2. building high performance teams
focus on people
NICHOLAS MULDOON • AGILE COACH • TWITTER • @NJM

3. focus on people

4. Here be dragons

5. 1. Impact - Teams are customer focused
2. Quality - Teams deliver quality, minimising waste
3. Flow - Teams deliver iteratively to maximise learning
4. Kaizen - Teams constantly improve their process
high performance teams

6. (sidebar)
scrum is part of the solution
vs
scrum is the solution

7. hire amazing people
unleash productivity
review performance
improving the flock

8. hire amazing people
unleash productivity
review performance
improving the flock

9. roles and ladders

10. competencies

11. example competencies
Collaboration
•Team orientated, helpful and friendly.
Puts the goals of the team ahead of
individual goals. Knows when to ask
for help.
Communication
• Listens to understand. Clear and
concise in speech and writing.
• Treats people with respect.
• Calm and laid back demeanor.
Adaptability
•Understands that we'll need to
conduct many experiments in order to
get it right.
•Understands that failure and learning
are part of the process, works to build
a culture of learning.
Creative Problem Solving
•Ability to build new things and solve existing
problems with incomplete or ambiguous data.
•Pushes past existing constraints and limitations.
Competence and Impact
•Deep technical knowledge and desire for
mastery.
•Delivers astonishing amounts of valuable work
Ownership
•Work collaboratively, act independently. Take
responsibility for their work, solve their own
problems.
•Seek to simplify - “pick up the trash”.
•Measure success by benefit to customers, not
vanity
metrics.

12. (sidebar)
customer focus and collaboration
vs
purely technical candidates

13. hiring process

14. top grading

15. top grading quest ions
• What were you hired to do in this role?
• What accomplishments are you most proud of in this role?
• What were some low points during that job?
• Who were the people you worked with? Specifically:
• What was your boss’s (or team leader’s) name, and how do you spell that?
• What was it like working with him/her?
• What will he / she tell me were your biggest strengths and areas for improvement
when I talk to them?
• How will they rate you on a 1-10 scale?
• Why did you leave that job?

16. hire amazing people
unleash productivity
review performance
improving the flock

17. hire amazing people
unleash productivity
review performance
improving the flock

18. flight school

19. dev prod

20. principles

21. example principle
Iterative, team-based development.
We get small teams together with all the relevant skill sets, build in small
increments, and pivot based on customer feedback. These teams are co-located
and focused on the task at hand, not spread among other priorities.
Teams are “stable”, have a clear charter, ownership, and members share
accountability.
We use light-weight planning techniques to optimize our short term and long
term roadmap, respond to changing customer needs, and align with other
teams.

22. (sidebar)
optimise the whole
vs
optimise individuals

23. methods

24. hire amazing people
unleash productivity
review performance
improving the flock

25. hire amazing people
unleash productivity
review performance
improving the flock

26. 360° review
(individual)

27. objective s ,
key resul ts
( team)

28. (sidebar)
objectives, key results
vs
backlog

29. example OKRs
Objective: Drive industry-leading end
user quality standards
• Resiliency: Reduce top-line failure rate
(client events) from X% to Y% (at
least 15% reduction).
• Resiliency: 50% of traffic served from
XYZ, maintain five 9’s SLA.
• Cost: Reduce XYZ costs in Q1 by
$XXM. Develop process, content &
visibility for measuring savings.
Objective: Build a world class product
and engineering team
• Hiring: Make offers to X SWEs for
Consumer and Platform.
• Agility: Increase the “iterative team-based
development” survey score by
X% (X to X), achieve NPS >60 for
training sessions.
• Training: All people managers attend
at least one learning workshop.

30. pulse survey
(company wide)

31. hire amazing people
unleash productivity
review performance
improving the flock

32. hire amazing people
unleash productivity
review performance
improving the flock

33. women in
engineering

34. (sidebar)
girls who code

35. retrospect ives

36. twitter university

37. example courses
Languages
•Scala Essentials (5 days)
•ScalaCheck Essentials
•Testing Scala Code at Twitter
•Andriod Essentials (5 days)
•Android Performance
•Python Essentials
•Android Accessibility
Agility
•Agile Essentials
•Running Effective Retrospectives
•Effective Backlog Grooming
•Effective User Story Mapping
•Effective Code Reviews
Twitter Technology
•How to Build a Service at Twitter
•Twitter Futures
•Open Sourcing at Twitter
•Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
•Database Essentials
•Finagle Essentials

38. tech talks

39. flocks

40. Languages
•Scala
•Python
•Erlang
•JavaScript
Agility
•Agile Flock
example flocks
Twitter Technology
•Mesos/Aurora
•Manhattan

41. hire amazing people
unleash productivity
review performance
improving the flock

42. hire amazing people
unleash productivity
review performance
improving the flock

43. Remember :
Here be dragons

44. building high performance teams
focus on the people
NICHOLAS MULDOON • AGILE COACH • TWITTER • @NJM