Content drop for week ending 2/26

Stuff I’ve read recently that I found interesting and hope that you might get some benefit from:

• Good article from HBR on all of the burnout people are starting to experience after almost a year in lockdown. As someone who has work/life balance issues this piece really resonated with me. Here’s another piece by HBR on how to make virtual teams a bit better which could help with the burnout folks are dealing with.

• Here’s a really good graphic from John Cutler that highlights things that we think make teams go faster and the things that actually make teams go faster. There are a lot of good flow things on here as well as good stuff around quality and investing in tooling over hiring more people.

• I attended a version of this Woody Zuill presentation on “Mob Programming and the Power of Flow”. There’s a lot of great content in here around how why you would have teams mob but the best part for me was the concept of “shortening the trip vs going faster”.This feels like another way of saying “slowing down to speed up” which is good as some people struggle with that phrase.. Other great phrases included:

  • “We optimize for the flow of the work - rather than for the output of the individual”

  • “Don't get the most out of each person, seek to get the best from them”

• Speaking of “slowing down to speed up”, here’s a great article on that exact topic. For some reason folks seem to overlook the technical component of agility in software development and this is another reminder of why quality should be baked in from the start.