How to balance the functional/ cross-functional team seesaw

If you have a few years experience, you have probably experienced or lead several restructures of your teams and organisation. Perhaps, like mine, your organisational seesaw has swung somewhat violently from being primarily…

How to quickly judge a company by its office

You can tell a lot about a company by the fit out of their office. As I start planning a small office refit, I notice there are a few key decisions made in an office design that reflect the type of company that owns it.

From collection to cash, how to deal with data

When dealing with data, companies need to understand their path from data collection to selling valuable products and services, or they are just going to waste their time and money on consultants.

Hiring amazing people is really hard work, lessons I learnt about recruitment this year

If you are a team lead or manager, hiring people to join your team is something you have to do well, in fact as a manager, I believe it is the most important thing I do. It is a…

Is your team structure hurting your customer experience?

Many software teams adopt cross-functional team structures. I thought we had structured our teams well, but then we discovered a big problem.

What used to happen

My essential reading list for creating software and building teams

Learning styles differ greatly, but I learn most quickly by reading and then immediately trying to do, so here is an introduction to my favourite books:

Leading Lean Software…

Every software product requires serious investment, commit to keep up or shut it down

Deciding to build and release a new software product means making significant commitments and incurring costs over a life cycle of many years. However, the size and nature of these…

Tips for building software for professionals

Professionals are people who are engaged in an activity as a full time occupation. We are all hopefully a professional at something and so we can all benefit from professional grade tools. I buy and appreciate professional grade tools at work and I…

The most important connections you need to develop as a manager

I like to think of managers like trees. The visible achievements are the branches and the leaves, the hidden connections in their organisation that let them grow and weather storms are their roots. As a new manager…