How To Fix Your Daily Standup

The daily standup is probably the most common team meeting in the world. What started as a strange practice for software developers using something called 'AGILE' has morphed it's way in to everyday usage across most industries. I’ve combined lessons learned from my 20+ years experience in the software industry to share tips for how to fix your daily standup

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HR for Engineering Teams

It was two minutes in to my first 1-to-1 meeting with one of my team members at my new job. As one of the first management hires outside of the existing founders I had given an explanation of what my role is when I was met with a comment-masquerading-as-a-question: So you're just kinda like HR for Engineering?

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Running a Hackathon Your Team Loves

Running a hackathon is an important part of leading a high performing team in a software company. It has almost become a rite-of-passage in modern day software development leadership, marking the transition from reactive manager into proactive leader. Here is my take on how to run a hackathon your team will love. 

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Playing Games at Work

Playing games at work is something I recommend to everyone trying to build a high performing team. A good old fashioned fun gaming session has a number of benefits and creates a great fun culture and friendly atmosphere at work. We recently instigated a gaming culture and we're seeing fantastic results...

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Tripling an Engineering Team in Six Months - Part Two: Planning to Scale

In 2016, after being acquired by private investors, we were given the green light to triple our engineering team as fast as possible. In this article (part 2 of a 5 part series) I dive deeper on how we actually planned the massive task we were embarking upon, the questions we needed to ask, and the important lessons we learned about planning to scale.

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Tripling an Engineering Team in Six Months - Part One: The Background Story

In November 2016 the company I worked for was acquired, injected with cash, and told to 'go faster'. Over the next six months I led a recruitment drive that saw the engineering team (more than) triple. This is a 5-part blog series on that massive recruitment process; starting with the background story that led us to need to scale at such a pace.
 

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