Tobi(as Mende)

From Conflict to Collaboration in Engineering Teams In any team setting, conflicts are inevitable.

How to Measure Developer Experience: The Danger of Metrics Whenever I talk with people about developer experience or developer productivity, one question is never far: How do we measure it?

Developer Experience at Risk: Red Flags for Engineering Leaders Developer Experience is the most important driver behind productivity, engagement, and job satisfaction.

Engineering Strategy: Actionable and Specific Guidance for Growing Engineering Teams (High-Purpose Environments, Part 6) In the previous articles of my high-purpose environments series, we have explored the importance of vision, values, guiding principles,

Engineering Excellence through Mission-Driven Teams (High-Purpose Environments, Part 5) In software engineering and product development, high-purpose environments are vital for driving innovation, creativity, and collaboration.

The Importance of Values and Guiding Principles for Distributed Decision-Making (High-Purpose Environments, Part 4) Values and guiding principles are crucial in enabling distributed decision-making within an organization.

Crafting a Compelling Engineering Vision (High-Purpose Environments, Part 3) Creating a solid engineering vision is essential to building a high-purpose environment.

The Importance of an Engineering Vision (High-Purpose Environments, Part 2) Have you ever seen organizations and teams spinning in circles, having endless discussions, and never seeming able to make progress?

Creating High-Purpose Environments (High-Purpose Environments, Part 1) High-purpose environments are cultural spaces that inspire, motivate, and empower individuals to work toward a common goal.

Managing Technical Debt in Software Development Organizations often accumulate technical debt as the pressure to deliver customer value quickly increases, systems grow, and extending functionality the right way becomes more difficult.

Default-to-Open: A Principle for High-Performance Organizations Sharing, communicating, and persisting knowledge, information, and decisions is a challenge that most companies have.

The Inverse Conway Manoeuvre in Existing Systems – It does not work!

Weekly Kickoff: Reconnect and Kickstart as a Team It’s Monday!

Deep Work and Collaboration in Platform- and Enabling-Teams This is the fourth and last articles of my series about deep work.

Deep Work is a Team Effort This is the third article in my series about deep work.

7 Tips for more Deep Work for Individuals In my last article, I highlighted the importance of deep work to achieve high productivity and quality of work.

The Value of Deep Work for Peak Performance As somebody who juggled various roles and responsibilities as a software engineer, architect and tech lead, I certainly understand the importance of deep work and how difficult it can be to get it when working w…

Happy without hierarchies: Who cares for employee happiness if there are no hierarchies?

Dysfunctional without knowing: 5 signs that your team might have a problem In the last 10+ years, I have worked in and with many teams.

The Benefits of Remote Work for Developer Teams: Increased Productivity and Better Work-Life Balance In today’s fast-paced and constantly changing world, many organisations are rethinking traditional work arrangements and embracing the benefits of remote…

Make three friends with one gift: Why developer experience is key to productivity, engineering excellence and stakeholder satisfaction.

The Importance of Developer Productivity in a Recession When times get rough, companies and investors get more cautious with how they spend and invest their money.

How to do Architecture Mapping Workshops in a Remote Setup Mapping the architecture of the system that you are building in your company, is a worthwhile activity.

Is “Not deploying on Fridays” an outdated practice?

Scratch the Backlog – There is a better way to plan your work Every approach of making work visible has some kind of “Open Column”, “Backlog” or something similar with a more fancy name.

From two manual monolithic deployments a week to 15+ automated deployments a day We did it.

What Developer Experience Engineers can learn from User Experience Engineers While developer experience is a relatively new term, user experience is not.

DRY – DO repeat yourself When I started my career as a software developer and already during university, almost no principle was mentioned as often as the DRY principle: “Do not repeat yourself”

Interaction modes of a developer experience team In my last article, I wrote about how we shaped our developer experience team and why we decided for this team constellation.

Shaping developer experience teams for autonomy Once you have decided, that a developer experience team would provide value to your organisation, the question is, how such a team should be set up, how it should be shaped, and how it should interact with o…

Why a developer experience team can help your company Great developer experience is directly linked to great developer productivity and an important factor for company success.

Why companies should care about great developer experience Companies might fall into the trap to believe that developer experience is a nice-to-have luxury rather than a necessity.

Should we focus on developer experience or developer productivity?

Code ownership conflicts as a signal for structural mismatch In my last article, I explained why I believe that individual code ownership is bad and why weak code ownership on a cross-team level can be highly beneficial.

Code Ownership: Keeping the balance between structure and agility Code ownership is an important topic when it comes to enabling your teams and allowing developers to improve the system while keeping the overhead of changes low.

A platform team for next-level developer experience In this article, I am sharing my experience (and opinions) of how a platform team should be set up to provide great developer experience for other development teams.

Remote can be synchronous, too!

OKRs are NOT guaranteed deliveries Objectives and key results are a great tool for collaborative goal-setting and for aligned on a company-wide direction.

Blameless Post-Mortems: Incidents are a learning opportunity Blameless post-mortems are an effective tool to facilitate learning from failures, to share knowledge and to significantly improve the entire system, including software, infrastructure, and proc…

Bonuses are bad – change my mind Compensation is a difficult topic.

Why teams need slack – not the tool At BRYTER, we were hiring a lot.

Focus Week Case Study: Bringing E2E Tests into the CI Pipeline In my last article, I wrote about focus weeks and how my team is currently doing them at BRYTER.

Focus Weeks: How to collaboratively crack difficult problems with joy Focus weeks are a tool for cracking difficult or complex topics as a team while fostering team collaboration and improving team culture.

There is no system like production: Why you should test in production Shipping software without testing sounds scary.

Adopting Continuous Delivery: More a culture change than automation of processes Continuous delivery, the process of automatically delivering changes of a system without human interaction, is one of the most beneficial practices that software teams can ad…

Crucial developer practices: Decoupling deployments and releases When systems are small and the risk of introducing defects when changing its behaviour is low, these changes can happen during deployment.

Do you have walls in your deployment process?

The value of team programmings In this article, I want to explain, why team programmings across units with developers from many backgrounds and areas of the codebase are extremely valuable for companies and individuals, but often undervalued and depriorit…

Just care less about not being aligned If you work in a company that is aiming for fast growth, being overly aligned will slow you down as the number of stakeholders increases.

Cross-functional units and uni-functional teams Many modern companies put a high emphasis on having multiple functions within one unit or team.