Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Author: Pawel Brodzinski

  • The Kanban Story: Retrospectives

    Chapters of The Kanban Story are published pretty irregularly these days but it doesn’t mean the story is over. This time, encouraged by Michael Dubakov’s great post on retrospectives, description of our retrospectives.

    The first thing is we generally don’t hold meetings. At all. This also means we don’t have retrospective meetings. At all. Also, if you asked the team about retrospectives, you’d get mixed answers. Some would answer positively others negatively. Yet I keep saying we do have retrospectives.

    The pattern is very simple: every time someone sees an issue which seems worth reviewing we start discussion. Here and now. Without waiting for a meeting or something. Then people who are interested join the discussion. We also poke people who we need feedback from and they haven’t yet joined us. We try to finish this retro with some action points, but sometimes our action point is “do nothing” as we agree we have no quick idea how to do things better than we already do.

    Doing nothing about the issue isn’t a big deal since when it is important it’s going to come back soon.

    These retrospectives are, by design, very short as they touch only one problem each. We usually finish in less than 5 minutes; hardly any of them lasted longer than 10 minutes.

    Retros are done on the fly. On one hand we don’t prepare ourselves to the discussion but on the other we start talking when the problem is fresh which compensates lack of preparation.

    Prerequisite to this approach is co-location. If you start talking and expect to be heard, everyone should be in the same place.

    Now, the tricky part: interruptions. Sometimes it happens we interrupt others when launching retro. We all know it is costly. However, an interesting thing I’ve noticed is that we’re pretty good at “turning ourselves off” when we’re in the zone. It happens over and over again that we need to poke someone to get him involved in discussion as voices in the room aren’t enough to break into the zone. This means we limit a number of interruptions only to those situations when we really need someone’s input.

    I’m not sure why it works that way. I don’t know if we worked that way from the beginning or I should attribute that to maturity of the team. The trick is it works.

    Of course this is only one of many possible approaches to retrospectives in Kanban. I recommend reading Michael’s article along with comments if you want to learn others.

    Read the whole Kanban Story as well.

  • Money and Motivation

    A few people have left. Or I should say a few good people have left. Yes, the company has tried to stop them but well, when people decide to go it’s usually way too late.

    The next station is realizing that people are gone. Well, they will still come to the office for a couple of weeks but they are gone. Gone. If you wanted to change their minds you should have worked with them a few months earlier.

    And then there comes the idea that you should at least take care about those who are still here. When people leave, their colleagues start thinking about leaving too. That’s how it works.

    So we come to the point where most of managers use tools they have to keep retention on reasonable level. Quite often they use the only tool they think they have, which is money. “That should keep them motivated for some time. And they won’t leave either.”

    Yes, except it isn’t true.

    As I think more about money and motivation I’m closer and closer to Dan Pink’s approach: pay enough to get the money off the table and then focus on things which really motivate people. By the way if you haven’t seen Dan Pink’s TED talk about the subject you really should do it now.

    OK, so what kind of effects you should see when you throw more money at people? For some of them it would take the money problem off the table. Will it keep them in the company in the long run? I don’t know. You are either able to build creative, motivating work environment or you aren’t and raise won’t change anything in the long run.

    For others money wasn’t the issue in the first place. They will happily accept raise, that’s for sure, but is it going to change their approach? Not so much.

    Now you can point a number of examples when someone you know has changed jobs purely for money. I think they fall into the first group. The only difference is in their cases money was a major problem and not a minor one. Bigger salary doesn’t make them motivated – it just gets the problem off the table. It isn’t guarantee that they won’t eventually leave. If your organization suck they will. You can buy a few months but the outcome is going to be the same – they will be gone soon.

    In short: if you have a big bag of money you can make people stop complaining about their salaries, but you won’t make highly motivated top performers out of them.

    I know people who are leaving with no change in remuneration whatsoever. Heck, if you look for people who changed job and got lower salary in the new place I’m one of examples. And yes, I’d do it again. I’ve never left any organization (or project) for money, even though sometimes it was an issue.

    If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. If the only tool you have is money, every problem seems to be solvable with cash.

    But then you see teams which don’t get any bonus money whatsoever and they’re motivated and those which spend days complaining about lack of bonus money. All in the same organization. They are even paid basically the same. I see two possible explanations: one supports argument above and the other includes words “black magic.”

    If people go, you won’t change that if the only thing you can think of is throwing more money at them. Unless you’re paying peanuts, that is.

  • We Are Unique Syndrome

    That Scrum thing sound fine but, you know, the way we work here is quite specific so it won’t really fit our organization. And yes, unit testing is such a great idea but we have pretty unique work environment and I see no way to implement this practice. Oh, I’ve heard about this new web framework, which we might use, but I believe it would be better just to build the stuff in-house. And by the way, that issue we were discussing yesterday – just apply some hacks, I don’t think anyone could have had this problem before.

    You’ve definitely seen that. The canonical example is NIH syndrome often seen in programming. We hate tools built by others because, well, they aren’t built by us. We are so damn unique that there’s virtually no other organization similar to ours in the whole damn universe.

    The same principle applies to other areas as well. Cross-functional teams work in other organizations but here, in this unique, extraordinary and special company they would not, no way. Empowering (damn, I used the word) people results in better motivation and higher retention but it won’t be like that in our organization because we are different.

    Well, yes you are. Everyone’s special. But somehow huge numbers of companies face the same problems. And the funny thing is it seems that usually common solutions help majority of those organizations. Strange, isn’t it?

    While you can pretty easily convince me that your company is special in this or that area (I don’t know your company as well as you, so it’s not that hard) I just don’t believe you’re so freaking different that none of recipes known to the world works in your case.

    If you come to me with unsolvable issue with integrating web services written in Java and .NET I call bullshit. I don’t know the solution but I find it hard to believe that hundreds thousands of web services written in one technology can’t talk with hundreds thousands of web services written in another. Either I miss something here or this was kind of principle for guys who were standardizing this web service gizmo.

    Someone had that problem before (like hundreds or thousands people). You ain’t that special.

    Now go look for solution using this hi-tech tool called Google search. Or you’re so unique that you won’t use such a plebeian tool, eh?

    The same applies to project management issues. Ditto organizational and people problems. Pretty few people in the world can say they worked in truly unique environments on ground-breaking ideas and they had to solve issues no one had had ever before. Yet we all tend to play like we were working on Apollo program and it was sixties.

    Now, I’m not trying to tell you that silver bullet exists. I’d be a hypocrite, wouldn’t I? What I’m trying to say is that your issues have (likely) been solved by others and they (likely) described solutions in details.

    If you deliberately want to keep the way you work unchanged I’m fine with that. Just don’t tell me it’s either the best or the only way unless you have checked. And if you’d checked you (likely) wouldn’t have been selling me that bullshit about your uniqueness.

  • Kanban Basics

    I often say that you can implement Kanban in your team in a single afternoon. That’s how we did that after all. So when Andy Brandt asked me to do Kanban Basics webinar I expected that preparing it would be pretty simple. How long can you talk about few-hour-long task?

    Well, it wasn’t as simple as I expected.

    Kanban itself is very simple. But telling people they should visualize workflow, limit work in progress and measure the flow isn’t really all the basic stuff they need to know. After a while it always ends up with questions how we do this and how we do that.

    What limits should be set on board?
    What happens when a bug is found during testing?
    Should sticky notes be moved back on the board at all?
    How cycle time is measured?
    What happens when the limit is reached?
    What to do when emergency task pops up?
    How to cope with multiple projects?
    Is feature-by-feature deployment mandatory?
    How estimation is done?

    That’s an interesting observation – I often deal with most of these questions at the end of my Kanban presentations, no matter if I cover basic or advanced material. After giving it some thought I decided this would be a good starting point to prepare Kanban Basics presentation.

    What I ended up is presentation below. It covers a bunch of scenarios visualized with (surprise, surprise) Kanban board. Additionally I used Scrum as the reference to make a basic Kanban description easier to understand.

    Kanban Basics

    If you have some basic questions which seem to be omitted in the presentation, please leave a comment. I’d be happy to both answer the questions and update future versions of the presentation.

    If you speak Polish feel free to watch the recording of the webinar.

    Also, check The Kanban Story series as it reveals all the details of Kanban implementation in my current team.

  • The Beauty of Kanban

    OK, I admit it. This is a biased post. But you should have known. I’m sharing our journey with Kanban for more than a year already and the journey itself is even longer. And I’m still not fed up with all that Kanban thing. But then, after days like today, I realize why I appreciate Kanban that much.

    Majority of you was in this situation before – you saw your team working on tasks as planned when someone came with that super-important, top-priority pre-sales project which totally required that your team added widget foo to some application. And it had to be done exactly then.

    What I used to do in those situations was anything between panicky search for least loaded engineer and panicky explanations why we couldn’t do that before requested deadline. Either way the word “panicky” was involved. In every situation the threat was the same: we had a lot of pre-planned work to do and needed no additional distracter so what we really hoped for was to get the salesman hell out with his damn pre-sales project.

    And now? Now I just put the task on the top of the stack. Well, I do if it is important enough of course. Then the magic happens. In vast majority of cases you get someone to start working on your damn widget tomorrow. Day after tomorrow if you’re less lucky. Glad I could help you that fast. Note: I didn’t tell you “at the beginning of the next sprint.” But now, the best part.

    It doesn’t ruin the way we work. We aren’t distracted by your drop in. It is the process we follow which allows us to deal with the issue so quickly.

    As I think about that, we hate all those unplanned tasks not because they’re unplanned (we know they’re going to happen after all) but because they force us to change our initial plans. If we had a framework which helps us to embrace those tasks in a way which is acceptable for our dear stakeholders (what a nice way to call salespeople, isn’t it?) wouldn’t that be worth trying?

    So what are you waiting for? Go try damn Kanban!

    Going to the meeting to tell business folks that you’re going to do your best adding all those crazy things they think they need to get the deal (and not lying on the same time) and then getting back to the team knowing that you aren’t going to change all their plans is priceless.

    And that’s the beauty of Kanban.

  • The Value of Certification

    The other day I had hot discussion about the value of certificates. We went through certificates for developers mainly but the issue is general: how much value certificates bear from the company’s perspective?

    The point where the whole discussion started was when we started analyzing what the most objective way to appraise engineers is. Typically organizations have some appraisal system in place – I don’t want to go deep into it as that’s the subject for another story. Anyway every such system is subjective as it bases on one person judging another. And the Holy Grail of many managers is to make appraisal system more objective.

    That’s where certification kicks in. Certificate is objective. One either passes an exam or not. It’s not her manager who says “she knows Topaz on Tires at 8 out of 10… I guess.” There are some standard criteria which say whether it is 89% or 23% or whatever.

    Then certification process is run by some external entity which isn’t biased so certificate is a kind of independent evaluation. Guys from certificating entity don’t really care if a specific individual passed the exam or not, at least as long as they have steady flow of incoming candidates to be charged for certification process.

    Where’s the problem then?

    It seems certification evaluates people independently and is objective. Unfortunately it’s also pretty much useless.

    The problem I have with vast majority of certification programs is that the only thing people are taught while preparing to earn the certificate is how to pass the exam. They don’t learn how to be a better programmer or a better project manager or how to deal with a specific technology. They basically learn what question schemas and standard answers are.

    You get what you measure. If you measure how many certificates people have you will get “many” as the result. Would that mean that you’d improve skills of your teams? No, not really. So my question is: which problem are you solving this way? Except of course having a huge pile of certificates.

    And by the way the real issue of subjective appraisal system is not system’s subjectivity but lack of trust between senior management and appraisers. “I don’t trust your evaluations so I’ll cross-check them with some certificate.” Well, I’d prefer to work on building trust relationship instead. But maybe it’s just me…

  • Being a Leader

    Recently a subject of leadership pops up on Software Project Management pretty often, but usually I look at it from manager’s perspective. After all that’s something I do for living – managing teams. So yes, being a leader is the first and probably the most important role of manager (by the way, the post on role of manager turned into full-blown presentation which causes some buzz every time I deliver it). But leadership isn’t exclusively attached to management.

    We are leaders in our workplaces, but we lead in different communities and informal groups as well. And even if we stick to our professional lives we can lead in technical areas or be typical people leaders. Leadership has many names. This was exactly the theme of my recent presentation on the subject which I delivered as a guest on Toastmasters contest.

    Being a leader

    A very interesting discussion followed the session. I used leadership definition I’ve heard from Mary Poppendieck: “Ability to attract followers is exactly what makes you a leader.” The definition neatly covers all sorts of tech leads – if I believe you’re knowledgeable and experienced person in a specific area I will come to pester you every time I need help with that matter. In other words I will follow you, which according to definition makes you a leader.

    The argument against that approach is that we call it authority and not leadership and leadership is/should be discussed from a perspective of leading teams/groups. I can’t say I agree with this point of view as we’d have to cross out many leaders who build their follower base thanks to extraordinary knowledge and technical skills. What do you think?

    By the way, after criticism I faced on my slides from AgileEE I built this slide deck differently. Happy now?

  • The Kanban Story: Moving Cards Back

    This is the question which I hear very often: should we move back cards on the Kanban board when we realize the feature isn’t that advanced as it looks like? A typical example may be about feature which has been developed and is being tested and it appears some bigger patch has to be applied. Another, more interesting one, may be about feature waiting for someone outside a team, i.e. waiting for client’s decision.

    So, coming back to the question, should we move back cards?

    I always answer that is isn’t forbidden, so it is a subject of rules agreed by the team, but I don’t think it is a good idea. Consider a simple situation:


    You have development column full and it appears one of cards from testing should be moved back, so you break the limit. On the other hand you don’t want to move the card back to todo column since it isn’t a feature which is 0% done. It just has to be changed or has to wait for something before a team can perform further tests.

    OK, the simple answer is that you should avoid moving cards back and do whatever it takes to clear the feature out of the board while the card stands where it is. As long as you have all the tools to do the job this approach works pretty well.

    However, sometimes you don’t have control over the feature anymore. One of teams I’m working with has pretty complex deployment process. To make the long story short we have to wait until the customer performs some task to be able to move further. The part of the process is out of our control. Be it waiting for clarifications regarding a bug or completing acceptance tests for a feature to give a couple of examples.

    Now if we put features we really work on along with those which were waiting for some external input in the same column we’d end up with crazy high limit. That is as long as we cared not to break them every now and then. We may have a couple features which we are actually fixing and a dozen of them which are waiting for client. And setting the limit of 15 doesn’t sound like a good idea if you ask me.

    We solved the issue by setting additional todo queue within the column. It works as priority queue, so if we look for features to work on we consider cards from the priority queue first and only then from the previous column.


    Feature B would be taken before feature D. Additional trick we needed was to visualize which features in priority queue were ready to go and which were still waiting (small sticky notes attached to cards can be used for that).

    Thanks to this approach we can have reasonable limits in every column we have control over. What more, mechanics of the board forces us to finish the older tasks first. If there is a task in priority queue which isn’t blocked anymore it we start working on it before we move to regular stuff.

    The downside is we have some hidden work in progress which isn’t limited in any way. But at least we make it visible and get rid of it as soon as possible. And we don’t move cards back which always create some mess.

    One final advice: if you face this kind of situation once a year don’t bother to rearrange the board. You will need adjustments if, and only if, it is a common issue in your team.

    Read the whole Kanban Story.

  • Embrace Failure

    I failed. It wasn’t very spectacular. Well, if I asked people around they wouldn’t even say it was a failure, but for me it was below-average performance. Thus failure.

    Did I feel bad? I did. I couldn’t help. I knew I shouldn’t but after all I’m just a human. But then I consider it as much better thing which happened to me than just another success. Why?

    Because we don’t learn from successes. We learn from failures.

    When we achieve success it’s like someone was telling us “you’re great, no need to change.” And there is a need to improve. Always. The thing is we usually don’t see it unless we fail.

    The trick is to embrace failure. Welcome it warmly. It is your ticket to another learning session. Yes, you will fill badly for a while, but in the long run it is more valuable than success.

    Failure is an eye-opener. Suddenly you see what you were doing wrong and you don’t understand how blind you’d been not to spot it earlier.

    Failure is a kick in the butt. You feel bad so you know you have to do something to avoid this unpleasant feeling next time. Unless you’re a masochist and you like to feel bad.

    Failure is a helping hand. You get some guidance what you should improve or what you should avoid.

    We are told we should embrace change. I see no reason why we shouldn’t embrace failure.

  • So You Promoted Wrong People to Management, What Now?

    It seems recently I’m telling you a lot stuff about people management and managers in general. If describing the role of manager wasn’t enough you could also read a rant about screwed promotions which we see so often. This all stuff is good (yes, such a shameless self-promotion), but it assumes one optimistic thing: you can still make decisions who will be promoted to management.

    However sometimes we don’t choose who is promoted to managerial positions. These decisions have already been made and they’ve been made wrong. If your task is to deal with that you’ll need to follow a three-step scenario.

    1. Coach

    OK, great engineer doesn’t make a candidate for a great manager. But it doesn’t make you can’t make a good manager out of great engineer. The trick is to raise awareness that someone doesn’t perform well as a manager and coach them to improve their people skills. Help them to change their focus from engineering to people management. However this effort can’t be unlimited. If someone isn’t willing to change you won’t force them. Then it’s time to move to the point number 2.

    2. Find a better place

    If someone excelled as an engineer and you can’t make a good manager out of them you might try to move them back to some engineering-related role. Maybe design, maybe architecture, maybe even project management would be a good place. It all depends on an individual case. Of course it is tricky – what you basically do is you move someone back from management to engineering, so you better have pretty prestigious engineering roles. And do it if, and only if, you believe the person would perform well in a new role. If you can’t find such role or leaving management isn’t really an option all you’re left with is a solution number 3.

    3. Let them go

    If you can deal with an issue other way you should let wrong people go. And yes, this means you’re losing a great engineer, who unfortunately became poor manager and is unwilling to switch back to the role which he performed well at. What you’re left with at that point is either to keep someone who do crappy job, which also affects their team, or to let them go and find possibly a better candidate. Well, if we discuss someone who failed at points 1 and 2 of the plan I’d let him go. As harsh as it sounds it is a good decision for both of you and for the discussed team.

    Keeping poor managers is much worse than admitting you’ve made wrong decision promoting them in the first place.

    And if you want to see more stuff about being a good manager you will appreciate my recent presentation titled Good Manager, True Leader, which I delivered at our internal company conference.

    Good Manager, True Leader