Impressions of Teamlead Conf 2018

In early February in Moscow, the Teamlead Conf 2018 conference was held. The event can be said to be significant - it was realized that the problems of your position are fully worthy not only of local meetings or tracks, but also of an independent large conference. We could not miss such an event, and the four of us went from the Plesk office in Novosibirsk straight to the capital to absorb the experience of our colleagues.



There is a tradition in our company: on returning from the conference, to conduct a retrospective trip with participants and interested colleagues. Usually we talk about our impressions as a whole, choose reports that we recommend for viewing, discuss heard ideas and practices that we would like to apply in our company. So we did with TeamLead Conf 2018. It is worth noting that all the reports were at a high level. Almost there were those that we did not recommend for viewing. Probably, the organizers of the conference will make a detailed review of the reports, but here we want to share general impressions about the conference and highlight the presentations that most liked us. We will immediately say that the rest of the reports are at an excellent level (there were almost no those who received the verdict “I do not recommend viewing”). In the end, we decided to select the 3 most liked reports and make their review. The themes should not be repeated, otherwise the choice would have focused on the report “Managing a large distributed team” by Alexey Kataev - it really hurt us all and was quite close in spirit to solving problems.

Management of a large distributed team

A stunning report on the concentration of information: Alexey Kataev covered topics from interviews to building effective communications in a team and the involvement of each engineer in product development, afterwards provided many useful materials that you can take and apply. By the way, some time ago, Alexey slightly reworked his report and put it in the form of an article .



We have 2 development offices in Plesk in Novosibirsk and 1 office in Cologne. Even with such a structure, many tips will be useful to us. For example, how to structure communication in Slack, to inform all involved and not spam half of the company, and also how to make our TechTalk'and more efficient and diverse. I think that the report will be useful for companies that are actively growing, and with the growth of the team they need to maintain the level of awareness of developers and not lose time for constant conversations and distractions.

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In general, it is better to look at this report once (or even several times to review it) than to retell it. We strongly recommend for viewing and use.



Link to the presentation .

Evaluate the developer based on objective data.

I think the organizers had no reason to give the first report of the second day a speech by Sergey Semenov and Alexander Kiselev (the first reports of each day were broadcast simultaneously in both halls).



Self-efficacy is impossible without the use of good tools. Instead of frank PR of their own startup (the company GitLean is just developing the tools for analyzing the activity of developers), the guys tried to talk about which metrics to collect, where to draw data from, how to build on them. Some metrics are quite obvious, and some in combination with each other provide interesting observations.



The report clung primarily to the fact that there were many practical examples. The guys said that they communicated with a large number of companies, CTO, teammates. And you willingly believe them, because you look at the slides and it seems that the interview was taken from you yourself: you also thought about how to add objectivity to the subjective 1: 1 and performance review, also wrote scripts that extract data from git and JIRA, then I tried to analyze, find the correlation and the causes of performance decline or problems.



Of course, they did not forget to mention that metrics is not a panacea and not a search tool for the guilty. First of all, it should be a tool for finding problems in the work of the team. For example, only one person (bus factor) or a feature turned out to be poorly implemented for some area of ​​the code for a long time, because the team morale survey showed very low ratings.



But enough already to spoil. Anyone who has a team of more than two or three people, be sure to look.



Link to the presentation .

1000 and 1 feedback

The final report of the conference was perhaps the most emotionally vivid for the two days of the conference.



As it was already said on another report by Alexander Ziza “Looking for a timlid: long, expensive and no guarantees!” skill to train and develop. This report to Eugenia is about how you can and need to develop the ability to give feedback. Feedback is very important for employees, and it is not only 1: 1 meeting.



To develop some kind of ability, you need to practice and try to use it more often in everyday life. Eugene in his report talks about the organization of a conversation club in the company. This initiative brought positive results in the development of public speaking skills on the one hand, and the skills of providing quality feedback on the other. People regularly trained to give feedback correctly, and Eugene helped them in this process.



The report is recommended to anyone who understands that in the work of a manager or team leader an important part of communication is fidbek, and who are thinking about how to develop the ability to do it on a qualitatively new level.



Link to the presentation .

Results

The conference turned out to be interesting, first of all, thanks to the excellent content. We must pay tribute to the organizers: they clearly managed to gather the right audience and the right speakers.



There were several technical issues on which we think we need to work: the visibility of the screens (the bottom third of the screen was not visible beyond 3-4 rows) and the quality of communication. This can be considered a minor nagging, since they did not affect the overall impression.



This conference definitely wants to be categorized when you return to work and analyze them by building blocks, rethink heard reports, are ready to try new ideas, experiment and improve development processes. The goal “to gain experience and inspiration” is achieved at 100%.