Living in a world surrounded by products of all shapes and sizes, I used to wonder what went on in the minds of people who built those.

Thankfully, the answer has not been evasive, as my career in business analysis and product management so far has taught me to be one of those people.

There’s no doubt that 2020 was a tumultuous year for everyone and it’s widely acknowledged that government assistance has been a big part of keeping people safe and supporting businesses and individuals financially. At Pragmateam, we’re super proud to have been part of several support initiatives provided by the NSW Government.

We were recently discussing ways to show how we have a successful offshore model with Brazil and I thought there was no better way than the actual people involved talking about their experience: I happen to be originally from Brazil, where I started working for Pragmateam through the partnership with DB and that's where this story 'from the trenches' begins.

Over the past 25 years I have been fortunate to work with many great people at some amazing companies in three countries.  

However, by far my most favourite experiences have come with two small businesses I joined who both had a very specialized focus, supportive ownership and a clear why.  

It is quite clear to everyone now that remote working is not a temporary thing: first, the pandemic itself isn’t going away in a few days; and, second, I don’t believe anyone in our industry will go back to the office 5 days a week when it’s over, so working remote - even just part of the week - is here to stay.

As part of our recruitment process, we currently offer candidates the option of a take-home code exercise and/or doing a pairing session. Even though the code exercise requires a longer time commitment, some candidates choose it because of the flexibility to work offline, timezone challenges or simply to show us their coding skills.

So here is an “open letter to candidates" about what we're looking for when we review their code..

One of Pragmateam's core objectives is that "learning and experimentation is recognised as an integral part of our culture".. We found that people were regularly bringing this objective to life, whether it be experimenting with new techniques, organising a learning lunch, presenting at meetups, all with a positive impact on the rest of the team. But we were lacking a way to naturally yet formally thank, reward and recognise each other.

I’ve grown a bit tired of strategies for ‘digital transformation’ that focus on agile, team structure, customer research, architecture, continuous delivery and ways of working (lots of them quite good advice, btw) but don’t say one word about the strategies to motivate and get people to change. Agile, lean, software engineering and product development practices are the easiest parts to solve but the people aspect, buy-in and ‘stickiness’ of those changes are not as straightforward.

Last week we were honoured to run a workshop at Agile Tour. Our workshop posed the challenge to attendees to go “From post it to prototype in 90 min”. Could we go from problem statement to paper prototype and introduce a product delivery framework, a simulated scenario and a toolkit of techniques to use?

There is a common trend for teams to push ahead with partially completed work, irrespective if it no longer aligns to our goals. It feels counter intuitive to halt this work, but if done in a conscious and informed manner, I encourage teams to have the brave and open conversation about whether they are still aligned to their goals.

We believe it is far more pragmatic to spend time on understanding the real problem and solving for that rather than allowing our bias towards action to take over and risk having to start from scratch - or delivering a bad product

What are your company values? How does your behaviour relate to them on a daily basis? How do you continue to evolve the company values as the company evolves? How do you onboard new team mates into an existing culture and set of values?

Too often teams feel disconnected from their leaders and the company's strategy and vision.

We need to put a focus back on connecting the dancefloor with the balcony.

Last week we held our final Node Girls Sydney meetup for 2017. It has been an amazing year of achievements for the group, so it feels timely that we reflect and share.

At our recent PragmaOffsite we took the time to revisit our 12 month old OKRs. While these OKRs have served us well, we felt it was time to evolve them further, allowing them to reflect our next horizon; balancing the growth of Pragmateam (now across multiple clients, cities and countries), while also nurturing our culture.

Every two months we come together again as a team for our PragmaOffsite. Given our recent growth, now 26 Pragmatists, across 4 clients and 2 cities, the challenge we set ourselves to address at the offsite was:

How do we maintain our culture and close connection to each other while we continue to grow, irrespective of where our team mates are located or which client they are partnering with?

September 10th was Pragmateam’s 3rd Birthday, and as tradition has it, we gathered in Centennial Park with our families to celebrate.

This day marked 3 years since we registered our business name, 3 years since we stepped out of the corporate world and started our own micro world, a world based on the foundations of our values: Pragmatic | Delivery | Outcomes | Empathy | Behaviours.

The “team” in Pragmateam is critical to us and our culture. We are a collective of like-minded practitioners who are all inquisitive, continually looking to experiment and learn. And we acknowledge that working together as a team will get better results for us personally, our clients and their customers.

Last week we experimented with the offsite format, hosting a mini conference. Each Pragmatist invited a PragmaFriend, whether it be someone they are working with at a client or someone they felt close aligned to our values and passions.

Think about your Agile environment. Have you implemented your version of Agile and stopped there, content that you're done? Have you focused on what Agile is actually about? In this blog post I'll share my views on what Agile is, and more importantly, what Agile is not.