Chang Lee
You can see the recording here: https://youtu.be/O3xGnVGUdTo
Participants
Mary van Valkenburg
Scott Burns
Alex Antoninson
Kim Alexander
Jeremy Jordan
John Berryman
Matthew Cronin
The Problem I'm facing
I have been leading a computer vision project of 3 people that goes head-to-head against vendor offerings. One difficulty I have as a project lead was that there are situations that I have no idea how to handle. For example, when I expect a teammate to finish the work in 4 days, but at the end of the period, the teammate would say “I’m almost done.” As far as I can tell, I have the choice of
Cut the work and move to another high priority task
Let the person work and finish the work. But this creates blockers for the team.
How do I deal with situations like this, where I can see problems are likely communication but I don’t have an answer for?
Give people ownership
Let people own their work and provide transparency into the meaning of the work, instead of assigning people tasks.
Chang: Honestly I’m still having trouble understanding what does that have to do with making a product ship on time. I can see that being a part of building a good team though.
Add regular checks to progress
What I learned was that there is a need for regular checks -- the smaller the work chunks are and the more frequent are the checks, the less likely the output will deviate from the desired outcome.
I also have trouble breaking work down to meaningful chunks. What do I do?
Research tickets are difficult but there are ways that may help manage around it:
“Don’t spend more than 4 hours on this” - timeboxing when setting expectations
Regular presentation after research to avoid doing things that don’t matter to the team
How do I encourage people to ask more questions when I know that will save them a lot of time?
Thoughts
Oversharing own mistakes creates a culture of trust and learning.
A difficulty in management is to allow space for individual contributors but keep track of progress at the same time.