Techpoint Charlie: Recent Episodes

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Noa Tamir (Data Science Manager) and Raz Shuty (Engineering Manager) share with Alaa Sarhan (IC Fullstack-er) what management is about in general and why an IC (Individual Contributor) is nowadays more than ever empowered to not become a manager for the wrong reasons.

Sneak-peak reasons from the episode:

• Manager role is totally different from a lead IC role
• ICs are paid more than managers
• Missing short reward cycles, a.k.a "It's not about you anymore"
• and more in our lovely conversation ;)

Recommended reads on the topic:

• Charity Majors' 17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager
• Tanya Reilly's Not all engineering leaders are engineering managers

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License 

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Noa Tamir and Alaa Sarhan speak with Rony Lahav about the role of QA and Automation, Why do we need QA people (or why developers shouldn’t be the only testers), Different Test - Component, Integration, System, E2E, Is Manual QA dead?

We also touched on:

• Automation is a software project
• when should testing/QA stop? / what kind of bugs/edges cases are fine to be ignored or not covered?
• QA vs. Product Acceptance. How much do they conflict, and do they complement each other?
• what areas QA covers on top of "functional": performance, accessibility, usability, fault tolerance/recoverability, etc.
• In presence of QA team/role, what should Software Engineers test?
• Tracking data quality: tracking QA, and Functional QA (OSS tool from King https://github.com/king/tratt-api)
• Phases of QA: development, build, release, on-call
• What QA and TE gets that devs, PMs, and DS don’t get and what do we get when there are better collaboration and comms
• Team testing

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License 

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Noa Tamir and Alaa Sarhan speak with Alexandra Paun (@ale_paun) about the Functional Manager hat that she often wears as part of her current job at King.We learn from Alexandra the many intersections this role has with many, if not all functions and departments in the organization, even extending outside of it to negotiate, collaborate and continuously work with external partners and organization, to bring a great business initiative from conception to life.

In this episode we talk about the skill set of a functional manager, the phases a project goes through under their supervision and the challenges and rewarding aspects of this role.

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License 

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A quick episode where Raz Shuty, Noa Tamir, Alaa Sarhan (@TweetingAlaa) are randomly asking themselves a question and trying to see how they feel about it, in 20 minutes:

Have you used any persona framework at work. If so what did you like about it? What was it good for? What’s the downside of using them?Nothing scientific here, more like a quick conversation about it :)

Also Available on:

Spotify, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, TuneIn, PlayerFM

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Noa Tamir and Alaa Sarhan meet with our lovely guest Phil Bennett to chat about Emotions at work

Triggered by an article Phil Bennett wrote called The Crying Game: It’s OK to Cry at Work!Emotions are unavoidable and normal, but you have to understand the emotional Labour you’re putting on other people. That said, sometimes high emotions are the only way people can express what they really feel. Especially in times of frustration.

In the episode:

• Intro to Phil, and his experience from working in agencies
• Wearing your heart on your sleeve and its effect on others
• Perspectives on differences between individual contributors and managers
• Going through personal difficulties while at work
• Emotional labour, empathy as a skill, and fairness
• Support frameworks we know:
  • Step away or take a walk
  • Ask people if they are OK
  • Managers, HR, Trust keepers, Coaches, Psychologists

Also Available on:

Spotify, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, TuneIn, PlayerFM

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It!
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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A quick episode where Raz Shuty, Noa Tamir, Alaa Sarhan (@TweetingAlaa) are randomly asking themselves a question and trying to see how they feel about it, in 20 minutes:

How do you battle the common "too many meetings" problem?

Nothing scientific here, more like a quick conversation about it :)

Also Available on:

Spotify, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, TuneIn, PlayerFM

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Alaa Sarhan (@TweetingAlaa) Fullstack Engineer at Doodle is inviting Armin Bognar Product Advisor and Head of Product at Orderlion and Marc Sandifer Senior Product Manager at Contorion for a conversation to exchange and share their knowledge and experiences around measuring success in product companies; a topic that is or must be near and dear to every Product Manager, Product Designer and pretty much any Individual Contributor in a product team.

• What success do we want to measure?
• How do we shift from output-driven to impact-driven process and culture?
• How can we measure impact of our changes, small or big, operational or strategic?

In this episode, we mentioned:

• ICE Scoring Method as a useful tool for trying to quantify your ideas, which might be even more helpful to do when you can't rely on data to back those ideas with.
• Disney's four keys to Guest Experience as an example of how prioritized goals help teams and individuals act in an aligned and autonomous ways while carrying their day-to-day work.
• OKR framework as one way to align teams around prioritize goals as well as flip the natural inferior way of approaching development which is starting with the idea and later figure out what it is useful for, to starting with the goal and then figure out good ideas that might get us there.

Also Available on:
Spotify, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, TuneIn, PlayerFM

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Raz Shuty, Noa Tamir, and Alaa Sarhan meet to chat about open plan offices, and how working in them makes them feel..

We mention in this episode:

1. The (recent) history of open plan offices
2. Our personal experiences working in open plan offices, and other office plans
3. Cubicles!
4. HBR's "The Truth about Open Plan Offices"
5. Clear glass rooms
6. How are we dealing with the circumstances as individual contributors, and as managers
7. Lots and lots of feelings!

Also Available on:

Spotify, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, TuneIn,PlayerFM

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It!
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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A quick episode where Yael Schweiger, Raz Shuty and Noa Tamir are randomly asking themselves two questions and trying to see how they feel about them:

• Can you be a Manager without being an IC in the role?
• Can managers be friends with the people they manage?

Nothing scientific here, more like a quick conversation about it :)

Also Available on:

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Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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On-Call Engineering: How to do it and smile

• Intro to the topic and Charity Majors
• What is on-call even? And why does it exist?
• Our Experiences with on-call?
  • When did we start? How many years, some stories about our past and why we are talking about it
• How to onboard to on-call?
• Can it be done and actually be positive?
• What causes on-call to be negative then?
  • What are the steps that can be done to improve it?
• What is incident management?

Charity Majors is the CTO of Honeycomb.io, @mipsytipy on Twitter, and blogs at https://charity.wtf/

Links Raz shared with his team:

• A story of being on call | Charity Majors | Monki Gras 2018
• Charity Majors – Observability and the Glorious Future, Iterate 2018

Also Available on:
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Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Yael Schweiger, Raz Shuty and Noa Tamir are meeting again to talk about management, and specifically what makes a good manager, and how makes a bad one...

We mentioned in this episode

1. What is the role of a manager?
   1. What sort of manager are we talking about? Project / People / Function / Strategic / Change Management?
2. Can an inexperienced manager be a good manager?
3. Should it be a full-on move? Can it be a combo IC+M role? Does it scale?
4. How to recognize a good manager
   1. What they do
   2. How you feel
5. How to recognize a bad manager
   1. What they do
   2. How you feel
6. Some stories from our past (good or bad that shaped us as people)

Reading recommendations:

1. https://charity.wtf/2019/09/08/reasons-not-to-be-a-manager/
2. https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/
3. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/300025.The_Ideal_Executive

References:

1. https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897
2. https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/btc-manager-path-camille-fournier
3. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45007872-97-things-every-engineering-manager-should-know
4. https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/4-signs-that-a-boss-has-high-emotional-intelligence.html
5. https://increment.com/teams/how-to-build-a-startup-engineering-team/
6. https://hbr.org/2018/05/managers-cant-be-great-coaches-all-by-themselves

https://www.trainingjournal.com/articles/feature/four-types-dysfunctional-manager

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Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Yael Schweiger Senior Product Owner at Careship, Raz Shuty Director Of Engineering at Delivery Hero and Noa Tamir are talking about what is the role of a data scientist

• What do people usually get wrong about this role?
• How can data scientists help, and who?
• What skills or mindset are important for this role?
• How do you get to it?
• What does it mean to be a junior in this role vs senior/experienced? What are the main big differences you learn along the way?

We mentioned in this episode

• Data Science is about Communication (empathy, humility), not programming or statistics
• A good point to talk about the different DS functions: DS for X vs. DS as X.
• Noa's talk in PyConDE
• Nonviolent communication
• Empathic listening

Also Available on:

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Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Daniel Rüdiger Senior Product Manager atDelivery Hero, Alaa Sarhan Fullstack Engineer at Doodle (yes yes! the doodle you send your friends when you are trying to arrange a movie night at your place) and Raz Shuty Director Of Engineering at Delivery Hero are having an episode without Yael and Noa, and trying to figure out, what is product-driven development? What is this new trend called Product-Developers?

We mentioned in this episode

• What is product-driven development?
  • The development team is involved in finding the best solutions to solve business problems instead of just implementing them
  • Detached from “What” by Product and “How” by Tech
  • Value outcome over output
  • Opposite: Feature Factory(?)
• What are Product Developers?
  • If you Google Product Developer you get mostly non-software development related results
• Why product-driven development?
  • Pros
    • Have many (smart) people solve a problem instead of just one/few
    • Most people more motivated by being involved in “what” is being built
  • Cons
    • Highly specialized people “waste” time on topics they are not expert in
    • Overhead of storytelling, getting everybody involved (?)
• Discussable questions
  • How to handle a high-output software engineer in a product-driven development team?
  • Is product-driven development the evolution of cross-functional teams?
  • What’s the role of a product manager in a team of product-driven developers?
  • If product-driven development focuses on “product output”: What’s your opinion on trying out new technologies (for the sake of trying out new technologies)?
• Alaa's blog posts:
  • I am a Product Developer
  • Product Developers - Draft Definition
  • Product Developer TechStack
  • Product Developers - definition and roles

Also Available on:

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Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Noa Tamir is our awesome new host, and Raz Shuty met remotely to talk about remote work, but also about this specific occasion of remote work with Covid-19...

Trying to understand what is remote work first of all, what are our feelings and experiences and talk about different models (and what it means how it differs from the current reality we are experiencing now)

We mentioned in this episode

Intro:

• What's remote working even?
• What are the benefits?
• What are the downsides?

Our experiences:

• flexible, if-needed, prohibited

Different models of working remotely:

• A remote employee (minimal amount) in an on-premise place
• Partial remote/partial on-prem
• Flexible
• Fully Remote
• Unplanned remote with further complications (kids at home, caring for others, stress, not being prepared)

We mentioned in this episode

• Raz mentioned:
  • My Group’s Remote Working Manifesto
  • Wikimedia Foundation offers full pay for reduced hours
  • Spotify Tribes
• Noa mentioned:
  • Basecamp‘s Update to employees
• Tools:
  • Zoom
  • Google Hangouts
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Slack
  • Snap Camera
  • Mattermost
  • Firebase
  • PyCharm
  • VS Code Live
  • Team Retro
  • Jira
  • TeamViewer
  • Usenet
  • IRC

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Yael Schweiger Senior Product Owner at Careship, Raz Shuty Director Of Engineering at Delivery Hero and our awesome guest Noa Tamir are trying to make sense of the data of data science, what are the different roles? What is the difference between User Research, Market Research, Data Science Researchers, Business Analysts, Business Intelligence, Data Analysts, Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, Data Engineers?

We mentioned in this episode

• User Research, Market Research, Data Science Researchers, Business Analysts, Business Intelligence, Data Analysts, Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, Data Engineers
• Speed, Rigor, Performance
• https://towardsdatascience.com/data-sciences-most-misunderstood-hero-2705da366f40
• Did we “get it right”? What kinds of roles are there in data science
  • “Scientist”
  • “Engineer”
  • https://vas3k.com/blog/machine_learning/

Also Available on:

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Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Anne's reading recommendations:

• Must have -

UX Maturity Model: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-maturity-stages-1-4/

• Nice to have -

The role of a user researcher: https://medium.com/@stonecrops/the-researchers-journey-leveling-up-as-a-user-researcher-a85cd35b53f5

Research Ops community: https://researchops.github.io/www//

Dovetail, my research repository: https://dovetailapp.com/

Our episode today:

• Introduction to the episode and Anne
• Introduction to the role of UX research
  • What exactly that is
  • Why even have one, and not just incorporate research into your role
  • How is it different than doing research as part of another role (designer, product manager...)
• The motivation for doing it
• How does it look like in the day to day
  • For Anne
  • For others
• UX Maturity / How to live a user-centered approach in any organization
• The UX Maturity Model
  “User-centered” is a buzzword your organization uses? The time or an honest self-assessment.
  1. As their UX approach matures, organizations typically progress through the same sequence of stages, from initial hostility to widespread reliance on user research. (NN Group, Nasdaq)
     E.g. scope, purpose, staffing
  2. Cultural topic but also needs a monetary investment
• Creating awareness and exposure hours
  Experience precedes essence - you’ve got to get out there!
  1. “Evangelizing” takes time, building relationships
  2. In the end, you just have to do it and grow into it
  3. UXR dashboard: # people participated, # days since the last contact, % of a team conducting research within last 3 months
  4. The team has its own insights = most beautiful moments for me
• Processes & scaling
  Everybody owns user research.
  1. Empowering teams
  2. ReOps
• Making data actionable:
  Maybe not everybody’s a designer - but everybody contributes to the customer experience.
  1. Tailored to organizational needs, lean & jtbd vs scientific
  2. Research repositories
  3. Journey maps and OKRs
• Educated decisions
  Sometimes there is no right or wrong decision - but it’s always wrong to make an uneducated decision.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-maturity-stages-1-4/

https://uxdesign.cc/the-organizations-design-research-maturity-model-b631471c007c#.kc3ubuh91

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Yael Schweiger Senior Product Owner Careship and Raz Shuty Head of Engineering @Wikimedia DE finally came back from a long summer break and decided to talk about one on ones on episode 11 - talk about how to do them, why they are there and what the effects they have and generally what it means to have good ones and to have "bad" ones...

We mentioned in this episode

• https://www.careship.de/

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Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Yael Schweiger Senior Product Owner Careship and Raz Shuty Head of Engineering @Wikimedia DE are happy to host Erin Jeavons-Fellows Head of Design (Product) @Delivery Hero Germany and they are talking about where from which point should designers be involved in strategy talks and how to improve our connection to users

We mentioned in this episode

• The Design Process: Double Diamond

https://www.buzzsprout.com/258844/1223315-episode-10-what-it-means-for-everyone-to-have-design-and-ux-leading-the-strategy

Also Available on:

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Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Yael Schweiger Product Owner @K.Lab and Raz Shuty Engineering Manager @Wikimedia DE meet again to talk about Processes, how to build them right, what no to do? do overhauls ever work? and why Raz hates them so much :)

During the episode we mentioned future episodes that this talk inspired us to talk about:

• One on Ones
• How to handle career growth
• Good Manager, Bad Manager
• Quick Talk about an in-depth look of the Journey Model
• How to do Lessons Learned Session A.K.A Postmortem (yuck! bad name!)

This was a productive and fun episode, we think it's actually one of our better episodes and our backlog grew after it, so yay!

We mentioned in this episode

• 5 Whys
• Infinite Hows
• The Journey Model
• The Spotify Model
• Contentful Engineering Blog
• Valve Handbook

Also Available on:

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Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Yael Schweiger Product Owner @K.Lab and Raz Shuty Engineering Manager @Wikimedia DE meet again to talk about retrospectives (and why Raz is SO high on them):

We talked about retrospectives, and why they are so good, why value they could bring if they are done right (and of course how to do them "the right way").

We talked about how to create action items and what some other tricks to make you retros productive and effective.

We mentioned in this episode

• How to retrospective
• Three popular ways to run a productive Retrospective

Also Available on:

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Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Tech Debt and how to get your Product Manager on board?

Yael Schweiger Product Owner @K.Lab and Raz Shuty Engineering Manager @Wikimedia DE meet again to talk about tech debt:

We concluded in the episode that tech debt is a normal thing in every place, and no company or org exists without tech-debt.

We mapped types of tech-debts, clarified why and how they happen and discussed strategies of dealing with them + strategies of communication about them

We mentioned in this episode

• The Journey Model
• Cost of Delay
• Martin Fowler - Tech Debt Quadrant

Also Available on:

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Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Super interesting talk with Charles about organisational culture and why should organisations care

Yael Schweiger Product Owner @K.Lab, Raz Shuty Head of Engineering @Wikimedia DE host a guest for the first time! today we meet Charles Ahmadzadeh Co-founder & Engineering 🤖 @bunch.ai to talk about organisational culture, the science of it and how to understand why it's worth paying attention to it.

We mentioned in this episode

bunch.ai's Github repo on culture:

• https://github.com/12grapes/culturewisdom

Quick intro to the Charles O'reilly's model (5min video):

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFDMFbz4DEs

Some more content on culture:

• The topic on HBR: (Harvard Business Review): https://hbr.org/topic/organizational-culture
• Our free library of culture-hacks to influence your culture: https://app.bunch.ai/culture-hacks
• https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/charles-oreilly-finding-corporate-culture-drives-growth
• White paper: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Lists/Events/Attachments/627/Parsing%20organizational%20culture%20-%20Chatman%202-12-14.pdf

Also Available on:

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Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons:

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Quick discussion about interviews and mostly what we look for in people when we interview them.

Yael Schweiger Product Owner @K.Lab and Raz Shuty Engineering Manager @Wikimedia DE meet again to talk about interviews.

We mentioned in this episode

• The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing

Also Available on:

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Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Quick discussion about biases, What they are and why should we care...

Yael Schweiger Product Owner @K.Lab and Raz Shuty Engineering Manager @Wikimedia DE meet again to talk about biases.

Biases: What they are and why should we care...

We mentioned in this episode

• How to Be a Great Manager if You're Shy

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It!
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License 

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Welcome all to our new podcast, we plan to talk about different topics of the day to day tech life from our different perspectives and role.

This episode contains:Yael Schweiger Product Owner @K.Lab and Raz Shuty Engineering Manager @Wikimedia DE meet again to talk about hiring.

• Topic: How to hire right? Processes to support hiring and how to avoid biases?
  • CV Screening
  • Hiring Process
  • Hiring Biases
  • Decision Making Process

Links:

• Value VS Risk when hiring
• Culture Fit or maybe Culture Benefit?
• CV, yeah, yeah! CV!

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It!
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License 

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Welcome all to our new podcast, we plan to talk about different topics of the day to day tech life from our different perspectives and role.

This episode contains:Yael Schweiger Product Owner @K.Lab and Raz Shuty Engineering Manager @Wikimedia DE meet again to talk about refactoring.

• Topic: Refactoring: What it is and what it isn't, and how to factor it in your work
  • What is refactoring, REALLY?
  • What is refactoring to a Product Owner, to an Engineering Manager and common misperception in the industry?
  • How to plan for refactoring (should we plan for it even?)

Links:

• I'm a Product Developer
• Extreme Programming
• (Book) Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
• (Book) Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests
• No.Tarbut (Hebrew development-culture podcast)
• (Book) Marie Kondō: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It!
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

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Welcome all to our new podcast, we plan to talk about different topics of the day to day tech life from our different perspectives and role.

This episode contains:

• A brief intro about us: Yael Schweiger Product Owner and Raz Shuty Engineering Manager
• Topic: Should Engineers write User Stories?
  • Topic 1.1: Who should write the technical tasks?
  • Topic 1.2: Who should write User Stories?

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It!
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License