methodology
- 12:17 Factors that contributed to successful outcomes – the right people on the team with the right mix of skillsets
- 13:15 The value of having the right client representation who is empowered to make decisions quickly
- 14:23 Having someone who really can take on the product owner role is one of the most important success factors in an agency engagement
- 14:38 Advice for new team leaders
- Don’t try to do it all yourself – rely on your team
- At a certain level of complexity, it becomes impossible for one person to know everything about the product – don’t try to be the all-knowing oracle
- Clearly recognise where there are expertise gaps in the team and ensure you get them filled
- 15:31 If you don’t have what you need – tell your bosses ASAP
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