Building our Team - Professional

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I write this article based on the insight of the conversation that I have with my team in their monthly 1-on-1 call. I speak to each one of them and after the conversation, I write one insight. I share them in our team group chat. This article is a compilation of a full week's takeaway. You can read more about the reason for it in the article Restart.

How to manage time and avoid negativity when we are not able to produce the expected outcome?

This was was a big one and I went into a rant. As they say "People who are complaining about time management don't have time to learn about time management" So instead of giving a time management course I asked what's her desire to do after she gets back some time. She mentioned she wants to invest it in learning and improve her outcome at work. Avoid doing repeated mistakes and get better at analyzing the tickets. It was a great intention. We saw what her week looked like and I added a 30 minutes early start each day. The objective is to take the weekly target and get it done before Thursday so that she gets some time on Friday to improve her skills, creative thinking and analyzing data. This will give her the motivation to be in control of her time.

The second part of the question is related to our emotional intelligence and mental health. It's a tricky subject and first I misread it thinking that some negative thinking is affecting her work but actually not up to the standard work as per her or team's expectation is creating negative thinking. Thus creating a downward spiral to make future work effect and unable to produce the expected outcome. I have a completely different take on this and firstly I would celebrate being average (https://vikramshetty.com/2022/01/29/rationale-on-being-average/) What that means is to stop chasing perfection and stop doing things for the sake of doing it or checking the box (below-average people do this) So do less but do it enough, neither less nor more.?

The only measure is are making progress (see point 4 in the first paragraph of our culture https://73bit.com/Culture). Are you improving month over month? The next point is to lean on the team. Identify the task that you are really bad at. Create a plan of action and seek help from the team lead (see point 2 in the first paragraph of our culture https://73bit.com/Culture). Stop comparing yourself with your teammate we are working towards a common vision and not against each other (see point 5 in the first paragraph of our culture https://73bit.com/Culture). The 3rd suggestion would be to use point number 7 from the first part of our culture https://73bit.com/Culture. Make clear that you are not good at these 3-4 points and you need help and some extra time to improve on it. Mention the benchmark of measurement that you are trying to achieve each month and communicate it with the team. This will show you don't lack intention, you have the desire to improve and you are a team player. It takes a lot of courage to admit your shortcoming in public and take responsibility for it. That's the better approach to improve rather than hiding it under the carpet. You may fool people around during the meeting but deep down inside your leaders and the rest of the team is well aware of your shortcoming. We are humans our Brian is optimized to find mistakes in others like super-sophisticated military machinery. You are not spared with your sloppy work ever. Just like after the call I realized that I misread the negativity point as personal instead of work, which wasted our time for 5-10 minutes when I was giving advice on an unrelated topic.?

How to live the shared learning culture at work??

I think it's very important to understand the culture that we are building is the value system of our company. These are the guidelines we align ourselves with so that it makes it easier for us to make decisions, select the kind of work and say no to things that don't go with our culture. It's not a poster that we hang on the wall for the sake of it. It's something that we live with so that we can attract talent who want to live this culture and clients who would love to work with us because of it. We talk a lot about Shared learning https://73bit.com/#about and https://73bit.com/Culture But it's not something only talk about.?

Let me give an example if we talk about living a healthy life and we eat junk and sweets all the time it means nothing was we talk about we are still living an unhealthy life. Similarly, with shared learning, it's not enough to come up with an idea to improve the design of our software. It's creating the sample example of how that will look in the Probench. It's about teaching it step by step to the junior or new team members. Creating the plan of action with actual implementation to the outcome. Overlooking the roadmap of the execution and course-correcting till the outcome is met. Releasing and making it live for our clients to us. Taking advice and feedback from the client and see if it delights them. Ask for other recommendations and repeat the whole process again.?

My big claim(https://73bit.com/Culture#idea last para) here is the when each of us works in the culture that we have set out. It will become easy, effortless and effective to produce outcomes on demand. We all enjoy the power of 2X outcome which will give us enough time. We all can invest our free time in more shared learning and grow our individual careers multifold. In my experience, I have seen a team that works well together always produces a better outcome than any individual working. So for us to testify that we live our culture will be measured by the outcome we are producing. These can be measured by many factors like the number of story points the team can do in the sprint, the Total number of test cases created in a day, Reduction in the number of bugs, Accuracy in the estimation of the operation team, Increase in the introduction call per month by the BD team, Lesser number of time anyone gets stuck during the day, How can your work not become an impediment to others work? Reduction in a number of time systems goes down during the week, Reduced number of meetings, Reduced number of support tickets, Reduced number of unbillable work, ability to do any task in half the expected time, ability to delight clients on demand, ability to map every task to increased revenue for the company, ability to double everyone's salary within two years. I know your mind was just blown away. It's a big claim but not an impossible one. If each one of us can practice the culture daily and build products and services aligned to our current expertise it is possible to 3X our revenue and subtract taxes, fixed costs, profits from it each one of you who can map out how their outcome has helped increase 3X the revenue can be rewarded with 2X income.?

As I mention in my 1-on-1 that the people working in Google are not working 2X harder than we are they are thinking 10X smarter than we are. So my question to you is do we have the capability to think 2X smarter and act upon it to bring in 3X revenue??

Why do we deliver our software in Sprints and every 3 weeks? Did our client ask us to do it?

I think this is an excellent question asked to me to date. It is important for us to understand that we work as a Product company which means we are a partner vendor to our clients. We provide the tool that makes their work-life easy. It means we play a strategic role to guide our clients to make the best use of the technology that we have to offer. So no one should tell us how we should work. We have developed some internal processes, methods and systems that bring predictable outcomes in terms of the number of story points per Sprints. It also makes sure there are fewer to zero bugs in the software we deliver. We have 7-8 proprietary steps that are involved to ship a working and documented software. We should stand strong like expert professionals with skills we have learned and lean on the assets we have developed in 73bit. So the answer to the second question is NO. Our client has not asked us to do work in Sprint but we think this practice gives us the predictability on working software. It also gives us the ability to add assets like automated tests, documentation, release notes, smooth release process, measure team productivity, easy to teach new team members, one language of communication, add more automation like Continuous Integration, automated GUI testing. It also gives us the leverage to be upfront on how we develop software and set the expectation with every client. Plus if we have a technical expert at the client end like PRI they acknowledge our process and see the value in it. It also makes it easy to increase more value in the software we develop so that we can increase our billable hours per sprint or charge our client per sprint.?

Coming to the first question Sprint is a part of the Agile Development movement and in software Lean startup the concept of faster feedback loop is highly appreciated. In the old days of waterfall methods software was used to ship every year or sometimes 2-3 years. When Sprint started teams could ship software every 4 weeks and due to advance programming practices like Scrum meeting, pair programming, simple designs, mob programming, Test Driven Development, Dev Ops, Code ownership, Refactoring, Small Releases, Sustainable pace, Continues Delivery etc. team could release in every 2 weeks. Thus the common practice is to follow releases in 2 weeks. We choose 3 weeks because we thought we are learning a new method and we don't want to put too much pressure on the team. It's currently working in terms of confidence on delivery and the leadership team find it comfortable But if you all think you can pull off the same story points or billable hours in 2 weeks you can go for it. The rule is everyone in the team should agree, be comfortable and be confident about it. There are companies like Netflix and Amazon that ship their software every day. I have read stories that some teams in Spotify have the ability to fix a bug and ship within an hour. They can do all this because they have DevOps and Continuous Delivery in place that could make it possible for any team member to do it. It runs more than a million tests in a few seconds using web farms followed by performance tests. They can release it to a few testing teams and do some verification. It's released to a few geography and users use and slowly it is rolled out to the rest of the world. At any given point they can roll back and the developer gets a faster feedback loop to fix it again.?

As a team to create a profit centre out of this system we can always work in 2 member team that ships code in 3 weeks and we can have an offering of shipping code in 1 week which we can charge at priority fees. Making it possible to do it in an emergency.?

Why do we have a point system in our company for appraisal and pay hikes?

Currently, apart from the Operations team rest, all the teams have a self-scoring system (a point system) that decides their pay hike. It not only includes billable hours but also includes points for improvement, documentation, learning, coaching etc. The reason we came up with this idea is that both I and Gautam (Owner of 73bit.com) during our working days at MNC have faced two problems when it came to paying hikes. The first one is HR's favourite tool the bell curve (https://empxtrack.com/blog/bell-curve-for-performance-appraisal/) and bosses' favourite habit of favouritism. We both did not want to create this culture in our company.

It also enables each member to take charge of their own pay hike. They can decide how much they want to aim for at the beginning of the year. They can also decide to have a slow year and have a goal of only 50%. They can measure month on month if they are on the track to achieving the goal. In some cases, they can optimize the work that produces the desired outcome for the company with effortless execution on their end. They can leverage knowledge from their team, the internet and even books. They can calculate the work waste from the time they have logged and create an action plan to overcome it. It also means the pay hike is given based on merit and they cannot bypass it.

It also is a business advantage because people are more interested in achieving the points. Thus working towards a shared outcome that is aligned to the growth of the business. Thus they know exactly what all things to point out and focus on so that we can keep our client happy and make a good profit in return. For instance, our team have developed an interest in User Experience, performance and high flexibility in features to name a few.

There could also be a case where everyone gets the best pay hikes and as an owner of the company, it can be a scary thought. As of now, our billable hours is not tied properly because we work with non-profits and also we have not found the sweet spot to create a feature that would delight the clients. There is something called as Law of averages. This means at any given point in time each one of us has different expectations from our career. At times it is money or learning or peace of mind or work-life balance or challenging high-risk projects or taking it slow. The cycle of life doesn't allow every one of us to be in the same phase of life. So it will automatically clear any confusion about the pay hike and we could also work on our business and revenue model to lean more on subscription fees. Making it possible to give a good pay hike to everyone.

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