Management is not something you “just do intuitively” and it will work out by itself. Instead, management is a craft that you can - and should - learn. It’s about knowing the right tools and approaches and learning skills that help you to lead a productive, happy and motivated team. In this post, we visualize these skills as a “Skill Tree” like in a video game. Have a look. It will be fun and insightful!

Especially in bigger teams, establishing and maintaining a common standard for software development is important and challenging. At the same time, it’s crucial to involve the whole team in the creation of the standard to ensure its acceptance and high quality. In this post, I present our approach for this: The regular meeting “Tech Talk” and the team guide.

Traditional hierarchy-based feedback flows are limited as they don’t consider the useful feedback of peers. To improve this, I suggest a “Complete Peer Feedback” session: All team members come together and share their appreciation and growth potential for their peers. In this post, I present our experiences with this approach, why we are enthusiastic about it and how you can adopt it.

Employee journey maps are a tool for preparing and structuring staff appraisals. They trigger reflection processes and reveal the employee’s motivation. Moreover, they can lead to interesting insights as they compare the different perceptions of the participants. And the best is: You only need two sheets of paper and a pencil.

Motivation leads to higher performance and satisfaction in the job. But how can we motivate a team of software developers? Sadly, there are common misconceptions about motivation that do more harm than good. Fortunately, science has already discovered the motivators that work: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This post presents these three pillars of motivation and concrete actions to implement them in software development environments.