Finding your Motivation and Managing When you aren’t Motivated

We are all motivated by different things. But most companies and managers only know how to encourage employees through money or title. By better understanding what motivates each of us, we can be better teammates, managers, and people. In this session we will learn:
• The 8 different kinds of motivators people have and how they impact engagement
• What kinds of motivation profiles fit different jobs and strategies for compensating for lacking motivation in an area that is essential to your position
• How to use existing employee engagement funds and structures for employees not motivated by money or position
• When to force yourself to care about a motivator and how to do it

Estimates are Evil but Can be Used for Good

It happens to all of us. You have built your backlog, the tasks are all in order, everyone is committed to the work. Everyone feels great about a backlog well planned and is ready to get to work. And then someone does it, they use the ‘E’ word. “What is our estimate for this?”. A chorus of groans breaks out. Suddenly, two developers come to fisticuffs over the difference between a 2-point and a 3-point story. The SDET storms out because we haven’t included enough time for testing. The Product Owner climbs on the table to start preaching the difference between accuracy and precision. Join this season and learn how to avoid this scene, or the groan factor, at your next planning without giving up the value of estimates. In this session we will learn:
• Why “the business” wants estimates and how to make sure they aren’t abused
• Why the development team should want estimates and how to reduce the trauma
• Using estimates now to avoid disappointment and overtime later
• Accuracy vs Precision, Story points vs t-shirt sizes, and all the ways we do this wrong
• When to estimate, who to estimate with, and how to keep it all for being a lie

The Interview Lab: Understanding how to navigate interviews from either side of the table

At some point all of us will be involved in interviewing. Some days you will be sitting in the interviewee chair, trying to impress a panel of people who give only blank stares in return to your witty remarks. Other days you will be in the interviewer chair trying to judge a candidate’s qualifications from answers to canned questions. After interviewing hundreds of people for all kinds of technical jobs, and advising candidates in all points of their career, I will give you the inside scope on what is happening and how to do better at this essential part of the job hunt process. Whether you are thinking about starting your own job hunt, or have been tapped to be on an interview panel, join this session to learn:
• How to understand at a job description, how to vet a resume
• Recruiters, contracts, aggregators, and how to understand the motivations of everyone involved
• Different approaches for the technical, “culture fit”, and soft skill parts of the job
• Key questions you should be able to answer without asking directly and why you are being asked/asking certain questions
• When and how to talk about money

GDPRs, and PCI-DSSs, and HIPAAs, oh my: Untangling Compliance So You Don’t Get Scared

All software will fall under some compliance standard from HIPAA for health care information to PCI for credit card information, from GDPR for privacy in some countries and states to SOX for publicly traded companies. As software developers, product managers, and quality engineers we have an outsized influence on the ability of a company to maintain compliance and meet standards.
However, compliance standards can be confusing, contradictory, and scary. Every day we are making decisions from data storage to data security, from form validation to walking away from an unlocked computer that impacts the compliance of our software and our company. When should we talk to a compliance officer? What are the right standards of data security vs user control that we should maintain? How do I even know if any of these standards apply? Join this talk to learn the basics of compliance.
Key takeaways of this session are:
* High level understanding of the most common compliance standards
* What responsibilities you have as an employee and as someone building software
What to do when compliance requirements are contradictory
* What is involved in various compliance audits and what to do if you think you are out of compliance
* When to talk to your compliance officer, HR, or security team and what to do if your organization doesn’t have one of those

As a product person, I have worked with teams to build software that required compliance with GDPR, SOC2, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS. I have worked in companies with a security team and a trained compliance officer and startups with none of these support structures. I have written compliance handbooks and gone through compliance officer training. Too often I have been in conversations where teams are debating different standards with little understanding of what they actually mean and how to get clear guidance on what is the right thing to do.

Build Things People Want: User Feedback Loops

It’s the first day on a new team as a product owner. You sit down with the tech lead to get a lay of the land: What are our products? Who are our customers? What does our backlog look like? The tech lead waves you off and says, “You are here to help us build things people want. It’s your job to figure those things out, we don’t know.”

Building things people want is the job of the entire team in partnership with the users. Software exists to solve user’s problems. Software exists to solve user’s problems. We fail at software development when we fall into the gap between software requirements and real world user experience. The business wants products that sell or make processes more efficient. The thing that most undermines a good development team is when they build something that never gets sold, used, or heard about. All too often, organizations don’t know how to do that.
During this session we will learn why we listen to users, how to listen to users, and who should be involved in those discussions. We will use that customer feedback to create feedback loops which iteratively solve customer problems. Using advisory groups, feature toggles, and iterative release strategies we can test hypotheses, see user adoption and hurdles, and build the right thing. We will also touch on how DDD practices like ubiquitous language and domain mapping and help both the development team, and the customers, speak the same language and collaborate towards functional software.

Consuming Endangered Pachyderms: A Product Approach to Tech Debt

You are buried under a mountain of debt. You are anxious and feel like you are being set up for failure but you can’t pinpoint why. It’s preventing you from building your dreams. It’s making stakeholders unhappy. Every feature is a nightmare to build and you doubt yourself. The development team is about to stage an armed revolt. Your software is rotting under you and it’s going to cause a premature death for your product. How did things get this bad and what should we do about it? Or, even better, how do we prevent it from ever getting this bad in the first place? How do we start eating that tech debt elephant?

Understanding how tech debt is holding back your business objectives will help you start digging out and creating a better product for everyone. This session will help you articulate what debt you have, formulate a plan for addressing it, and communicate that in business friendly terms. All systems have tech debt. Not all tech debt is made equal and not all of it can, or should, be addressed. It’s time we start talking honestly about what debt is, how it affects the product, and what to do about it.

Key takeaways:
• Evaluate how tech and product debt are impeding your vision and business objectives
• Learn tools to build your own debt backlog, prioritize debt against features, and socialize debt solutions
• Discover simple ways to communicate effectively about tech debt within your organization

Given at KCDC 2021, CodeMash 2023