Randy took the time to talk through High Performance Culture, and how to build and scale it. This was my favourite talk of the conference.
Randy went through a lot of material verrry quickly, but all of it was super interesting.
Initially he basically talked through the accelerate [accelerate] book at a super high level, and the key notes he took which lead into his points in the rest of the talk.
Project Aristotle - how to differentiate high performing vs low performing:
Interpersonal risk taking & safety at work was the largest contributor to high performing teams.
This enabled collaboration
More about people being allowed to being themselves rather than risks of choices in projects etc.
This allowed people to collaborate and disagree, with lots of open collaboration with other people.
When given the common context, and when we say what are goals & priorities are, people are much more likely to agree
Currently teams are split between product/dev/test etc, whereas a good model is to build full stack teams where the team is split by a domain, with analysts / dev / test within that all co-operating within the same space.
Give each team ownership of the roadmaps etc, having goals outset from the beginning.
These teams own their domain end-to-end, so maintain etc and don’t split the work between teams of maintaining old code and some working on new sexy_stuff.
Ask when a requirement comes in which is a solution, ask what the actual problem we are trying to solve. People live in their own boundaries of design, where they may not have all the information on how to best solve the actual problem.
You may have well have been on holiday if the thing you built doesn’t solve the problem.
Understanding the problem deeply means that usually the path to solving the problem will become more clear, as the routes through the issue are substantiated, and reduces the amount of unforeseen consequences.
Talking about people saying they don’t have time to do a fix properly, it basically means we have to do it twice (creating an instant technical debt).
Would we rather do a small number of great things or a large number of average things?
Self explanatory? People push to the boundaries, so the the more they are unbounded, the more likely to bring other people into that realm.
Move somewhere else!