Tips on building trust using retrospectives
Trust is the most foundational pillar of a high performing team. Your team members need to trust each other that they can be candid about their work, behaviours and outcomes. To build trust in the team, everyone needs to know that you all have the same intentions. Building trust takes...
Master the skill of managing up
There are a few critical skills that you need to master independently of your role or level. One of them is managing up. Especially if you are a manager - your face to face time is probably drastically limited with your boss. How to make the best of this limited...
Ownership explained for Engineers and Managers
Introduction Ability to take ownership is critical for the majority of careers. For me, as a manager, how people handle ownership and with what level of ambiguity is one of the clear distinctions between senior and junior positions. And to explain my understanding of ambiguity - it’s not only...
How to take over a team?
A few months ago I changed business area I work in at Intercom from Messenger and Platform to our Messages product. I started to manage one brand new and one existing and old team. Taking over such team is always a challenge. The cogs are spinning, everyone has formed opinions...
Continue. Stop. Start.
Start - Stop - Continue is a common way to drive your retrospectives or even your growth. At the end of the sprint, you think about what else we should do, what we should stop doing and what worked well and we should continue. At your performance review, you might...
How to set goals for engineers?
Growing your people is the most important task. As a manager, your most important responsibility is to grow your people constantly. First of all, because people wants to grow and build their careers. Everyone has a steeper and more gentle growth curves in their lives, you included. Therefore, remember...
Embrace the stretch
The world today is the most dynamic it has ever been. Information moves in milliseconds, social media platforms grow to hundreds of millions of users in years and fail in the same short period of time. Every day there is a global competitor appearing in your company’s business area that...
Stress doesn't mean workload
Every team from time to time has a period of over-normal workload. This might be a huge project they are running, unplanned increase in customer service requests or, best to have, a huge growth of the business that the team was not prepared for. Almost everyone feels stress when facing...
Usage of process is not success
Processes are important and beneficial. They streamline the workflows, help people make fewer mistakes and bring some degree of comfort - people tend to think that if we have a process, then we already achieved some degree of success. At Intercom, we have a very strong culture of solving the...
Assume good intent
When we start a new job, we start with a blank page, both for us and the company. Over time, we observe good decisions that affect us positively and motivate us to be better. They increase our happiness and strengthen the bond and relationship with the company. On the other...