Ken Judy on High Performing Teams: Collaboration, Creativity and Delivering Value

Ken Judy has twenty years experience in development and over a decade of experience leading and creating agile teams. Currently he is VP of Technology at Simon & Schuster, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

This is a great episode for technical leaders and team members to understand how to create value on their technical team beyond pushing tickets. We also discuss how the day to day actions and behaviors of leadership impact the decisions and values of the team. 

Notes from Interview

Improv Theater Takeaways 

in theater people have a good sense of the lifecycle

adjusting expectations based on constraints and timeframe

constraints support creativity

you can’t get performance from an actor without interacting with the actor

Typical Environments

developers are creating the product and often don’t have say in what they are crafting

kill yourself to get to date, not make the date and then its arbitrary, so they just set another date

only way to have accountability is to have a date

Team Dynamics

different personalities combine

having right environment that attracts the right talent takes a long time 

i wanted a way of working that allowed us as a small team to take advantage our our individual strengths and not be victim of individual weaknesses

Leadership

developers are achieving what their company wants them to achieve

they will do what your values/actions tell them you want

people say they value quality, but their day to day actions and priority do not

if you cannot have collaboration around features, you will automatically sacrifice quality

Valuing Quality

model through collaboration

humility from the stakeholders

listen to risk

what you want to achieve -- not how

creative ways of measuring value

Antipatterns

developers are there to code and efficiency is about passing off tickets

master/slave paradigm

by the time it gets into debs hands, the business has already made too many decisions that limit impact devs can have on limiting work and creativity

its all about how many people are on something and not who they are

Where to start

a conversation with business, product and developer is most efficient conversation

once you have that practice internal, build relationships with outsiders

often time people asking for work are not in technology and developers are not domain experts

coding is meaningless without understanding the problem at hand

The value is in the team

companies that think they are agile and constantly reform team

team reforms every time it changes

small group who know/trust each other, needs to be reestablished if even one person changes

core talent of development team is problem solving

Fallacies

there is value in variety, can lead to a new spark of creativity and excitement

people will roll on/off team, that is life

never have to worry - oh no team has been together too long, i need to shake things up

Agile 

agile is not about delivering more stuff, its about delivering more value

accomplishment comes from focus on what really matters

achieve outcome with least amount of waste.

you need to understand success on small scale to know what success looks like on large scale

You get what you ask for

devs close stories when it meets the letter of what you ask for

schedule pressure makes it too easy to not get it "done done"

if you criticize velocity, your team will increase velocity, but most likely deliver less value

Read more of Ken's thoughts and experiences on his blog.

How does your team stack up? Ask the right questions.