#40 - Sprint or no sprint (customer value bro)
If I had to guess, I would say the most commonly misunderstood terms I hear about are Agile/MVPs.
I spoke to someone who spends his days trying to get Agile right in companies and when I challenged him on the process he admitted that his biggest discussion is around whether the teams he works with can actually do that. It’s important to get the team right early on.
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Following my trip to Lagos, Nigeria at Christmas, I have really started to feel like great minds are distributed evenly across the globe.
You can’t equalize the outcomes but you can give same opportunities
To celebrate #blackpanther I'm gonna plug pan-African startups that are on stuff in my next 5 newsletters https://t.co/bZtMjDB9ZA
So along with bringing the disparate pieces on product, biz model & data insights lemme show u y greats minds r distributed evenly across the globe https://t.co/88bqxNTgoI
Let's Build Great Products
We Can’t Do That In One Sprint
This is a frequent Hacker Noon writer reminding us to not get too caught up in agile (or was it Agile?).
Sunday Reads
The Problems of the CTO Role
This was a GREAT read, I can’t make this up
“Technical leadership is about leading by example”
As someone who has spent more and more time understanding the technical side - I also know what many of you reading this are founders who don’t know who their next CTO is.
The other shocking finding is that many CTO’s never learnt to write code (they may have dabbled) but were operational types i.e. running but not shipping.
Takeway, good CTO’s tend to come from pure technology companies where the main product is a piece of technology sold to businesses or consumers.
In Defense of Call-out Culture - City Arts Magazine
This article talks through the psychology of the call-out culture. I saw this with the Monique incident where she highlighted the dodgy contract they were trying to make her sign.
I see this with diversity, calling out organisations that are not inclusive of race, gender, intersectionality and other forms of biases. A bevy of writers in popular publications took to the internet last week to decry “call-out culture”—a catch-all phrase that refers to the extremely online practice of denouncing racist, sexist or otherwise problematic statements on the internet itself.
You might only have the time to read this on a Sunday.
How to Stop Taking Things Personally
A bit of EQ goes a long way.
As Founders, PM’s, Freelancers, friends/family of these people we are all in the firing line. I believe its important to take care of yourself.
People are hustling and London ain’t getting cheaper. Solo-Founders are less likely to respond to your messages and may miss a birthday. As the title, says, we all need to try to not take things so personally.
Being an Adult is all about understanding the grey areas
Helpful Tool(s)
Andela - Helping build world-class software development teams
If you’re a business that is scaling up and wants to invest in Africa Andela have a network pool of top developers.