Recent content on Tobi(as Mende)
The 5 Processes Every Business Should Automate First Most businesses I work with know they should automate more. They have heard the promises. They might even have an n8n instance running somewhere with one or two small workflows that someone set up a while ago.
Thoughts on AI, Productivity, and What We Should Do Differently In the last couple of months, I got to use Claude code a lot for software development, and I am at a point with it, where it gives me consistently high-quality results at incredible speed. In 99.5% of all cases, I get the results that I expect/desire. In other areas of my life, (other) AI tools have a drastic influence on my…
Building in Public – Part 3: How We built the Diving Nomads Partner Map This is part three of the Building Diving Nomads in Public series. After sharing how we automated outreach for dive centers and coliving / coworking partners , this chapter is about the thing people actually use – our Partner Map .
At Diving Nomads , we’re building something special for digital nomads who love scuba diving. Our mission is to make it easy for them to find great places to work, live, and dive — without having to choose between beautiful dive spots and solid remote work setups.
Building Diving Nomads in Public: How We Onboard Dive Centers and Automate Memberships with (Almost) No Code TL;DR We’re building a platform for digital nomads with a passion for scuba diving. Our lean, automation-first tech stack allows us to move fast, deliver value early, and maybe inspire other early-stage founders to rethink how they build.
Creating a superior developer experience is key to motivating and streamlining engineering teams, serving as a strategic pillar for business success. Focus areas include optimizing workflow, reducing cognitive load, and establishing efficient feedback loops. As technology grows more complex, achieving these becomes increasingly challenging.
Rethinking Leadership in B2B SaaS: Lessons from Self-Managing Organizations Two months ago, I joined the Corporate Rebels Masterclass – a hands-on exploration of how pioneering companies like Buurtzorg, Haier, Viisi, and others approach leadership, structure, and collaboration. These aren’t companies tinkering at the edges. They’ve built entire systems that challenge our default assumptions about…
With the number of daily decisions increasing significantly over the past ten years, effective decision-making is crucial. Decisions need to be made as fast and as good as possible. This talk focuses on the value of collaborative decision-making, highlighting benefits such as improved problem-solving through diverse perspectives and enhanced commitment from team members. We will explore various…
“You don’t have a delegation problem. You have a clarity and trust problem.” I used to think I was helping my team by staying involved. Answering every question. Checking every detail. In reality, I was slowing everyone down – including myself.
Most software engineering teams operate far below their capabilities. They perform okay, good enough, or average. But what if any team can reach higher productivity, joy, and excellence? In this session, we will discover why most teams do not use their full potential and what every one of us can do to lead our teams toward high performance and engineering excellence.
There’s no shortage of leadership advice out there. Everyone has a framework, a matrix, or a magic quadrant. And honestly? Most of it feels disconnected from the messy, real-world challenges of building a company – especially when your team is growing, priorities are shifting weekly, and you’re just trying to keep your calendar from eating you alive.
Deciding Better: How to Make Faster, Smarter, and More Effective Decisions in Your Organization The quality of your decisions influences the quality of your life. The quality of the decisions in your organization determines your company’s future.
The Leadership Dilemma – When Times Change and Generations Collide Your leadership style is heavily influenced by the leadership you have experienced yourself. The way how you run and build a company is the result of the companies you have worked in, your experiences, and your considerations.
Organizational Change and Leadership — Driving change effectively within organizations Many people believe that you have to be in an official leadership position with official authority and power to lead change in organizations. This is far from the truth. I would even argue that it is easier to drive successful change if you do not have that formal authority. This is because without formal…
Better Alternatives to Performance Reviews Traditional performance reviews often fall short of delivering the value they promise. Even worse: They can have disastrous effects on motivation, engagement, and performance of teams and individuals. I have explored the reasons for this in detail in my last newsletter . In today’s article, I would like to explore what we can do instead to satisfy the…
Performance Reviews Considered Harmful Performance reviews are widely accepted in software companies to provide feedback, justify or object to promotions, and discuss compensation increases. Typically, they occur between an engineering manager and their reports, often cited as a necessary function of management within an organization. They are simply “how the world works.” Big companies do them,…
Many organizations struggle with streamlining the software delivery process, resulting in slower delivery, lower quality, and decreased customer satisfaction. They also face challenges in establishing efficient CD pipelines and implementing cultural changes necessary for successful CD implementation.
Organizational Tension Processing – Driving Change in Self-Organizing Companies Newcomers to self-organization often mistake the lack of a people-hierarchy for complete chaos. The term “flat” can be misleading, as it suggests that self-organizing companies lack any structure. In reality, this is far from the case.
Don’t motivate people Now and then, when working with leaders, I get the question of how they could motivate their people. From their perspective, their people seem not motivated, not driven enough to bring the results they want to see.
How to give outstanding code reviews (if you have to) Most software companies use code reviews to ensure that at least two people check each part of the code base and maintain its quality. Although I prefer pair or team programming over asynchronous code reviews, I recognize that this isn’t always possible. In such cases, asynchronous code reviews are the next best option.
Increase Engineering Productivity by 50% Through Focus and Flow Creating an environment where developers can maintain focus and achieve flow can lead to a 50% increase in productivity, as research suggests . But how do we create such an environment?
Value-Stream-Oriented Kanban Many teams, especially in the startup environment, move away from Scrum and use a leaner Kanban-based approach. This is a good thing. I don’t think Scrum is a suitable framework for modern, fast, agile companies. – Especially not in the SaaS field (the reasoning behind this statement will become another article, eventually).
Things I love and hate about the state of software companies in 2024 Disclaimer: This started as a rant, not meant to be published. But sticking to my “ New Year’s resolution ” to write about what triggers me most, I decided to publish it anyway. I wanted to publish it as a LinkedIn post, but it got too long. So here is the unshortened, unpolished and authentic original version of this document,…
11 Aspects Most Startups Get Wrong About OKRs and How to Fix it Objectives and key results (OKRs) can be a powerful tool. But as with any framework or methodology out there, just applying it as others do will likely not yield the best results. It can even harm your organization.
Self-organizing companies don’t need managers but coaches If you are a manager or consider managing teams and organizations a significant part of your profession, the title will likely cause a feeling of rejection or a strong disagreement. I invite you to read on anyway.
Cutting through the noise – becoming myself again In the last two years, I got tons of advice about how to start my own business, how to find clients, how to market myself, how much to charge, how to position myself, … you name it.
May the LLM be with You – On Planes and German Trains This might be the unofficial seventh part of the “ AI for DevEx ” series. LLM tools are a great help during the entire software development process. But what if we are offline or if data privacy concerns disallow using ChatGPT and similar tools?
LLMs for General Productivity Improvements (AI for DevEx, Part 6) Welcome to part 6 of AI for DevEx . In this last part of the series, I will give some inspiration on how AI, namely LLMs, can help engineers with their everyday tasks.
What AI Tools Mean for Deployment, Operations and Security (AI for DevEx, Part 5) Welcome back to AI for DevEx , Part 5. In the last part, we explored how AI tools can help us to improve our collaboration and communication . Today, we’re focusing on an often ignored aspect of software engineering: the importance of deployment, operation, monitoring, and security for teams that manage their…
How AI Improves Collaboration and Communication (AI for DevEx, Part 4) Welcome to part 4 of AI for DevEx . In this article, we will explore how AI can help us improve how we communicate synchronously and asynchronously, how we collaborate, and how it can even increase the value of documentation.
How Testing and Quality Assurance Change Through AI (AI for DevEx, Part 3) Part 3 of the AI for DevEx series examines testing and quality assurance. It builds on Part 1 , where we saw how AI and Large Language Models can assist in coding. We focused on how AI can generate test cases for unit and integration tests there.
Custom GPTs as a Developer Companion (AI for DevEx, Part 2) Part 2 of “AI for DevEx” focuses on the new GPTs announced by OpenAI on November 6th and how they can enhance the experience for developers.
Writing and Improving Code with AI (AI for DevEx, Part 1) Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay. It’s become a part of our daily lives through ChatGPT, Midjourney, or even the occasional frustrating chatbot. Despite their imperfections and the mix of risks and opportunities they present, AI tools are transforming the way we create, manage, and improve software.
Collaboration for Introverts: The Myth of the solo-working Introvert Almost all the teams I met throughout my career were collaborating too little. Productivity, quality, alignment, and the feeling of belonging rose in every team where we increased the amount of collaboration.
Benefits of Collaboration In my career, I’ve seen many “teams” that mainly collaborate only when the work gets tough or if someone has been stuck for days. In these cases, teamwork is more of an exception than a regular practice. This approach is backward. Collaboration should be the standard way of working, and we should only choose to work independently for good reasons.
How outstanding teams form without team-building exercises Building outstanding and high-performing teams is the dream of every engineering leader. But how do you do it? And how do you do it when people work remotely, and getting everybody to the same place is difficult and costly?
Selling DevEx Initiatives in Purpose vs. Profit-oriented Companies For years, a conversation has been ongoing on naming in the DevEx community (and within myself). Of course. Naming is hard, and why shouldn’t it be any different for this domain?
Why We Need to Stop Measuring (Developer) Productivity — Part 2 This is part two of my article on measuring developer productivity. In part one , we discussed the dangers of measuring productivity in general and why the need for productivity metrics for management and leadership is based on flawed assumptions.
How BRYTER Achieved Increased Developer Experience, Ownership, Product Quality, and Engineering Effectiveness through Continuous Deployments BRYTER, a German LegalTech scale-up, faced challenges with its monolithic deployment process and limited understanding of the deployment process within its engineering teams. Deployments occurred only twice a week and were managed by the QA team, leading to a…
Why We Need to Stop Measuring (Developer) Productivity — Part 1 Leaders are obsessed with productivity metrics. This is at least true for leaders who learned to lead in the last century. The ones that follow a command-and-control or carrots-and-sticks leadership approach. They need to measure each department individually to make the right decisions top-down.
Company Culture determines Product Quality You have probably heard the claim that improving developer experience and company culture will lead to higher product quality and satisfied customers. But is this true? How are company culture and product quality related? Are product quality and customer satisfaction side effects of a great company culture? While it would most likely go too far to call…
Improving Developer Experience, Level 4: Optimizing Feedback Loops: Tools, Tests, and Teamwork Last week , we dove into focus, clarity, and flow. Today, we will delve into the top layer of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (DevEx Edition) . Here, it gets a bit technical. While the three bottom layers are mostly concerned with culture, structures, and processes, the top layer includes technical and…
Improving Developer Experience, Level 3: The Triad of Clarity, Focus, and Flow Last week, we delved deep into “ Belonging, Collaboration, and Communication “. Further up in the Maslow Pyramid of DevEx , we have the factors that affect focus, clarity, and flow. This article will explore how we can improve those factors.
Improving Developer Experience, Level 2: Belonging, Collaboration, and Communication As part of the ongoing series about improving Developer Experience (DevEx), the last article highlighted the significance of psychological safety, stability, and work-life balance.
Improving Developer Experience: Starting with Psychological Safety, Team Stability, and Work-Life Balance As companies strive to foster an environment that promotes creativity, motivation, and productivity, they increasingly recognize the role Developer Experience plays in these efforts.
Measuring Developer Experience – A Balanced Approach Developer Experience is one of the most essential factors for high-performing teams and organizations. Thus, the obvious question is how to measure, assess and understand the status quo within your organization and team.
11 Tips to Prevent Survey Fatigue in Your Organization Surveys are a vital tool to measure and understand the perceived developer experience within a team or organization. People who run surveys often face the challenge of decreasing responses. Survey fatigue can be a huge problem when trying to get meaningful data about the state of the developer experience within an organization.
Ways to Decrease Performance: Daily Standups In this second article of my series, “ Ways to Decrease Performance ”, I will dive into the exciting topic of “daily standups.” Daily standups are an important ritual of many agile teams, which makes them a worthy subject in this series.
Ways to Decrease Performance: Velocity Tracking This is the first article of my series, “ Ways to Decrease Performance ”, which intends to trigger critical reflection on common “Agile” practices, that is, practices that I see many ”agile” teams doing.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — DevEx Edition Do you know how to prioritize your developer experience investments? You might have read about the three dimensions and 25+ factors of developer experience (see below). But what to do about that? — Maslow’s hierarchy of needs gives the answer.