I never paid much attention to the agile movement. I’ve worked with SCRUM and other methodologies and always had some issues with them. They always felt more like a control structure than an improvement by itself. I do remember the first time we used SCRUM. It felt like a breeze. That wasn’t because of SCRUM itself but rather because using any kind of organisational model when we have none, is always an improvement.

But I did feel much constraints using it. I’d say that maybe we never used it properly. But I do feel that SCRUM is great at some things, like managing risk, but not good at others: like productivity. It helps a lot when we need to build tailor made software to a specific client. When we are sharing the risk with the client and the client pays by the sprint.

I met Ricardo Vladimiro a long time ago when I was active in the gamedev Portuguese scene. I actually had the pleasure of working with him in his startup where we developed several games.

At some point I went back to the web applications world and he started his journey at Miniclip where he turned to data science and grew as a manager. He is a good friend and a good mentor.

He also contributed to the blog with a guest post:

• If you love them, let them go!

I met Monika because Ricardo Fiel had referenced me as a team leader. We talked about topics related with leading teams because Monika is preparing training topics for leaders.

I really liked talking with her and felt that I could have so much to learn. Being more focused on executing I sometimes feel that I lack in the theory part.

She works at TEAMmatters where she helps companies change for the better. I learned a lot on this interview and hope it will also be useful for you.

It’s very common to see discussions or debates about different topics. These discussions can be light or very harsh. We may invest hours discussing trivial things or even days aligning on a RFC.

If we have an idea or opinion that we feel is the right one to follow, how can we make sure that we convince our teammates?

Hugo Lopes is leading a Research and Development department that interacts with a product team at James.

This is very interesting. We’re starting to have data science mentioned everywhere and it’s nice for Hugo to share his experience building a R&D department.

We talk about development process, onboarding, training, team management and team performance.