HBT - In the Margins

Happy Friday,

After looking through my last email, I thought I should maybe provide a little bit of visibility into things that I'm almost always fixing and tweaking that aren't as important as what is in the roadmap.

Some of these things are about making things easier, some are about removing obstacles in advance of the team hitting them, and some are just to be helpful.

• Making the Daily Stand-up not suck
• Making sprint reviews real and improving attendance
• Establishing metrics
• Cleaning up how the team uses a tracking tool
• Setting up meetings with other groups/dependencies
• Smoothing out handoffs (Dev to QA or to Ops, etc)
• Organizing backlogs with product folk
• Providing technical/architectural guidance when needed
• Dropping copies of The Phoenix Project or The Goal on folks' desks
• Hosting smaller workshops on batching, team dynamics, requirements, terrible release post-mortems, prioritization, etc.
• Smoothing out on-shore/off-shore issues
• Identifying skill/experience gaps
• Restructuring teams
• Working with leaders on their calendars, delegation, etc.
• Helping product folks with storytelling and communication
• Investigating CI/Testing/Automation maturity and tooling
• Establishing/smoothing out mobile development
• Pointing out and correcting systemic disrespect among colleagues
• Customer interviews
• Product strategy and roadmaps
• Business case development

I'm sure there are more, but this list was readily available in my head. When I talk to clients about what I do, I tell them my sweet spot is building exceptional teams, but I work in the blast radius of that as well. This list hopefully gives you a sense of what I mean when I say blast radius.

Sincerely,

Ryan

PS: If you enjoy this series, I'd love to hear from you. You can reply to this email with any thoughts, notes, or ideas for what to write about in the future.