Productivity
fromMountaingoatsoftware
10 hours agoWhy Smart Teams Overcommit And How Leaders Make It Worse
Leaders should avoid pressuring teams into overcommitting, as teams often do this themselves due to their inherent optimism.
Lydia noticed the machine's battery was running low and told two other team members. The more senior went to fetch the backup battery, while the junior team member suggested a quicker method that Lydia firmly rejected.
Santa Cruz de Tenerife is one of the most idyllic cities in the Canary Islands. At its heart stands the jewel - the Auditorio. It's a place where talent from both worlds, New and Old, comes together. A theatre, opera, dance, and music heaven.
Capacity Planning is the process of right-sizing the 'Total Project Demand' with the forecasted Team Capacity. Most UX teams have no idea what their capacity is. Fewer still have a process for calculating it and using it during quarterly planning activities with their counterparts in Product Management & Engineering to ensure teams don't commit to more work than they can handle.
Overlooking how important a brief is will start your collaboration with a web development agency in London off on the wrong foot. A brief not only communicates what you're looking to build, but it also aligns everyone's expectations, mitigates delays and limits the amount of revisions required. Whether it's an e-commerce site launch, a branding overhaul or tweaking a few pain points, the guidance you provide will directly influence your website from day one.
Her payment form wasn't connecting to the payment processor, and every attempt ended in an error message that made no sense. I understood her frustration. As a founder myself, I was acutely aware of the pain of trying to run a business and feeling like nothing was going your way. When I dug into her form, I found the problem a few minutes later: a mismatch between test mode and live credentials.
Most of these companies start the journey from a functional standpoint, avoiding extra layers that may "divert users' attention", such as refined flows, potential edge cases, and, sometimes, proper visual design foundations and user experience. Here, the goal is to ship the product first to validate its value, then address other considerations.
Your coding apprentice can build, at your direction, pretty much anything now. The task becomes more like conducting an orchestra than playing in it. Not all members of the orchestra want to conduct, but given that is where things are headed, I think we all need to consider it at least.
It's been almost 20 years since I started my career in product design, and, as you might imagine, many things have changed dramatically since then. One of the main characteristics of the technology industry is the constant evolution of its dynamics, roles, processes, technologies, experiences, and even business models. Those changes are inevitable and will continue. In retrospect, I see that there is one reality that has not changed much over the last 20 years and remains a constant issue to this day: building technology products can sometimes be a discouraging and exhausting process, from junior positions to senior management levels. Why do we suffer every time we need to build something? Why is there so much burnout among today's tech professionals? Why is it that, regardless of the industry, company, or technology, we always hear the exact phrases: "I'm exhausted, I feel drained by this job."? Well, those are valid questions that still haunt me 20 years after my first web design job. It seems like there's no choice in this environment but to suffer.
"I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue."
During my eight years working in agile product development, I have watched sprints move quickly while real understanding of user problems lagged. Backlogs fill with paraphrased feedback. Interview notes sit in shared folders collecting dust. Teams make decisions based on partial memories of what users actually said. Even when the code is clean, those habits slow delivery and make it harder to build software that genuinely helps people.
To find the typical example, just observe an average stand-up meeting. The ones who talk more get all the attention. In her article, software engineer Priyanka Jain tells the story of two colleagues assigned the same task. One posted updates, asked questions, and collaborated loudly. The other stayed silent and shipped clean code. Both delivered. Yet only one was praised as a "great team player."
The recently updated SWEBOK Guide v4.0a represents a needful industry standard, following a thorough peer review and a consensus-based approach. With the rise of AI, a significant skills gap in IT and cybersecurity is emerging alongside changes in the global workforce. There has never been a greater need for a consensus-based framework. This guide, created and thoroughly reviewed by industry professionals, serves as a dynamic and evolving resource.
Hast mentioned that they trust their unit tests and integration tests individually, and all of them together as a whole. They have no end-to-end tests: We achieved this by using good separation of concerns, modularity, abstraction, low coupling, and high cohesion. These mechanisms go hand in hand with TDD and pair programming. The result is a better domain-driven design with high code quality. Previously, they had more HTTP application integration tests that tested the whole app, but they have moved away from this (or just have some happy cases) to more focused tests that have shorter feedback loops, Hast mentioned.