David Bauer

Leadership Approach

Defining leadership is more complex than I initially thought. To me, leadership means guiding others towards our collective goals within an optimal environment—a responsibility I take seriously. This environment extends beyond the physical workspace to encompass a supportive culture, ensuring everyone has the necessary resources, information, tools, skills, and access to succeed.

Strategies for Growth

In my role, I've leveraged several strategies to foster individual and team growth:

• Individual Development Plans: Tailored plans that have catalyzed personal and professional growth among team members.
• Regular One-on-One Meetings: These sessions help me stay connected with each team member's world, understanding their challenges and aspirations.
• Competency Matrix: This tool has been invaluable in identifying our team's current capabilities and pinpointing areas for development.
• Ongoing Feedback: Focusing on my leadership style, this feedback is crucial for my personal development and effectiveness as a leader. (I ask everytime I have chance for feedback (What to improve)

Feedback and Adaptation

In my leadership approach, feedback is more than just a tool for evaluation—it's the cornerstone of continuous improvement and adaptation. I ensure that every piece of feedback received is transformed into actionable steps. This process is meticulously carried out with a focus on clarity and transparency for all parties involved.

For instance, at the conclusion of each meeting, we don't just part ways with a general sense of what needs to be done. Instead, we draft detailed meeting minutes that include specific action points. These action points are assigned to individuals or teams, complete with deadlines and expected outcomes. This practice not only holds us accountable but also provides a clear roadmap for what needs to be accomplished, ensuring that feedback leads to tangible change. It's a method that reinforces our commitment to growth, adaptation, and the collective pursuit of our goals.

Environmental Innovation

In pursuit of optimizing team performance, I've also been exploring the idea of measuring CO2 levels in our offices. Maintaining optimal CO2 concentrations can significantly enhance cognitive function and overall workplace productivity, aligning with our commitment to a supportive and healthy work environment.

Enhancing Environment

Another approach to fostering a motivating and reflective workspace is by decorating the office with inspirational quotes, such as "How will this help our customers?" These visual reminders encourage continuous reflection and alignment with our core mission, enhancing the collective drive towards customer-centric solutions.

Future Plans

Looking ahead, I'm excited about integrating personal "read me" files to deepen team understanding and collaboration.

Leadership Journey

My leadership journey has predominantly unfolded within an Agile (Scrum) framework, which has underscored the importance of adaptability and continuous improvement in achieving our team's ambitions.

Specific tips

• IDE environment:
  • Set up .editorconfig, to ensure consistent project IDE settings across the team.
  • Use Makefile it's great starting point for developers
• Definition of ready: Criteria that must be met before a task can be considered for development.
  Life hack: Use a checklist to ensure all requirements are met before starting a task.
  • Set Quality what we expect: For how long will be this (app, script) used? Where it will run (cloud, localhost)? How we are going to use it(once in week, 100 people at once)?
  • What must the application meet?
    • Performance: How fast must the application be? How many users must it support?
    • Security: What security measures must be implemented (JWE, SSO, Basic Auth)?
    • Scalability: How many users must the application support?
    • Reliability: How often can the application fail?
    • Usability: How user-friendly must the application be and for whom?
    • Maintainability: How easy must it be to maintain the application?
• Definition of done: Criteria that must be fulfilled to consider a task as completed
• Definition of roles: Specify the expectations for each role or individual in the team.
• Automation: Automate as many processes as possible, such as running tests, building, and deploying, within the CI/CD pipeline. This practice not only streamlines the development workflow but also reduces the risk of human error, ensuring consistent quality and efficiency in software delivery.
  Life hack: Run tests before commit by git hook
• Be Transparent: Share the team's vision, objectives, and timelines. Not only with team, but also with company. To be specific:Announce releases (v2.3.1) and add tech changelog (specific bugfixes, features), add business changelog (what value it brings for customer), share it with company
• Fail fast, learn fast: Mistakes are seen as opportunities for learning. Highlight and celebrate both successes and valuable lessons learned from failures in team meetings.
• Regular Feedback Loops: Establish a regular schedule for performance reviews and feedback sessions. Use tools like 360-degree feedback for more comprehensive insights. Act on the feedback received to improve processes and support. Use specific questions to answer e.g. "What advice would you give that person?"
• Continuous Learning: Encourage continuous learning and professional development. Provide opportunities for team members to attend conferences, workshops, and training sessions. Life hack: Share interesting articles, books, podcasts, and other resources with the team.
• Business: Present challenges, not solutions, at the product discovery meeting. The team will collectively determine strategies to boost client numbers.
  Product owner is the one who represent business, if the product fails, he will be the one who will have to explain it to the C-levels and stakeholders. If the product has technical debt, it's up to the product owner to decide, if it's worth to pay it off.
• Visualize the issue: Discussing feelings or subjective experiences can be time-consuming and sometimes unclear. However, the moment you can visualize these issues through charts or graphs, you gain the ability to understand and address them effectively. This approach is particularly powerful when using tools like Jira for project metrics or Grafana dashboards for real-time data monitoring.