Prathima's Miles & Milestones

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Designing products for the long run — on screens and on trails

Signs of a good workplace

  • Choose a company which hates “Jugaad”.
  • Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
  • Hustling and Hacking are very different things.
  • Ensure that ‘Quality’ is a defining characteristic.
  • Production issues occurrences be a once in a blue moon/odd or even sprint scenario.
  • Code reviews should be as a daily ritual.
  • Pair programming should be a weekly affair.
  • Surround yourself with people/colleagues who lift your higher.
  • Great employees can solve problems you did not even know existed.
  • You hire them not to tell them what to do, you hire them so they can tell you what to do.
  • There are two kinds of people in IT — One who preaches “Agile” and one who practices “agile”. Be the latter.
  • Practice a process with developers welcoming the process and follow them religiously. Make sure you measure the outputs before and after the process to earn your value-add from the team.
  • Look for a workplace where the Product vision is crystal clear. Many products fail before developers have written their first line of code. This is not due to lack of talent or ambition; most frequently, due to misguided goals and initiatives.
  • Code optimisations should be an obsessive-compulsive trait.
  • Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use existing libraries and create libraries for your domain-specific projects.
  • Design should be pixel-perfect.
  • Do not accept any meeting invites without an ‘Agenda’ specified.
  • Every task should be metricised and measurable.
  • Look for a company with time crunch rather than cash crunch. They are inter-dependable.
  • Clean code is as important as the clean sheets/laundry in your room.
  • Look for a company which clearly defines the tasks as — “What’s urgent” v/s “What’s important”.
  • Look for a company where you can spot mentors during the initial communication phase.
  • Look for the applause amidst the tough days. ‘Champions of the month’ declaration is my favorite session.
  • Email should always be formatted well, fonts to be perfectly aligned, short and crisp content, and never have a typo.
  • Look for a team that never compromise on the magic of process.
  • Customize the agile practices but do not cut the process.
  • Look for a team who stands by the pledge during the prime directives literally.
  • Programmers are the modern day superheroes. Make sure their words are heard and then share your opinion.
  • Ensure not just the code is chiseled and works well, but it is also foolproof.
  • Contribute to ending the chaos in order to settle things matters.
  • Self-motivated employees eagerness to read the MoM matters.
  • During bug bashing ceremonies, the tone of voice is the first people notice before you read out the bug description.
  • Make sure the sprint deliverables are always moved to production after being tested and approved by clients in UAT.
  • During server downtime, everybody’s thought mind should be “Let’s fix it” attitude matters.
  • Do not hesitate to get to the root-cause-analysis of the problem.
  • Look for a team who doesn’t wait for your instructions.
  • If a release does more harm than good, please ensure you revert it to the previous release checkpoint.
  • Whenever you experiment with a whole new feature, make an internal release to 5% of your user base to monitor them closely and get their feedback before you make a full-fledged public release. This saves us from any unexpected surprises and nightmares!
  • Shit happens. How we get things back to normal matters. Equally important is to investigate how it happened and not who did it. Stay away from the blame game.
  • Make sure that the customers’ do not panic anytime. Give them a sense of comfort your expertise will resolve any unexpected issue. They should believe that they are in safe hands on facing production issues.
  • Every single line of optimised code adds values to your clients and end user. Motivate the team how noble their job is or what’s their value add.
  • After the storm has passed, respect the team’s hard work and overtime availability by giving the employees a day off or gift vouchers.
  • Always have cronjobs for production backups in different machines with timestamps.
  • Ensure that the code is foolproof and can be rolled back to a previous version anytime.
  • Migration scripts, Optimise database scheme, clean the code round the clock.
  • Ensure that the team is able to handle a high volume of ideas to be executed in an agile manner
  • Appreciate your teammates for the efforts during trying situations.
  • Encourage them to work smart rather than working hard.
  • Talk to your team on various 1-to-1 meetings to ensure they find the workplace gives them positive vibes and the daily tasks challenge them.
  • Commit by your actions rather than words on listening to a suggestion to make the difference.
  • Hire those employees who are ready to ease people’s lives with every single line of code.
  • Measure the impact of your process in every phase. Use metrics and integrate with third-party tools who expertise in this arena. If something is not “measure”, you won’t know whether you are improving or stagnating. Eg: Burndown chart for Productivity of teams, Epic burndown for shipment of feature A when compared to Feature B.
  • Make sure the developers look at metrics to track progress rather than tools for micro-management. Build such rapport.
  • Define the success metrics applicable for your product. Eg: No. of Uses and Downloads of an app is important whereas no. of active users on a day-to-day basis is more important.
  • Ensure that developers and QA mingle well.
  • An occasional trip does make a difference to the team bonding levels.
  • Work-life balance is a must. It’s a breather to the employee to increase his productivity.
  • “Overqualified” employees are only overqualified for insecure bosses. For good leaders, they are rock stars who will make everyone in the team look great.
  • Instead of calling them “overqualified” consider calling them “someone who will help us to change course”, “someone who we all can learn from”, “someone who will make a great difference”.
  • Work somewhere where your hard work and loyalty are appreciated and respected.
  • Finding a genuinely good company isn’t always easy.
  • Don’t take your health for granted — no amount of success or money can replace your health.
  • Any employer that does not value work-life balance is not worth working for.
  • Any employer who doesn’t revert even after your follow-up doesn’t deserve you.
  • Patience is a virtue and a strong weapon to unlock talents. A leader who lacks patient should hire a magician.
  • When product teams practice idea scoring for teammates with Yay, Nay, or Soon — it encourages quality discussion and additional insight. The result is happier teams building more loveable products.
  • When someone else’s success is your success, you are a leader.
  • Successful products are built and adopted by customers when a group of committed, focused, and passionate team members play their positions to the best of their abilities.
  • Go where your efforts and loyalty are celebrated, not tolerated.
  • Teamwork makes the dream work. Choose the best boss!

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