Living Every Week Like It’s Hack Week

Agile and Beyond 2016 - Friday May 6, 2016

Building software is creative work, and to get the best results you have to give your team the room they need to be creative. Modern software teams try to set aside unstructured time in the form of 20% time, free Fridays, or company-wide hack weeks to encourage their employees to experiment and take risks. But most of the time, companies end up with little to show for them. In this session, I’ll discuss how at Civis Analytics, we built something better: an in-house accelerator that gives us hack weeks every week. I’ll take you through our structured program that gives engineers the freedom to take risks, the opportunity to stretch their skills, & the support to launch their projects from inception to production. We’ll show you how to create a similar program for your organization.

Negotiation: Positions and Interests

Civis Analytics Monthly Lightning Talks - Thursday March 24, 2016

Negotiations are everywhere - not just the zero-sum haggling that people, especially introverted engineers, hate and fear. A very brief introduction to recognizing negotiations and guide to moving past parties’ positions to their underlying interests. Based on materials from Getting to Yes and the Harvard Program on Negotiation.