Milena-Mercedes May
Trainer and Mentor for Software Engineering Leaders and Teams
Hamburg, Germany
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Milena’s vision is to grow excellence in Software Engineering. She supports leadership to build high performing teams in Software Engineering organisations as a trainer and mentor for both leaders and their teams.
Milena has more than a decade of experience working hands on as a Software Engineer and about four years of experience as a software engineering leader at various companies, always keen on learning more about how agile mindset, principles and practices enable teams to succeed.
Driven by her passion for learning, she’s also teaching coding and Software Engineering at different universities.
As a founding member of the Digital Leadership Network she loves to drive this community forward.
Milena lives in Hamburg, Germany, and loves to work remotely and internationally.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Are you unintentionally delaying your software product’s time to market?
In today’s world of rapidly changing circumstances we can’t afford the luxury of planning months or years ahead when we want to succeed with our software against those of our competitors’.
We need to ship business value as soon as possible.
Leaders and decision makers who are responsible for Digital Product Development know this but often fall into a common trap:
They impact the time to market negatively when pushing for speed without heeding the Software Engineers’ warnings about bad quality.
This is a very common argument between business and tech - and it’s all about trade-offs.
But how can we make good trade-offs together?
And is the core trade-off really speed for quality?
This talk advocates not seeing tech and business as opponents, but rather making tech for business.
It aims at supporting people representing either tech or business to have constructive conversations about what technical trade-offs really support the business.
We walk through
Negotiating what quality is adequate
Maintaining a high speed continuously
Understanding and managing Technical Debt
Measuring your Software Engineering performance
If you discover that you were unintentionally delaying your software product’s time to market, you’ll leave the talk equipped with practical advice on how to change that.
Between Monolith and Microfrontends
Advantages of a modulithic architecture and how an incremental refactoring can succeed
Based on my experience as Tech Lead, I recap the successful path my team took to modularise a monolithic React frontend - without micro frontends. The goal was to scale the software development of the frontend to multiple teams.
Starting from a monolithic architecture and a Git Flow integration and deployment process, we modularised the code incrementally and also made significant progress towards Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD).
It was important to never hinder the continuous development of new features therefore we favoured incremental refactorings over big bang approaches.
The technology-agnostic approach of the talk focuses on the principles of incremental refactoring. Particular attention is paid to creating the conditions that allow different teams to work on the same code base at the same time.
With this experience report, I want to encourage Tech Leads and Software Developers to approach refactorings incrementally and not to view architecture decisions in a binary way. You will also get tips on tooling and how to guide incremental refactoring organisationally.
My Leadership Toolbox - A Collection of Inspiration for (Aspiring) Leaders
Leadership is nothing you learn at school or university. At best, you get leadership training when you get promoted to your first leadership role - or some months after that.
You are growing into your first leadership role, are aspiring to or even a seasoned leader but struggling with your current challenges?
Let me support you with my learnings, first as a Chapter Lead, later as an Engineering Manager.
My Leadership Toolbox contains:
* How to set yourself up
* How to build trust
* How to facilitate growth
* How to manage conflict
* How to make sure you’re ok
You will recognise some of these behaviours in yourself and in other leaders and get better at using and appreciating them more deliberately.
How to Make Remote Collaboration Easy, Fun and Effective
The pandemic made us all experts in remote work.
Did it?
No, some people just went to their home offices without adjusting their skills to the new setting.
Individuals, teams and companies that hadn’t learned before how to collaborate effectively in an office setting, failed even more to do so in a remote one.
I’ll explore the nature of collaboration and how we can facilitate it throughout the workday, adjusting the means we have when we’re onsite to those we have remotely.
We‘ll look at different personas to better understand how remote work looks from different perspectives.
You will take away inspiration on how to make remote work more fun and effective for you and your co-workers.
Workshop: Understanding Agile Values and Principles to Use Agile Practises Fluently
"We have too many meetings!" - "Our Daily StandUp takes too long!" - does that sound like your evergreen Retrospective complaints?
I'll explore with you how agile values can help you reflect whether you're following agile practices hollowly and how to make better suggestions for improvements.
Followed by an introductory lightning talk, we will collaborate in small groups on mapping agile practices to their underlying principles and values. Then we will create problem statements about an agile practice that doesn’t create the value it should and brainstorm how to promote this value instead of just promoting the practice.
You will leave this workshop with a deeper understanding of agility and be equipped with inspiration on how to become a more fluent practitioner and advocate of agile ways of working.
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