Having a team that is aligned on a set of core values is very important to have a healthy and productive environment.

I’ve been following David Amador for a long time. He’s a one man team that created the Quest of Dungeons game. This game is available in 10 platforms, like for example on Steam, Xbox, Playstation, Apple Store, 3DS and Nintendo Switch.

This blog is much about team leading, and it may seem off to interview an one man show. But I do believe that to lead others, we need to lead ourselves first.

I always found interesting all the things that David is able to accomplish and on this interview I tried to understand better what makes him tick.

I see productivity as value added per unit of time. There are many factors that impact our personal productivity and at the end of the day we’re always part of something bigger, like a team and a company.

I met Raquel H Ribeiro when I worked at Feedzai fighting fraud. She was part of the team of data scientists that built the tooling to detect fraudulent operations.

It was always very interesting to talk with her about the new fraudster’s trends and how were they coping with that.

And her being a Cosmologist, it was usual to have lunches where we asked all sort of astronomical things. I still remember her trying to explain high levels of abstraction to us, but it was really hard to keep up.

We leave our comfort zone when we get that anxious feeling in our chest and we are conscious that we’re not in control, and that something may go wrong.