Thoughts on Leading teams

Anxiety is the Derivative of Overthinking the Future Have you ever felt that you have so many things running at the same time that you can't breathe? Your mind gets into a halt and suddenly you just want to ignore all the things that are happening and go play some GTA. I don't know about you but I have certainly been there many times. Although I keep learning about how to deal with it there is always a new situation that pushes out of your comfort zone. I haven't nailed this one and i might never fully get there but throughout the years I created strategies to deal with it. ACT on it! Start with number 1 I have a very special moment in my life that I go back to whenever I am blocked by anxiety. I was a really good student but on my last years of high school i stopped going to classes and was living a typical teenager revolution. At the time I was doing Jazz school at the same time, had a band and thought our music was going to be known by everyone. I wasn'

Roadmapping sessions can become quite heavy and the balance between bottoms up and top down is a constant juggle game. Here is an exercise that proved to be quite effective in the teams I have supported: Goal: Add Moonshots to the Roadmap! " A  moonshot , in a technology context, is an ambitious, exploratory and ground-breaking project undertaken without any expectation of near-term profitability or benefit and also, perhaps, without a full investigation of potential risks and benefits." in  https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/moonshot Time investment: ~1h (depends on the size of the team, this is an estimate for a max 5 people) Frame what is going to happen! This is an opportunity to take riskier or crazy ideas into the roadmap of the team. As in any type of investment we take a portfolio of items that range from low to high risk, this is the time to explorer riskier items. You will be proposing ideas and the top rated will get into the roadmap. We will rate

Trust Need Space Opportunity (TNSO) Framework Through out the last few years as a manager i have created a framework to help me position myself to guide others improve and be able to take it to the next level. First let me tell you about some of my mistakes when i first became a manager. My first job as a manager happened very organically, I was on a technical architect role and it was my first job in the uk. Upon joining I got a reality check: all developers were leaving and the projects I needed to put in place wouldn't succeed as there was no one to keep the lights on. I was asked to help recruiting people. I did it but they were reporting to one of those managers that took a couple of excel courses, thinks that knows technology and was extremely directive. The developers that I hired were very unhappy and would come to me to unwind. After a lot of honest conversations with the manager and with the CTO the developers start reporting to me. I thought this was lovely and we w

Is it time to change? I have been wondering about this question for a while...  I always thought that there needs to be passion about what you are doing. I am passionate about technology and people, i develop my own experiments about Agile and i like the freedom to do what i think is best for a company, a team, an organisation or a project. But what is to like a job? This seems like an obvious question but  in reality is a fuzzy perception that might not have a clear answer. We spend most of our lives within the work environment, it becomes part of us and one might say professional and personal time can have strict boundaries but we are human beings and as so we build communities, we belong to communities and that's what will trip the "strict boundaries. I think it's really hard to keep separation of concerns when you spend a minimum of 8 hours a day in the same place with the same people. Our mood changes, the exterior world changes, we change, sometimes the day go

Sometimes Influence can be very subtle. People are often driven by feedback and visibility, socialising ideas (on a positive manner) might have a dramatic positive impact on the things you would like to accomplish but don't depend solemnly on you. This article comes after discussing it with someone that wanted to gain visibility on a topic. If you are a software engineer like me think about Eventual Consistency and Gossip Strategies . The background idea is if you propagate an idea then you are allowing other people to think about it, mutate it, grow it, make it theirs till it comes back to you polished as if you have never heard of it. If it's a bad idea it can just die or branch into something new, nevertheless this will keep people aligned with your ideas/visions and help you build it as it also became theirs. When is this helpful? Any time :D well let me give you some simplified examples. Once i really wanted to pick up an interesting project on a team but I w

Is interesting.. Everyone is naturally gifted so no one is special and everyone is. Our natural abilities tend to inhabit in us as something unimportant, normally we are unaware of these precious gifts and tend to dismiss it as: anyone can do it. Now, you are wrong. Things that we consider simple and effortless other people don't have, value the things you are good at. If you think everyone else can do it tell me why they don't? Every human is unique and your natural skill set is as well. Open your Potential Box and treasure it, don't dismiss it, is a Gift.