Talk: Retrospectives for introverts – APIs for humans
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Speaker:
Olja Rastic-Dulborough
Talk description
Title:
Retrospectives for introverts – APIs for humans
Short synopsis:
Agility is an expectation when teams form to develop software. What about unspoken motivation or power dynamics between the members? We use empathy to design experiences for external developers but what about how we see each other? Conflicts in teams can come from false assumptions. We did some work to adjust those. Our software has APIs, why not start with ‘human APIs’ to better understand each other? Our lightweight framework gave us a starting point for having meaningful conversations that had empathy built in from the start. It helped us create better ‘interfaces’ for mindful interactions.
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Long synopsis (optional):
Software development and associated tasks bring with them an expectation for agility to be a consideration when adopting team practices. We do a bit of work, check where we are, correct, adjust, learn and repeat. In a developer relations squad within a large product development team we work on code samples, demos, tutorials and workshops. Our challenge is that each of the four of us can at any time be working on such varying tasks that it can feel we’re sole workers rather than a team. Trying out mood marbles and regular retrospectives only helped to surface that we didn’t have a way to handle the issues that were less tangible but affected the way the team worked. In an effort to find our team mojo again, we explored an idea of APIs for humans. Each of us exposed several basic things about ourselves that we thought would help others understand what we needed to be happy and productive in the team. We started with an agreed upon personality test, explored our motivation, what being empowered meant to each of us and then set expectations for how we could support each other in a given week with what we needed. Happy for this to be a full talk but can also break up more interesting bits into lightning talks. Feedback welcome, newish speaker, will be 5 years on the job in July 2020.
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