Product development tools

High vs Low vs No tech

Being a tech and web addict since the beginning of the web as we know it, I have a tendency to resort to technology first whenever I have a problem that needs to be addressed.
This was never an issue before or at least if it was I didn’t notice.

Lately as my professional responsibilities shift more every day to management related tasks (I work as Head of Engineering in a Healthcare tech platform), I started to think how I could improve certain processes.

We use a myriad of tech tools on our everyday tasks, from google docs to dropbox, from pivotal tracker to slack… and although ideally everyone in the team should be up to date with every tool in a daily basis I keep noticing patterns where some of the tools are constantly slipping under the radar.
This has a negative impact in our team performance, not everyone is up to date on relevant subjects, and on a participation driven culture that’s even worse.

So I keep trying to figure out why that’s happening:
-Having too many tools is a problem on it’s own. We are trying to improve this as much as we can by centralising as much as possible. Slack integrations are a great way of doing this.
-Not being able to surface the most relevant information in a way that it grabs team members attention at convenient times is another of the problems which I’m now trying to focus on.

Trying to look at the root cause of what’s causing this, it’s relatively easy to perceive that whenever a devops, developer or a designer, sits in front of is workdesk a thousand things start to compete for the screen real estate. One can accomplish so much at the computer that consulting some important tools easily drop on the priority queue.

So which are the alternatives? How can I get my team members to be up to date without shoving information into them in a way that breaks their workflow and without having to compete with the other thousand tasks?

We move the information out of the computer and into places where they can access them easily and in a timely manner.

As examples of this we now have:

• A Scrum board in one of our walls (a smaller version of we keep on pivotal tracker);
• Our Product Framework (customer feedback, business drivers … to macro roadmap) in other of the walls;

So when you listen to someone in your team complaining: “I keep sharing document Y to team members X and Z and they failed to check them out”, this is something you may suggest.
Web based solutions may be accessible everywhere, but sometimes you just need to make the information unavoidable in one place.

Making a business development analogy, move away from the crowded market (computer screen) and into the less crowded one (office walls).