Dream Teams: Making Your Dream (Team) Come True
January 25, 2018
What differentiates a successful software development culture?
Almost all of us have been on a high performance team. Just invite us, and we’ll sign up for another in a second! Typically, it was a team for which we worked harder – but from which we took away more exhilaration and joy than at any other time in our careers. What made it so? And what can we do to get it again?
Successful software development cultures are ones that are not just performant but that also both delight customers and are a joy for every team member to be part of.
One of the characteristics that differentiates agile cultures is that (finally!), it’s not just managers who are responsible for crafting culture – but everyone. And agile, done well, means every one of us engages in the crafting of it.
Meanwhile, every one of the various kinds of managers engaged with product and project teams have a role in crafting culture and supporting the emergence of high performance teams, too.
And agile asks people who are often introverted, highly-logical, independent thinkers not only to form teams but to make those teams self-organizing. It asks every team member to step up and collaborate.
Ultimately, stellar team experiences derive from us – we and every one of our colleagues must step up to make it so. We need to no longer just perform as individuals, but truly trust and respect and engage and share – behaviors that can feel at odds with the fierce independence from whence we’ve come.
On demand recording
Meet our panelists
Ron Lichty
Ron Lichty has been alternating between consulting with and managing software development and product organizations for 25 years, almost all of those spent untangling the knots in software development and transforming chaos to clarity, the last 15 of those in the era of Agile. Originally a programmer, he earned several patents and wrote two popular programming books before being hired into his first management role by Apple Computer, which nurtured his managerial growth in both development and product management roles.
Principal and owner of Ron Lichty Consulting, Inc. (www.RonLichty.com), he has trained teams in Scrum, transitioned teams from waterfall and iterative methodologies to agile, coached teams already using agile to make their software development “hum”, and trained managers in managing software people and teams. In his continued search for effective best practices, Ron co-authors the annual Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.
Punkaj Jain, Vice President of Software Services
Punkaj Jain, is Vice President of Software Services based in the San Francisco Bay area. He is a dynamic and accomplished executive, entrepreneur & leader with a track record from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies in multiple disciplines. Punkaj has experience delivering revenue & profit growth, business solutions in Big Data, IoT, Digital Health, E-Commerce & Cloud technologies.
Earlier in his career, Punkaj had senior database engineering roles at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) & Sybase. Punkaj has a Masters in Computer Science from Wayne State University and a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering
