Many organizations find the balance between project work and servicing ad-hoc stakeholder requests in a timely manner as a hard problem. If it’s done incorrectly, it can lead to burn-out, increase attrition and slow innovation in the organization. When it’s done correctly, a team will feel the value they provide daily, from increasing engagement to meeting the needs of stakeholders.
At the Developer Week Global Management, top engineering leaders from VMWare and Stack Overflow among many others, convened to share insights about team management, best practices and developer tools & technology decision-making. Foursquare’s Director of Client Solutions Engineering Mariena Quintanilla led a session providing practical guidance for managing agile development teams, from structuring your organization and hiring the right talent, to maintaining work-life balance and resolving friction points.
Highlights include:
- Carving out an intentional organization structure with interrupt-driven teams whose primary focus is support
- What to look for in recruitment to hire the right people, from engineers who are motivated by helping others, care and understand what your stakeholders need, to strong communication skills and empathy
- How to build SLAs with buffers to account for PTO, cross-training, documentation and improvements (process and tools)
- Understanding what your team needs to be successful and advocate for your team by digging in to understand friction points and work on resolving them
Watch the video to learn how to lead an agile dev team that balances project work with ad-hoc, time sensitive requests.