IMHO Saint TeamLead Conf 2019
On September 23-24, 2019, Saint TeamLead Conf 2019 was held in St. Petersburg for
One of the 42 reports that passed the selection was my report “The Tale of the Turnip, or How the Right Tasks Are Born”. I will tell you more about it in the next article immediately after the organizers publish the mounted videos and allow them to be published. And this time I want to share my impressions of the conference and reports as a participant.
What did Saint TeamLead Conf 2019 remember for me?
Workshops
This time TeamLead Conf was largely experimental - the organizers chose a new completely huge room ARTPLAY SPb, there was a separate entertainment zone from the organizers, etc. But the most useful change for me was Workshops. The ability to listen to theory and solve cases under the guidance of experts is the most effective way to acquire new knowledge or organize existing knowledge.
To the fullest, I was able to evaluate only Workshop Georgy Mogelashvili (Booking.com) "DIY Performance Review".
At the “DIY Performance Review”, George told us the theory around Performance Review, shared his experience, how it all falls on the processes adopted by their company, how the processes have changed over the past 5 years. After that, several teams compiled their lists of criteria for evaluating the middle developer at the Performance Review and agreed on a general summary list. After a small theoretical insertion, the teams solved 2 practical cases according to middle developers and calibrated the results among themselves. The third case and materials caught up with the participants at home.
Networking
Acquaintance with new people, communication with old acquaintances, acquaintance of other participants with each other - this is why it is worth going to profile and related conferences in Russia. Only in these 2 days I met 20+ interesting new people, asked “stupid” questions and received “smart” answers, wrote another 5 interesting books on the reading list, a couple of “brilliant” ideas dawned on me, etc.
For this were organized:
- a magnificent area with ottomans and tables, where you can comfortably accommodate and conduct conversations on any topic of interest to you
- a dining area right in the lobby with a lot of seats at one table, where in one lunch you could have time to talk with 5-7 different groups of people about the most different questions for 1 lunch
- for the speakers, a completely cheating space was created - a separate room where you could prepare / tune in to the report, but also there was an opportunity to talk behind the scenes with other authors of the reports
- preparty for speakers - “small space, communicative IT people, IT topics”
- afterparty for all participants on Monday - “beer, a huge crowd of different IT specialists, IT topics”
My report
This is a long story a year - initially I submitted to TeamLead Conf 2019 Moscow and was on the list of hot substitutes, but in the end I performed on the first day of Saint TeamLead Conf 2019 in the big hall. Over the year, the presentation underwent many changes, and it benefited her, thanks for the help to the program committee coach Roman Poborchy for valuable practical advice, my colleagues Tatyana Smirnova and Alexander Polomodov, as well as a huge number of people who helped and supported me.
Before the trip, the announcement was made:
In the morning I took an hour-long walk around St. Petersburg from the hotel to ARTPLAY SPb to bring myself in a positive mood, it was warm and sunny:
And then there was a hall for many hundreds of people, they sat and stood in a huge hall:
And it was scary. Very scary:
In the end, everything turned out very cool - I am very pleased with the result. And the built-in adrenaline maniac wants even more such reports, but only cooler!
The contents of my report with buns I will discuss in the next article.
Reports
I reviewed all 42 reports (some several times) and, leaving 2 reports from Tinkoff out of scope, I decided to highlight 10 reports that somehow hooked me and / or turned out to be useful. The order of listing does not matter - it was just more convenient for me.
Dmitry Li (Badoo) - Recipes of classy team lead: tools, approaches, practices - Presentation
Dmitry presented the main points that a good TeamLead should pay attention to, and told personal recipes how he performs them.
Maxim Tsepkov (mtsepkov, org) - Planning a project from demonstrations to develop a partnership with a customer - Presentation
Maxim scattered excellent recipes on how to engage the customer in step-by-step product / project development and reduce risks due to this. How to detect completely implicit functions and requirements during the project, and not when it is delivered. And why do you need to do that.
Stanislav Tsyganov (Tutu.ru) - Interviews as a Designer - Presentation
Stas spoke about how their company changed the process of interviewing new employees. He clearly described what results these transformations yielded. A good recipe for an environmentally friendly volumetric mutual interview of the team and the applicant.
Dmitry Semenikhin (Badoo) - Informal relationships in a team: when is good and when is bad - Presentation
Dmitry told about the involvement of employees in the team not only in the work plane, but also in informal relationships. At the beginning there are several criteria for checking how healthy the informal relationships in the team are, and then the recipes for how to build a healthy culture in the team.
Artem Rasskosov (Skyeng) - Frequency diagram in Kanban. How to answer the question “When?” - Presentation
Artem discussed several popular methods for assessing the timing of tasks by the development team and their problem areas. After that, the report discusses in detail the approach with building an SLA grid for different types of tasks, as well as a technique for estimating deadlines using this approach.
Dmitry Igoshin (Booking.com) - Change the architecture, save the command - change the platform in an existing project - Presentation
Dmitry touched upon the topic of changing development technology on the go, relevant to me. Various options for inculcating the new technology to people who own the old for retraining were revealed. Work and non-work schemes are described in detail, and the relative results of changes by key metrics are shown.
Leonid Savchenkov (Yandex.Market) - “We consulted, and I decided.” How to make decisions as a team, and not individually - Presentation
Leonid dedicated the audience to the existing decision-making models in the team. Each model is detailed in the form of pros and cons. And then follows a detailed briefing on how to build effective relationships in a team based on consensus.
Askar Ayupov (Raiffeisenbank) - We need more managers! .. - Presentation
Askar ventured to share his point of view that many companies lack the number and roles of managers to conduct business effectively. The scheme and model proposed in the report is an adapted version of the matrix management structure. Interesting presentation, good arguments.
Sergey Shisholik (Miro) - Installation determines the result - Presentation
Sergey immersed the audience in topics 1-on-1, mindset, personal OKR - a rather interesting presentation through the story, with results, intrigues and investigations. The report will be very useful for small companies that are built around a single product and focus on it at 146%
Evgeny Kot (Wrike) - About Engineering Chauvinism: Disgusting Being a Manager - Presentation
Eugene enchanted the audience with his new masterpiece about the depression of the newly-minted development manager, about Cthulhu, and how to live with it all further. This is more a performance than a report - well, as usual at Kota’s performances. But what is the top without seals?
Total
Saint TeamLead Conf 2019 is a very cool event, especially when you're a speaker. Prepare new and interesting reports together to raise the bar of quality and interesting reports to new heights.
See you at the next events!
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