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Very excited for my adored skamille to do an ask the CTO q&a next at #oscon2016. I will be live tweeting!
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Not a fan of innovation teams. Have clear goals. Lack of innovation is often a result of lack of engagement. skamille #oscon2016
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"The hardest parts of management are the one-offs" skamille #oscon2016
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"How do you determine the effectiveness of an engineering team?" - it's a hard question, and no great answer. skamille #oscon2016
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"Effectiveness only matters in the context of the business goals" - move needle on whatever your dept is in charge of. skamille #oscon2016
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Agile team - story points, tickets closed. These are internal measurements, "what is our normal rate of progress" - skamille #oscon2016
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"Effective teams tend to like each other." Doesn't mean going out, being friends, but engaging with each other. skamille #oscon2016
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"If your team is not happy, and they don't like each other, they are probably not being as happy as they could be." skamille #oscon2016
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"Giving people a chance to get to know each other can be really helpful" - teambuilding is worthwhile activity. skamille #oscon2016
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Figure out what people value. If people's values are too divergent, it's really hard for them to work together. skamille #oscon2016
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Getting people to share the same values will help you have an effective team. Look for it when hiring. skamille #oscon2016
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If people are afraid to share, explain they can't go anywhere else if no-one else can do their job. skamille #oscon2016
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Legacy systems and technologies make it takes longer to change things. Part of the answer is architectural. skamille #oscon2016
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Why are people so afraid to change things? No tests? In some banks - no source-code (I will have nightmares) skamille #oscon2016
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What are the benefits of moving to a new technology? But first you have to make them changeable. skamille #oscon2016
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"Sometimes we have problems that are literally just technical architecture problems" - have to incentive to fix. skamille #oscon2016
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Great leaders are good at taking a big problem, and breaking it down to show progress incrementally. skamille #oscon2016
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"I am a woman in tech so of course I have been involved in diversity initiatives." skamille #oscon2016
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Diversity is tricky. Step 0 is asking people to care about it to some extent, and actually measuring it. skamille #oscon2016
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Huge fan of not just checking boxes but hiring people with talent, and giving them stretch jobs. skamille #oscon2016
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If you hire for people who can do that thing, you are leaving out all those ambitious people who are looking to grow. skamille #oscon2016
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So many people out there with lot of potential, if you have bandwidth to give them training & support, can be amazing. skamille #oscon2016
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To be an effective CTO had to learn how to let go. How to coach and inspire without scaring them to hell. skamille #oscon2016
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Had to learn how to hold people to high standards without scaring them to death. skamille #oscon2016
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Developing patience is incredibly important. You can yell at people, but won't change overnight. Change takes time. skamille #oscon2016
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Figure out how to communicate with someone so that they hear what you're saying. How does someone want to be seen? skamille #oscon2016
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Let go of winning. Stops you from letting people own their own things and run with it. Let people take their own wins. skamille #oscon2016
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Hard to build good systems when devs don't support code in production. But - operations is a specialty. skamille #oscon2016