Matt Kimber
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teams

A collection of 26 posts

Steak and Salami
organisations

Steak and Salami

Ever had the feeling you're working constantly and getting nowhere? Specifically, the one where you've got a dozen things to do and none of them are getting done? Did you find that the

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
5 min read
Servant Leader, Helicopter Parent
agile

Servant Leader, Helicopter Parent

Why is developing software so slow now?Provocative statement, so let's unpick. Maybe I'm getting more impatient as I get older, but the pace of modern software development feels glacial. Honestly, why do

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
9 min read
Interviewing by Teaching
teams

Interviewing by Teaching

I've been trialling a new technique in interviews recently, and the results so far have been good so it feels worth sharing.Essentially it's a refinement of the "try to make the interview

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
3 min read
Mentoring, not hiring: The Reality
teams

Mentoring, not hiring: The Reality

Semi-anonymous Internet idiots like me love telling you all these things you should be doing about team structure, organisational approach and Really Exciting Technology but we're often a bit light on what happens

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
20 min read
How to really identify a 10x developer
teams

How to really identify a 10x developer

The sudden trending of "hashtag 10x developer" worries me. It worries me because it's not really about 10x performance, at least most of the time I've seen it. Instead, it tends to bundle two often overlapping movements which are unrelated to performance.

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
7 min read
The 10x Developer and You
organisations

The 10x Developer and You

I'm in the mood for sarcastic graphs. I think (I hope) that the idea of the "10x" developer is not an astonishingly new and radical one. People in the upper quartile

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
3 min read
Thoughts on Interviewing
teams

Thoughts on Interviewing

I think I'm destined to always be an iconoclast when it comes to interviews. Not quite so much as the days when "let's ask programmers some questions about programming" was a

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
12 min read
Thoughts on team leadership and metrics
teams

Thoughts on team leadership and metrics

I realise that in four or so years of this site I've never talked properly about team leadership, which is a bit of an omission given how much time I've devoted to organisational

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
14 min read
How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Uncertainty
development

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Uncertainty

Data/object anti-symmetry broke me. The reason for this breakage was established a year or two ago. I had the fortune to work with some very smart people, who were very good at

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
14 min read
Two Transformation Questions
organisations

Two Transformation Questions

What exactly is a transformation? Is it "go to the cloud" or "be Agile" or "containerise the things"? Despite the number of organisations which state those as

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
4 min read
Performance Reviews
teams

Performance Reviews

I had an interesting conversation last night about that old bugbear, the annual performance review. No matter how many well-meaning attempts have been made with SMART targets or peer review systems, every annual

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
4 min read
Bias for action and agility
organisations

Bias for action and agility

What has linked all of the high-performing teams and organisations I've worked for or with? That title is a bit of a clue: it's a bias for action. What this means is they

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
9 min read
Bad Team Leads and Responsible Adults
teams

Bad Team Leads and Responsible Adults

Does a team need a team lead? I've been thinking quite a bit about flat team structures over the past couple of weeks. As is often the case, it's recruitment-driven. I'm going to

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
5 min read
What is a Technical Architect anyway?
career

What is a Technical Architect anyway?

I spent a fair chunk of my career being a technical architect, most of which I also spent dreading the inevitable, "so what do you do for a living?" question at

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
5 min read
Firefighting
organisations

Firefighting

Firefighting is one of the biggest and most common causes of lost productivity and morale in software development. It usually manifests as developers being pulled off their project to urgently fix something -

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
7 min read
agile

Working with both physical and electronic progress boards

Yesterday in a retrospective one of my teams asked a question which is all too familiar: "Updating both a physical board and an electronic board to track our progress is a bit

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
3 min read
Agile transformation: The Low
agile

Agile transformation: The Low

A few months into any company's journey towards agile development I often see a point which I call the Low. This is where you've brought in a few experts, and done a few

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
3 min read
Waste
organisations

Waste

What's the difference between a merely good Scrum organisation and a great one? The answer is waste. Waste in a Scrum context is loosely defined as any activity which does not result in

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
3 min read
agile

Avoiding nightmare releases

Something I've seen a lot of supposedly Agile teams fail with is releases at the end of a project. Everything up to that point ticks along nicely, but the final sprint is a

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
4 min read
teams

JFDI Deployment

One of the things which small and startup companies often do so much better than large, established ones is encapsulated in this four-letter acronym: JFDI. Just Fearlessly Do It. (You can exchange your

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
2 min read
development

Repeating yourself

I think all good developers are aware of the basic axiom of "don't repeat yourself" - avoiding writing similar code over and over by making the effort to design and refactor

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
2 min read
development

No (more) heroes

A good development team has no heroes. There are three common "heroic" feats in software development: Hacking in features in a fraction of the time it should have taken. Pulling all-night

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
2 min read
teams

Why startups are fun

Working for a good tech startup is fun. There's a lot of energy, a certain amount of chaos, a huge amount of work produced and a general atmosphere of people enjoying themselves at

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
3 min read
teams

Ownership: Technical Debt

Hands up who didn't see this one coming? Technical debt is one of those strangely taboo subjects in the development world. Everybody has it, but nobody wants to talk about it when it

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
1 min read
architecture

Ownership: Architecture

I talked yesterday about what happens when development teams lose ownership of the software requirements. In that, I mentioned that teams need to own their architecture and technology stack. Surely this is so

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
2 min read
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