Lessons learned leading teams and projects and products
summary
Runs Juju GUI at Canonical, moves a Python-based tool to Go, and scales a distributed team across Italy, UK, US and Puerto Rico while shipping CI, code review and caman boards as single sources of truth. Practical rules: team grew from 3 to 12, over 20 repos to manage, weekly one-on-ones, two-month experiments, pair Google Summer of Code students, and make master always releasable with feature branches longer than three days are harmful; feature flags, QA by everyone, and spec one-pagers drive releases and prevent breakage.
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chapters (33)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:58What have I been doing the last two years?
- 1:1913:?? join the Juju GUI team
- 1:48Fully distributed engineering
- 2:10Started to learn about teams
- 5:3014:02 lead the Juju GUI team
- 5:41Grew from a team of 7 to 12
- 6:10LISTEN and LEARN from your leadership
- 6:50Weekly 1-1 schedule open door policy
- 7:06Hiring a new team
- 8:13Visibility
- 8:46Experiments
- 9:25How to submit code
- 9:39QA is everyone's job
- 10:22Always releasable master
- 11:13Lessons in project management
- 12:14Mini-Project teams
- 12:58Lessons in product management
- 13:11Project vs Product
- 13:44Specification document
- 14:50Understand the product narrative
- 15:31Lessons in general leadership
- 16:10I don't know anything
- 16:22Ask the right questions
- 17:18Conversations
- 17:32Your job to kill unproductive ones
- 18:00Applying to Open Source
- 18:22Two Students CI, Code Review, Kanban, Feature Specs
- 19:0415:10 Interim Director of Juju
- 19:19Lessons in team management
- 20:14Everyone loves to talk to the Director
- 20:43Burnout is REAL
- 20:58Never stop learning
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