Accelerate team learning… but learning about what?

Over time your team will naturally discover more about it’s users, employees and technology but you need to actively accelerate this. Here are three key ingredients:

1. Users are a key ingredient. How can you make them awesome? You want to find out, “Given I want outcome X, will change Y get me there?”. Hypothesis and experiments are one way of framing this.

2. Technology is a key ingredient. You need a clear vision. Engineers need plenty of slack so that they can explore ways to simplify and enhance the system. The vision and the exploration are symbiotic – this exploration informs the vision, and the vision guides the exploration.

For example, the product I work on now is complex with nearly 200,000 lines of code. The technical vision needs to give a clear view of where the complexity lies, so that the exploration is focused on the areas that matter.

3. Employees are a key ingredient. Deep collaboration helps members of the team understand each other. It also accelerates knowledge sharing so that individuals don’t become a bottleneck.

Having slack creates space for collaboration.

Do you know what your key ingredients are?

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Categorized as Agile

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