Once in a blue moon or maybe a few times a year, there’s the strategy retreat, the company-wide event, the collaboration day or the cross-functional workshop. The marketing is all about the benefits of getting together, sharing knowledge and collaborating cross functionally. Perhaps that day will be the first time you hear about what’s going on in marketing or sales and how it relates to your projects, or the news about the future company plans. The day comes, the event’s a success, everyone got together and collaborated, exchanged or brainstormed ideas. Tomorrow will be a brave new world! Tomorrow you’ll pick a new ticket and get your head down, and the next day, and the next one, barely talking to anyone to maximize building efficiency. Collaboration sure was fun.

Collaboration doesn’t get solved by a one-off event or workshop. Camaraderie doesn’t appear in a day. The most effective way to improve collaboration and camaraderie is by doing good work together and often.

A basketball team doesn't become a better and more cohesive team by just having one meeting a year when they collaborate. Only by playing, learning, practising and going through challenges together, they can build the reps and know each other. If every member of the team would work alone, looking only for their own interest, or wanting to only play 1-on-1 with their defender, that would only be five different individuals doing their own separate things, not a team.

If there’s one thing that characterizes a real team is that there are shared goals. Everyone rows in the same direction. Unfortunately, even when we think we row in the same direction, more often than not, we aren’t. We might be divided, split by functions, or we might not have any other goal than to produce artefacts—code, UI designs… The designer’s over there with the designers doing designer things, same with the product manager, and we are here doing our own thing. Meanwhile, nobody—or just a few chosen ones—have talked to a customer, learnt anything about them or the business or know why we’re doing what we’re doing. There might be a shared objective, but it's spread across many people and communication borders. Ultimately, we end up rowing in so many directions that cancel each other out or that take us through sinuous routes to some place we didn’t want to go.

Recently, a developer was telling me that the system was unreliable, and that bugs were always appearing in production after every feature. On top of that, no observability. The business needed the features as soon as possible, they were cutting corners left and right to get it done. Speed was of the utmost importance. At least they were doing manual testing to get some confidence, but it wasn’t enough and rework was high. The story continued with them saying that finally the business was letting them do automated testing and was on board with carving some time to improve the system—but not too much.

I’ll bet that while the features were being done at the speed of light, the developers were praised for their heroic efforts and dedication to the project, possibly spending extra hours to meet the—imaginary—deadline. Do you know how I know? Been there, done that.

This is my controversial opinion of the week: you don’t need permission from the business to start testing, or to start the many engineering things you think you need approval for to do a good job. Do you require permission to breathe?

I said that I’ve been there and done that. I know how it feels not to have control of the quality of the work, how it feels to constantly compromise to build fast the next feature, and the next one, and the next after that. Not only that, I was one of those that said “it is what it is” as a coping mechanism, and hoped that at some point the business would realise the value of quality and allow us some time to address technical debt.

A few days after finishing last week’s newsletter on energising work and collaboration, I started to look back at moments in my career when I felt energised and satisfied. This is a list of a few of the things that I came up with:

• Seeing the impact of my work and knowing that my work matters. When a feature is released, I can see if it’s working, if people are using it, whether it’s successful or not.

• Being part of the decision-making process and having my feedback recognised.

• When I had the chance to not just be a coder, cranking up lines of code in a dark cave, only seeing tickets.

• Having skin in the game.

• Talking to users, understanding them, their circumstances, their world, and discovering how we could help them.

• Exploring the problems, ideating and solving things together, as a team.

• Being able to solve problems, not just build stuff.

• When I built something, whether it was an API, a user interface, a library, etc. it was built—and designed—with the people using it at the centre.

• An environment where we feel supported, and our humanity is seen.

• We can do good work and have pride in our work.

• We are treated as responsible adults.

• I can adapt, learn new things, face new challenges and grow.

• I am surrounded by people better than me that I can learn from. People are keen to learn from others.

• When the team cared about and built shared understanding frequently. The use of maps (e.g. user story mapping, event storming, etc.), visual tools and pairing/mobbing was widespread.

• Writing code that models the business flow and logic in a descriptive and well-understood way. People that aren’t developers could understand it, the code uses the language of our business.

• Building things that I can be proud of, instead of having the feeling that I have to compromise and write bad code all the time.

• “It is what it is” is not in our vocabulary.

• When I was able to move fast but always under control, with a safety net. Mistakes weren't scary.

This week I’ve been able to stabilise a bit more my routine and “roll with the punches” when I couldn’t. Part of it has been doing lots of movement snacks (every 45 minutes at least), making sure I go for walks in the middle of the day, that I eat healthy and get enough sleep. Specially, getting enough quality sleep has been a challenge sometimes, but it’s getting better, and I feel better because of it.

In terms of learning, I’m still not back to full speed, but I’ll take what is given. Anki flashcards are my go to these days, they help reinforce the things I learnt in the past and just takes a few minutes a day to do.

I didn’t pay attention when it stopped happening. It is what it is, I thought, but when it occurred, the feeling was like a drug, a rush of energy and satisfaction. I’m talking about collaboration, not “collaboration” but real collaboration, building in community, as a team.

The Product Manager had questions about the feature, we were writing back and forth in the chat. Sensing that the conversation was not going anywhere, we jumped to a call. I shared my screen, and started to show the code that described the business logic we’ve been discussing. Luckily, the code was legible and self-descriptive, anybody could understand that part of the business flow. While we were going over the code, we discovered we weren’t on the same page on small but critical issues. Even thought we were saying similar words, what each of us had in our minds was slightly different. As we compared the code and our ideas, we created a shared understanding and changed the code based on that understanding. We were building together.

On another occasion, I was working on the UI and having the designers close by, I showed them the interface I was working on. It was a short conversation, they gave me some feedback, I got answers to my questions.

Another time, I was working with an exec to update the wording on some pages. Rather than getting a ticket or an email with all the copy changes and me applying them on my own, we sat side by side and I plugged the laptop to a big screen. On my laptop I had the editor, on the big screen I had the app running locally. As I changed the copy, immediate feedback was shown on the big screen, they could see what the app looked like with the updates. You could say that it was a waste of time, they could've sent me the list, so I could do it on my own time. But here’s the magic, there was a list, but the wording from the list changed as they saw the changes “live” and realised that some didn’t feel right. If I had worked solo, the next day I would’ve had to make changes again and maybe get more suggestions. The feedback loop working together was seconds and minutes, working solo would’ve increased the loop to hours or days. Moreover, I was involved in the process, we were co-creating.

Hey! This week’s newsletter is severely delayed, as you can see. While I’ve had some positive improvements, I’m still struggling with getting a stable routine, and sleeping hasn’t been great at times, which has made writing the newsletter a challenge.

Still, when I finally sit down to write, it’s enjoyable and time flies, so I've been trying to write, even if I’m not feeling in the best mood or have the right mindset. Writing sometimes feels like an exercise in synthesising, clarifying, learning and discovering what’s on my mind. Many times, an idea appears clear inside my head, but when put on paper, things change, expand or go sideways.

Anyway, it’s been difficult to write, and while I’m satisfied with having committed to it these past two or three weeks, I need to get a week or two off. Here’s the plan: next week there won’t be a newsletter, and I’ll be back on Friday the 23rd.

Brief thoughts on AI