Personnel Management *

The Agile methodology consists of various mandatory concepts and artifacts. A product backlog is one of them. This is actually a set of requirements received from the business and formulated in the form of development tasks.

Backlog grooming is not a magic wand; it's a comprehensive activity aimed to ensure that all the tasks are always in clear order. How can the grooming process be improved? And what are the special things about it?

Young product managers aim to rapidly learn the fundamentals of their role and master the craft. However, there are no magic power, specific book or a class that can give you 100% of professional mastery.

You want it all, you want it now. But it will surely take some time to make you a product management guru. This post contains a set of relevant resources about product management for those who prefer to read, listen and watch.

Successful decisions are being achieved by the efforts of individuals. Their collaboration is the key to success. No matter if they have won a basketball champ or released a new software product.

Where does the team path to success begin? In this post, we share ten essential tips on how to improve team meeting discussions and describe five powerful methods that accelerate brainstorming sessions. IT professionals, this will perfectly suit you too.

It is difficult to imagine a situation when a product manager does not face prioritization challenges. Can you quickly decide what to place to the first place?

Any product timeline requires a clear order and only qualitatively decomposed and managed tasks will lead you to a decent and successful product release. In this case, you will not successfully perform without a powerful prioritization. Where to start and how to define the most appropriate prioritization method? Especially if you are a newcomer in the product management world? Here we describe the ICE scoring prioritization method that empowers product managers to choose the right features for development.

Recently I’ve been getting invited to a lot of interviews, and they all go pretty much the same way: I come on, we chat for a while, and then… they make me a job offer. Like I’ve already passed the technical interview stage and confirmed my skills. The thing is, I don’t even have a mega-popular GitHub page with examples of my code, and my CV is so bland it looked like I was forced to write it. The only outside indication that I’m worth something is my ability to answer technical questions, but I’m not even being asked to do that anymore.

The reason for that is simple: I wrote a couple of Habr articles and they became popular. Looks deserved and normal at first glance: since I shared my experience publicly and people have clearly appreciated it, my skills are considered “community-approved” and there’s no need for a lengthy interview.

But the articles aren’t even about my skills at all — mostly they’re there so I can whine about my depression. I mean, I’m glad I don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore, but seriously: THAT passes for a quality developer these days? Are you out of your mind? I believe you are, and the symptoms are everywhere.

Originally article was posted here — 7 tips & tricks on how to deal with remote teams

A number of both large corporations and small companies having almost no staff is increasing. This is the impulse of new times that many call “uberization”. The phenomenon was named after Uber — one of the largest public-transportation companies whose drivers all are independent entrepreneurs aka freelancers. Such a structure allows Uber to work all over the planet through operating remote teams of drivers in dozens of cities simultaneously.

Some companies have many managers and team leaders in their staff, because they need people with management skills. What characteristics should an ordinary employee have in order to become a good manager? Much depends on the purpose of the company, its scope and market characteristics.

In autumn, we announced we were going to expand our IT team from 49 to 250 developers. And immediately we were buried under an avalanche of questions — mostly, people were interested why a pizza chain needs so many software engineers. How did we come up with such a number? So now I want to answer that.

Once upon a time there was a guy on my team so weak that he was going to be fired (a developer! Fired!). Every comment of mine was another nail in his coffin. I could almost hear the bang of the hammer every time I clicked “Submit review”. He was a nice person and I almost felt bad for him, but it didn’t stop me from tearing his work to shreds. I had an inalienable right to criticize his work, right? I’m a better developer, therefore I’m right. No one wants to say that bad code is good, right? He was eventually fired, not before leaving him without the customary bonus for a couple months.

I said to myself: “I’m not going to do his work, right? He was taking the place of a more talented developer. I did everything right”. But then I received another pull request for a review, and something changed. Drastically.

Back in those times when I just started learning how to code, I trusted the old wise weasels with their “Programming languages don’t matter” mantra. I grew obsessed with the idea of some day becoming a developer who can do just anything. That guy who transfers his experience from one technology to another and transcends the minutia. But that idea failed miserably.