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The Garden

Welcome to the garden. The garden is everything in its current state of growth. Wander at your leisure.

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Home

Ryan Latta builds exceptional software teams and the leaders behind them. Also, he helps folks navigate their careers in tech.

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Trust Triangles

#article#leadership#trust

Exceptional leadership depends on trust, even when your job demands otherwise. Trust triangles are a way to build trust beyond traditional one-on-one relationship building.

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Can You Hear Me Now

#leadership#agile#tool

After agonizing over a plan or strategy, how do you know if there is alignment? Often there isn't. You need a way to triangulate where the gaps are and the reality people are operating with and not the hope you have. This article explains how.

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Measures, Metrics, and Signals

#guide

My thoughts and approach to developing measures, metrics, and signals for exceptional engineering teams and leaders. If this topic has always felt baffling, this will cover goal setting with metrics, leading and lagging indicators, developing useful leadership signals, and how to avoid chaos with balancing metrics.

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6-Day Work Week

#case-study

A QA department that is chronically over-worked and behind schedule believes automation will save them. However, after thorough analysis, removing interruptions gave everyone in the department an extra day of capacity back.

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Result-Oriented Transformation

#case-study

A Fortune 10 company had been "Transforming" for years but the only thing that changed was vocabulary. Shifting to result-oriented work instead of training and assessments changed everything.

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Skynet or Bust

#case-study

A company has one last hail-mary before they run out of money. It has some of the most challenging technical demands of anything built. In this case study, you'll see the techniques used to have a team deliver on time, without bugs, and able to meet every demand.

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The High-Performing Team

#case-study

Delivery is slow, expensive, buggy, and unpredictable. Yet, most efforts to improve things fail. I was asked to build a team to prove that you can have it all. You can have fast, cheap, good, and predictable.

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Stability

#guide#software-team

What does "Stability" have to do with teams? How will changes to the team's composition, processes, and more impact them?

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Team Size

#guide#software-team

I've worked with exceptional teams that had 2 people and all the way up to 13+. These are some thoughts about the considerations that I have when forming a team and wondering how big the team should be.

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Leadership

#leadership

Ryan Latta helps technical leaders build high-performing teams, improve delivery, and develop their leadership skills.

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On The Front Lines

#change#management#system

When many companies want to bring about change they primarily train and inform people as to the new behaviors and expectations. What is often unattended is where the lines are where the change is the most disruptive and what needs to happen right on that line.

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Skill Composition

#guide#skills#software-team

When it comes to building high-performing software teams, you need the right composition of skills. This involves several considerations that I describe in detail.

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Facilitation Guide

My brain, guide, and processes on collaborative facilitation.

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Careers

Navigate your career so you have the lifestyle you deserve

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Learning Team Capability

#leadership#coaching#team#technique

While there are lots of ways to understand someone's capabilities within a role, there are far fewer to understand what they are beyond it. I want to share a very simple technique that can help leaders see the potential in the folks around them.

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Product Management

Ryan Latta helps product managers and teams deliver products customers love.

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Hives

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Details and Options

#article#careers#interview

One of the best interview techniques I've developed is called "Details and Options." It helps you navigate interviewers who ask questions with no right answer. Mastering this technique will greatly improve your chances of getting an offer.

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Want to Get More Interviews?

#interview#resume#career

Ever wondered why you don’t get an interview at some companies? The answer is that your resume wasn’t good enough. In this article, I will take a few moments to explain why that is and a few things you can do to stand out more.

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Case Study: 10 Years of Scope in 6 Months

#case-study

A nonprofit wanted to build a mobile app and signed with a boutique consultancy to make it happen. After analyzing the promised scope it became clear that it would take 10-years to accomplish. This case study breaks down how I turned 10 years into 6 months.

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Case Study: Saving Time With Testing

#case-study

When groups need to go faster they often look to hiring people or buying better tools. At this client, they wanted to see if quality would unlock greater speed, and it did.

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AI: Use With Care

#technology#ai

Everyone is excited about AI and what it can do to automate our lives, but I want to caution everyone about believing the hype. I will break down the strenghts and critical weaknesses of LLMs and how to make the most of them so you don't get burned.

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Agile Isn't Dead, But Your Career Might Be

#agile#career#leadership

Folks on social media are claiming agile is dead, but I don't agree. I think people's careers are. Too many people have been yelling agile for too long and there's nothing to show for it. We have to connect what we do to what is valuable or get a new job.

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Are Scrum Masters Worth It?

#leadership#agile#scrum

In a short-answer, no. Most Scrum Masters are certified, but don't even know the rules of Scrum. Does that mean the role is dead? No! It means we need to raise the bar in how we find the folks who make a difference in companies and live up to the role of Scrum Master.

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Dear Architects, Do Better

#architecture#rant

Software architects need to do better. When I work with an architect I want to see the math, choose designs appropriate to the competencies, have evolutionary design, and take security and privacy seriously.

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Deciding Fast and Deciding Slow

#leadership

Organizations would love to make decisions faster, but simply speeding up is ruinous. Instead focus on some minimal guardrails for decisions and you'll speed up and have better decisions too.

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The Dos and Don'ts of Refactoring

#engineering#team

Refactoring to many teams means clean up the code, but they've also been burned by long refactoring projects that didn't improve much. In this article I'll share the basic dos and don'ts about refactoring to consistently improve code with low risk.

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Its a Secret

#leadership#consulting#power

In many organizations information is power. In this article I explain what information brokerage is, hoarding information, signaling to gain power, and leveraging taboos. By the end you'll have some helpful tips to navigate organizations and groups better by how you leverage information.

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Managing a Self-Managed Team

#leadership#scrum#agile#team

How do we support self-managing development teams and what do I do as a leader after I built one? In this article I share some hints about building teams and what role leadership plays in a world with self-managing teams.

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Permission to Choose

#leadership#agile#meetings#article

Agency is all about making meaningful choices. Yet, many organizations strip this away in favor of tight controls. Yet, the best teams I've ever seen operate with a lot of agency, and so make agency a focal point in creating teams as well. A good place to start is meetings.

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Poorly Built Racecars Don't Win

#quality#leadership#development

If racecars were built the way most organizations build software, they'd never finish a race. Organization's singular focus on speed creates ruinous levels of quality. Shifting to focus on quality first, on the other hand, creates huge time savings and having a car that finishes the race.

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Quick and Effective Delegation for Busy Leaders

#leadership#delegation

Learning to delegate can be one of the most significant factors in how much time leaders have to focus on strategic initiatives, the growth and development of their people, and devoting crucial time to emerging crises. This article breaks down how to delegate effectively, when to delegate, and how to grow your capabilities.

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The Red Bead Experiment

#leadership#exercise#system

What does a bin full of beads tell us about quality and improving systems? In this article I explain a bit about a small activity created by Deming that helps managers see the importance of building systems and processes that create quality instead of problems.

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Start Less, Finish More

#productivity#lean

Starting less means finishing more. This goes against every intuition we have, yet is backed by Little’s Law. Focus on finishing before starting something new.

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Stop Doing Things the Hard Way

#leadership#learning#article

I spent my early years believing a lie that what I learned struggling alone was more valuable than what I learned with help. I meet too many developers and leaders walking that same path. Stop spending years of your career standing still, get help, and accelerate your growth.

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Tales of Efficiency

#development#humor#lean

Most groups pride themselves on what they believe is efficient, but is it? Here’s a satirical example of a typical developer’s life and their view on efficiency.

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Book Review - The Checklist Manifesto

#book-review

The Checklist Manifesto is a fascinating book about the effects of checklists done well. This review covers a few key takeaways and an example we can use in the software industry.

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The Red Bead Experiment

#leadership#exercise#system#article

What does a bin full of beads tell us about quality and improving systems? In this article I explain a bit about a small activity created by Deming that helps managers see the importance of building systems and processes that create quality instead of problems.

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Three Costly Mistakes of Technical Teams

#leadership#development#design

Technical teams often shout for improvments. More design, less testing, and new tools are common requests. However, these requests are often far more costly than the problems that exist today. This article explains the root of the issues here and how to address them.

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Tick-Tock of the Agile Clock

#agile#leadership#goals

Almost every agile approach focuses on teams and short sprints. Unfortunately businesses need to think on longer time horizons and so we need better tools to help leaders respond better. In this article I show a simple way to set goals and measure them at any time scale.

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We Ain’t Got Time for That

#development#quality

“I just need more time,” is something we hear all the time from various developers. Yet, that often means they aren’t seeking the help of other experts. This is a costly mistake from junior developers all the way to architects.

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What is my software team's capacity

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How do you know what your team's capacity is and if they have enough for the project or work ahead? It doesn't matter how you estimate, you can get a very clear and consistent picture of capacity with my method.

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When You're Asked to Help Someone

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If you get asked to help some other group, what should you think about before you start? Know the situation, risks, and their interest before you start.

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The Hardest Question

Building a successful software product requires answering thousands of important questions throughout its lifecycle. Yet, there is one question that if you can master, will make every other answer even better.

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The Quick and the Dead of Prioritization

#product#agile#priortization

There are so many ways of prioritizing product work ranging from subjective to quantitative. Almost none justify themselves with results. In this post I will share how I prioritize product work with clients by using four simple categories of core, quality of life, retention, and other.

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The Shapes of User Stories

#agile#requirements#scrum#scope

User stories are ubiquitous in agile teams, but they wind up taking lots of different shapes depending on the maturity of the team and company. Here are common shapes that stories take and what to watch out for.

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What is this

A bit about how this site works, its structure, and my methods (and madness)