Getting an engineering team to eat their vegetables
summary
Slack reports about 3 million daily active users, roughly 930 paying customers and ~500 employees, and coordination workload rises ~50% over 20 years per Harvard Business Review. The concrete claim: psychological safety (enthusiasm, togetherness, vulnerability) boosts team performance. Concrete tools shown: pair programming, blameless post-mortems, active listening, game exercises from Jane McGonigal, and meeting hygiene (agendas, equal turn taking, five minutes of chit‑chat). Practical outcomes: faster decisions, fewer blame cycles, measurable productivity gains.
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chapters (34)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:10M+ daily active customers
- 1:45How to get engineering teams to eat their vegetables?
- 2:08Foster excellent working environments with minimal process
- 4:03A rising tide lifts all boats
- 4:18We are making more than just software
- 4:49Iteration beats a rewrite
- 5:02The future of work
- 5:21Coordination is competitive advantage
- 6:00Software engineering is a team sport
- 6:20How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
- 6:44Solidarity matters
- 8:30Qualities of high performing teams 2. Practical tips
- 8:46Teams make commitments to coordinate action, to address the issue at hand, for the sake of the project's shared mission
- 8:59Teams are the atomic unit of a company
- 9:10What are the qualities of a good team?
- 9:31Enthusiasm & support
- 9:43Sense of togetherness
- 9:53Vulnerability
- 10:57Psychological safety
- 12:38Satisfaction is satisfaction
- 13:04Absence of these qualities can lead to burn out
- 13:57practical magic
- 14:28Play a game
- 15:23Pair program
- 16:06Better meetings
- 16:321. Agendas 2. Interruption-free 3. Turn-taking
- 17:32Chit-chat
- 18:11Effective feedback
- 18:51shadow side
- 19:24What really matters are the countless small deeds of unknown people who lay the basis for the significant events that enter history
- 19:57Productivity is a measure of comfort
- 20:14Don't suppress your humanity
- 20:28BAE SYSTEMS INSPIRED WORK
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