fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
A Small Tech Team Manager’s Playbook — 18 years in making!
By: Kabir, Ko-Bir
Tags: Manager, Small Teams, Management, Todo, Team

I manage a small team that manages an e-commerce infrastructure and software for over a decade. Here are five of my lessons learned that works for us very well. Your mileage may vary!

I don’t have an MBA. Just an entrepreneur at heart who runs a successful e-commerce solution for mid-size enterprises for over a dozen years. This is actually our 18th year in business! As the owner and chief software and solutions architect, I learned to practice the following management techniques.

Shrink the TODO List!

Typical managers like to grow the to-do list for the team in every meeting. I learned that if I help reduce the to-do list for my team, then the morale becomes stronger, and their confidence in my Leadership becomes stronger.

As a manager if I am always reducing people’s TODO list by helping them get things done in a collaborative way, I noticed staff has genuine interest in meeting with me. Why won’t you want to lose an item or two meeting with your boss and not the other way?

Delegate Often

Trust comes from the delegation. Delegate responsibilities and good people will perform them well.

Automate Often

No one likes to do tedious tasks that can be automated. We accept a repeat job no more than three or four times. Then we start thinking about automation, and if possible, we automate as much as possible.

Less chores in life is a life with choice!

Avoid Micromanagement

Smart, skilled people never like to be managed in the first place. Micromanaging smart people is 100% time counterproductive.

Reduce Meetings

Most people dread meetings. You can get most of what you need from others via short phone calls, chat, and emails.

Find Common Connections

Chances are, there are some everyday things that you can identify to talk about and share if you get to know people. This creates personal connections that can grow bonds between people who are professionally maintaining friendly co-worker relationships.

I have managed people who work in a senior engineering role in Medium; I have managed software engineers who ranked high in Association of Computing Machinery's (ACM) contests; I have also managed people who went to state universities as I did. The caliber range varies widely, but I have always been able to get things done and haven’t received a bad review myself on exit interviews. On the contrary, I have maintained good relationships with more the. 70% of my ex-employees on a personal level. There were some bad apples, but that’s expected in life.

A manager can take the most important action to accommodate people’s life events and use adaptive planning vs. hardcore, rigid ones.

Our master plans only amuses the God and none.

I continue to learn how to improve my role as a small team manager through feedback, but most importantly, I care about my fellow humans who share a working relationship with me and my company.
The Personalities You Need to Build Great Teams
By: Fendy Dc
Tags: Teamwork, Entrepreneurship, Work, Life Lessons, Team

The Personalities You Need to Build Great Teams

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

To build a team requires members who have different personalities. If team members consist only of members with driving personalities, then the team will experience internal conflict because everyone feels the most right.

Therefore, a leader must be able to analyze the employee’s personality to find out the strengths and weaknesses. This personality is needed to position employees according to their expertise. That move is a way to build the ideal team.

I worked at the hospital for 9 years, where I often found the team’s performance was not optimal. This is evidenced by not achieving work targets. It makes me think that leaders cannot position employees in the right fields.

Company careers depend on teamwork.

The team works best if its members have complementary roles. There are four personalities of team members that are needed to make the ideal team. This is the composition:

Movers

Followers /Yes man

Opponents

Bystanders

In a company, all members must be involved to carry out roles and responsibilities. After forming four compositions for the ideal team, the task of the members is to understand the weaknesses of colleagues and make strengths as weapons to achieve goals. These two abilities are the keys for a company to be successful. Here are four personalities needed to build the ideal team.
Our Team
By: Editor Of Towards A Fsl Hub
Tags: Our Team, Team

Meet the team in charge of promoting retention among our teachers

Cecile Robertson. My career as an FSL advocate began as a Core French teacher in the TDSB twenty seven years ago. Through the various roles that I have held since this time, I have always believed that all students have the potential to be successful FSL learners.

As a former TDSB consultant, researcher for the Ministry of Education and vice-principal in a French Immersion school, my belief in the relevance of equity and diversity is at the core of how FSL programs should be delivered, developed and sustained.

By engaging in professional dialogues with teachers, families and community organisations, the importance of shared leadership and capacity building are key as we move into spheres of transformation in the context of FSL practice.

My current role as Course Director at the Faculty of Education at York University, Glendon College is an exciting opportunity to continue to look for innovative ways to approach curriculum and beyond. Some of the current work that I am exploring with students focuses on decolonising FSL curriculum as the basis for challenging ways of knowing and being to amplify voices that are often excluded in decision making processes, hiring practices and curriculum design.

My involvement as a researcher in this project allows me to continue to push my way of thinking and to explore and collaborate with FSL teachers and leaders who want to transform practices. This work is extremely important as we look for ways to sustain, nurture and reimagine the possibilities for change and growth in FSL programs in Ontario.
Making Lasting Change
By: Eric Peterson
Tags: Leadership, Change Management, Moving On, Culture, Team

Encouraging our teams to make a change can be easy. Doing it in ways that stick; not so much. Like a new diet or workout routine, their old ways tend to creep back in. 3 steps one can use to create a sustainable change include a compelling vision, purposefully moving towards it, and removing our ability to turn-back.

1. Agree on the vision

Before introducing change that may confuse our people, we need to communicate what we are looking to achieve. This requires them to embrace the proposed future where they see themselves in a better place than today. In the workplace, this means listening to people affected by the change. That is if we expect buy-in and adoption.

Vision is the essential ingredient for successful leadership. ~ Michael Hyatt

2. Start moving towards your destination

We should expect to move from transition to transition without a certain end state. We understand that most change happens incrementally; we learn and adapt along the way. Our perspective may change too, but what doesn’t change is the importance of encouraging and comforting our teams. They should not ever be looking for us because we are walking beside them.

3. Burn the ships

Don’t turn back. Remembering the way we used to live life should not be forgotten. Yet, to live one’s best life, we must take what has past and imagine a better future and move towards it. Our commitment to a hopeful vision strengthens the teams’ resolve.

Responding to adversity with positivity allows us to bring more generosity and empathy into the world.

Along the way, there will be successes, challenges, and opportunities. Taking advantage of every chance to learn, grow, and appreciate every step along the way can make us more generous and empathetic.
Our Team
By: Paul Charles Owe
Tags: About Us, Team

We are a community of like-minded learners building an eco-system for FSL teachers, students, administrators and researchers.

Dominique Scheffel-Dunand, Professor in Linguistics in French Studies at York University. I enjoy working on challenges bilingual education and societies face locally and around the world. The many inspiring colleagues who shaped my research informed my teaching and scholarly engagement and ensured I strongly advocate for the creation of linguistic, cultural and educational tools that give voice to marginalized communities. My research in psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, conversations, media and language systems (natural, artistic and computational) shaped my later work on critical pedagogies with a focus on student-centred learning and open pedagogy.

Investigating the critical role of suspending one’s judgment to embrace intercultural dialogues across communities, societies and nations has inspired me to launch Globally Networked Learning at York. Measuring the impact of computation and digitality on education in this project encouraged me to co-lead the French as Second Language Hub ( FSL Hub/Pôle FLS) at Glendon, York University. The aim of the Hub is to mobilize, accelerate and engage various stakeholders to transforming the field of FSL with a focus on equity accessibility and inclusion. As a pan-canadian collaborative endeavour I am thrilled to join many in the creation of a learning space crafted to give support and confidence to learners acquiring a second or third language to become a bilingual or plurilingual mind with creative and critical points of view.
4 Team-Bonding Activities For the Holiday Season
By: Sydney Nguyen
Tags: Holidays, Activity, Christmas, Online, Team

Spending time with co-workers might feel a little bit different this holiday season with everything being virtual. However, that does not mean you won’t be able to create fun virtual team bonding activities with your team. Here are a few ideas to help you celebrate the holiday season with your team:

Send Holiday Gift Boxes

If you still want to send a meaningful, but tangible gift then crafting holiday gift boxes for your coworkers is a simple and fun gift to give. You can either make individual holiday gift boxes or assign teammates to one another “Secret Santa” style. To fill the boxes, you can personalize them to the individual and add some holiday essentials like a hot cocoa kit, festive ornaments, holiday themed PJs, or fuzzy socks.

2. Create a Virtual Holiday Scavenger Hunt

If you want to ignite some friendly co-worker competition, you can plan out your own virtual holiday scavenger hunt. Start by creating a checklist of tasks to complete; they can be anything from take a picture with your favorite ornament on the Christmas tree to recording yourself singing a holiday carol. Divide your team into small groups to compete in the scavenger hunt. For each task, have each group compete to finish the task first, and award the fastest group with a point. The winner will be the group that earns the most points after all the tasks are completed

3. Host a Holiday Party Using Glimpse

If you want to host an engaging holiday party that helps coworkers get to know each other better, you can set up a Glimpse event in less than 10 minutes. Glimpse is a platform that rotates people through one-on-one, time boxed calls with fun icebreakers, games, and a photobooth. To help you celebrate the holidays, Glimpse has holiday-themed icebreaker questions and photo booth frames.

4. Facilitate a Virtual Card Exchange

If you want to share your appreciation for your team, you could host a virtual card exchange. Based on personal preference, you could write handwritten letters and mail them out or go onto Canva and put together a festive holiday-themed card. It’s a great way to get into the holiday season by appreciating the people you have in your life this holiday season.
Meet Alex Dawson, Experience Designer at Sainsbury’s
By: Iain Heath
Tags: User Experience Designer, Team, User Experience, Sainsburys Xd

Meet Alex Dawson, Experience Designer at Sainsbury’s

Alex Dawson, XD Designer

Can you tell us a bit about what you do?

I get asked this all the time by friends and family. The simplest explanation I’ve given has been to my then 4-year-old daughter.

“I make pictures of things and ask people if they like them, then keep trying to make those pictures even better”.

Happily, the reality is a little more complicated working across the entire UX spectrum. Even as a recent addition to the business, in my first 11 weeks, I’ve worked on everything between discovery research to developer handoff and more.

My role sits across the buy and checkout experiences for Sainsbury’s family of brands. My starting focus has been working on Argos, which has been a little surreal at times. I’ve still got childhood memories of flicking through the catalogue circling things for Christmas and birthdays. So to be collaborating with Product & Engineering teams and assisting with shipping a new pre-pay Argos customer journey has been great to work on in such a short space of time.

I’m excited to be collaborating with talented people on the future experience customers will receive when shopping online with Argos.
Have you met Adam?. In this week’s edition of “meet the…
By: Shyra Craig
Tags: Digital Currency, Bitcoin, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Team

Not only are we a mighty startup but we have a fearless leader. In this week’s edition of “meet the team” we like to introduce to you to Bitcoin Well founder and CEO, Adam O’Brien. In 2013, Adam bought his first Bitcoin, and after seeing the growth potential within the space, he purchased and installed Bitcoin ATMs at strategic locations across Canada. He is a leading advocate for education, consumer protection and the decentralization of financial services. His true passion is to bring Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to the mainstream making them easy, approachable and accessible for all. He serves as Co-chair of the Fintech Committee for the Canadian Blockchain Consortium, Canada’s largest non-profit network of blockchain companies and influencers. He can also be found appearing regularly on podcasts, youtube and the radio, providing education on the benefits of Bitcoin.

He dedicates his time as an active advocate for the homeless community here in #YEG and when he is not at the Bitcoin Well headquarters you can find him at home spending time with wife and three children, building skating rinks in the backyard, golfing and zooming around in his Telsa.

Tune in weekly as we dive into the amazing team that makes up Bitcoin Well.
Daniel Karsberg promoted to Partner, Irene Ardenstedt to CFO and Linda Höglund to join as…
By: Jacob Key
Tags: Partners, Team, VC, Promotion

Daniel Karsberg promoted to Partner, Irene Ardenstedt to CFO and Linda Höglund to join as non-executive member and partner in the Investment Committee

Daniel Karsberg, Partner, and Irene Ardenstedt, CFO at Luminar Ventures

The first three years of our journey have been fun and eventful. With a small team we have managed to become Sweden’s most active VC-firm, met thousands of inspiring entrepreneurs and backed almost 30 teams.

During these years we also had the chance to develop as a team and I believe our experience has made us strong and well-positioned to make Luminar an even stronger force in the Nordic ecosystem. That said, Magnus and I have the pleasure of promoting a few team members, who have truly contributed to our vision to enable Nordic entrepreneurs to build new, high growth companies ready to enter the global scene.

We are delighted to promote Daniel Karsberg to Partner at Luminar. He joined us in 2017, when the team consisted of a few people huddled together at SUP46 in Stockholm, ironing out the details of Luminar as we approached our first closing. Daniel has the ability to quickly build rapport with founders by rapidly grasping concepts and articulating strategic ideas and challenges that immediately adds value, regardless if we choose to invest or not. He has become an appreciated advisor to our portfolio companies and has led several investments in e.g. Mindler, Turbotic, Albacross and Petbuddy Group.

Next up, we are thrilled to promote Irene Ardenstedt to CFO. She joined Luminar earlier in 2020 as Fund Controller, and has since very rapidly learned the ins and outs of running a venture capital fund. Irene has prior to Luminar worked for several years at Deloitte and has proven in only a few months that she has what it takes to lead Luminar’s fund management backed by the rest of the team.

Congrats to both Daniel and Irene, well deserved!

At the same time Linda Höglund will join our investment committee as a non-executive member where she will keep bringing her valuable experience to us and in particular act as a sounding board prior to our investment decisions. Going forward, Linda will move on to an operational role at Klarna as COO starting in March 2021. Linda is a great friend, colleague and a very strong operator, and although we are saddened by not having her aboard our operational team moving forward, we look forward to continuing our work together in the investment committee.

It’s busy days at Luminar and we are looking to expand the team even further, since we are seeing so many fantastic teams across the Nordic ecosystem. So stay tuned!

Best, Jacob Key General Partner Luminar Ventures
Pelajaran Untuk Founders dan Investor Dalam Serial K-Drama “Start-Up”
By: Fundex Indonesia
Tags: Investors, Startup, Startup Founders, Kdrama, Team

An Equity Crowdfunding Platform from Indonesia focussed on helping Startup between seed invest and series funding. Expand your business and earn your profit
Leading Teams Thru a Failure
By: Eric Peterson
Tags: Leadership, Software Development, Teamwork, Agile, Team

Our responsibility to our team during times of failure

How we respond to our teams during these times will tell us how we are doing as leaders. Here are 3 responsibilities we have to do when the team is experiencing the sting of a setback.

1. Take care of the wound

As leaders, people are our primary concern. We must engage them on their terms by giving them our eyes, ears, and our hearts before providing instruction or coaching. Doing this will help reduce the sting.

2. Provide encouragement

Once the team mends, they realize failure is not fatal. We then can begin helping them explore the positive aspects of what the team experienced and look to apply these learnings to new circumstances.

3. Keep going

The work doesn’t stop nor do challenges. As leaders, if we successfully help our people regain their balance after a stumble, we will have cultivated a more capable team.
Introducing Koinstrap
By: Aniekwena Onyeka
Tags: Nigeria, Africa, Engineering, Product, Team

Access to Cryptos Made Easy

In Africa, many people can attest to having experienced certain transaction restrictions when using international cross-border payments platforms. People had to resort to alternative platforms that charged as high as 10% transaction fees to use their platforms.

With the advent of Cryptocurrencies, it became natural for cross border transfers to happen between peers without neck cutting transaction fees attached. But new challenges emerged. Peer to peer exchange of cryptocurrency involved a lot of trust between both parties. With time, this trust was put to test because shady individuals began taking advantage of it. This led to people losing or getting scammed of their funds. Also, most people who were interested in cross-border transfers and payments still didn’t have access to platforms that would ease the purchase of these cryptocurrencies. All these made crypto exchanges the avenue of choice to overcome these challenges.

Crypto exchanges enabled their users to buy and sell their crypto without worrying about trusting somebody on the opposite side of the trade. While these efforts were laudable, users still experienced some challenges. These challenges include but not limited to:
Foodie Gift Guide for Teams
By: Marwa Khalil
Tags: Drink, Food, Gift Guide, Christmas, Team

Gifts for the whole team can often be a little difficult and with December here, it might have crossed your mind. With many companies going remote, what better way to surprise your team and show a little love than the gift of food. Here is a list of delicious ideas to treat your team to, all under £30, yes even the hampers.

Baking + DIY Kits

Drinks

Hampers
Four Key Benefits of Teamwork in Workplace
Tags: Groups, Teamwork, Workplace Culture, Team Collaboration, Team

Human beings are social creatures, in which we need to interact socially to one to each other. Human interaction is important as it provides us with a vast amount of information necessary to carry out daily activities. Human interaction defines as a dynamic, changing sequence of actions between individuals or groups.

What is Teamwork?

One of human interaction type is teamwork. Teamwork is the combined effort that a team willingly contributes to achieving a common goal. The concept can be applied in any context where a group of independent individuals choose to trust each other and work together by sharing their individual skills.

These days, teamwork has become important towards people (professionals) on their workplace because it can enhance their work quality. Furthermore, there are some benefits of teamwork in workplace, namely:

Bring up new ideas

Teamwork among a diverse group of people will almost always reveal new, fresh ideas. And those new ideas are invaluable in today’s competitive business environment.

Improve efficiency

Teamwork can improve efficiency. That can lead to better productivity, reduced costs, greater profitability, and many other benefits.

Foster innovation

In this disruptive era, team is important to help produce more innovation than individuals, because they took up from multiple perspectives, skillsets, and experiences all at once which lead to be faster.

Makes a strong bond relationship

This point means that when employees work together and succeed as a team, they form bonds that can turn into trust and friendship, in which important in workplace or business.

Conclusion

To summarize, in this dynamic world of business, people must be able to build trust, which can be do through good human interaction, namely teamwork. Therefore, it will create trust which can lead to a good relationship in business that can have a positive impact to the business growth in the future.

Check Multimatics Strategy to keep updated with our latest articles

Reference

Editorial Team (Accessed in 2020, November 16). 10 Reasons Why Teamwork At The Office Is Important. Sling blog. https://getsling.com/blog/importance-of-teamwork/
Que tu primer trabajo sea en una Startup
By: Fabian Collazo
Tags: Where To Work, New Job, Starups, Team Collaboration, Team

Specialist developing business model worldwide through research, delivering the best solution focused on a main problem.
The Importance of Small Wins
By: Aulia Amin
Tags: Culture, Telkomsel, Team

The year is not ended yet, but I would like to share a piece of year-end reflection.

I took an inspiration from SpaceX on the importance of small wins. Here is why.

Many of us probably know SpaceX for the founder, Elon Musk. We also probably heard that recently SpaceX had been successfully providing a private-commercial passenger shuttle service between Earth and the International Space Station for NASA. And soon they are going to deliver cargo as well. Probably less known to us is that SpaceX also plans to provide Ridesharing service to Low Earth Orbit and even between cities. They claim that their Starship will be able to shorten travel time between London and New York to just 29 minutes, compared with almost 8 hours using a commercial airline.

So, is it ok to say that they are the “Uber” of the space? Well, not really.

SpaceX’s mission, as stated on their website, is “Making Humanity Multiplanetary”. This is the “big-win”. Such a simple and profound mission statement. Especially if we realize that humanity doesn’t make much progress in terms of distance traveled since the 70’s.

So, why they are now doing shuttle service?

The reason is because they need to do this “shuttle service use-case” to fund their company. At one time, Elon almost gave up either Tesla or SpaceX to keep the other survive. This “small-win” use-case gives breathing space for SpaceX. At the same time, this use-case also provides a playground to develop technology for the “big-win”, such as the game-changing rocket reusability technology.

Reflect to MSIGHT, we also have mission statements. As I mentioned in the Fintech Talks webinar last week, one of our mission is to help provides equal chances to access financial services for our customers.

MSIGHT’s Mission Statement on Financial Inclusion

But we were a very small unit back then, with a relatively unknown business. When I was joining this team, we had a difficult time getting 250K USD in annual revenue. At that time, I think only a handful of people in the entire organization know what a telco credit score is, let alone how to build it and bring it to the market.

So, we had to look for opportunities -the small wins-, how to gradually build business traction towards the end goal. At the same time nurture stakeholders’ confidence to invest in our use cases. And simultaneously build our capabilities, test our hypotheses and assets that can be useful for the “big-win”.

We have team members working on the small-wins, the opportunistic use-cases, that provide the lifeline of this unit. Some other team members working on the long-term project. All are important, one part cannot sustain without the other.

We are not a 250K USD startup anymore, we also have quite a lot of products compared with 6 years ago. We built a strong foundation this year, together with our friends in the IT department. Certainly, we gain traction, but we are not there yet. Keep patience, persistence, and perseverance. Conquer the small wins, take a detour if necessary, but don’t lose sight of the bigger mission.
Saying Goodbye to Talent
By: Jon Santee
Tags: Leadership, Personal Development, Team Building, Growth, Team

You have a rock-star team. Everyone works together, everyone communicates, everyone works to their strengths and asks for help in areas of less experience and skill. This is a team where you know you can hand out assignments, ensure they have the resources needed, and stay out of their way because it will get done. If help is required, they will come to you early, before it is a problem.

You want this team to stay together forever, right?

No. Not if you are doing your job as not only a manager, but as a mentor and leader.

(OK, OK, you honestly probably do a little, but stick with me.)

Top talent deserves rewards and with today’s world that reward wanted is often a new opportunity, not just extra dollars in the bank account.

(Those are nice as well, no one will say no to them.)

If you want to retain that top talent for your company, prevent that skill, teamwork, and knowledge from walking out the door, you simply must train them to grow beyond whatever box your team resides. Maybe it is managing their own team. Maybe it is migrating to a team with a new skill set challenge. Maybe is it leadership of a new team spun up to meet a new business challenge. Maybe it is YOUR seat as you look to do the same.

I’ve watched many of my best team members take advantage of each of these paths. Each time I’ve felt much like a proud parent watching their child score that goal, nail that dance move, or hit that high note.

Holding tight to your good talent, restricting them from growth and opportunity, that often in today’s professional world is what leads to the quickest loss of those very people. It is selfish and the younger generation especially sees through that selfishness without hesitation.

Help them grow, mentor them in how to progress their career, give them a path beyond you and your team. Give them growth and overall you’ll work together far longer than taking the alternative path. Even if they take that knowledge and do leave, it will likely be an opportunity you are proud to see them take, they will leave on good terms, and you’ll have a peer you can call on for years to come.

Thoughts?
NovaStar — Base Functionality Complete
By: Dylan Murayama
Tags: Unity, Teamwork, Programming, Development, Team

Day 32–12/07/20

Today, we spent pretty much the entire day meeting with each other. It was a lot of meeting time, but definitely well worth it going forward. We cleaned up a lot of our scripts and assets by organizing them into appropriate folders. This was a bit time consuming, but I think it has taught everyone to try to think of organization ahead of time, as it can save a lot of time down the road and also a lot of headaches. Moving scripts and assets around can be a little bit of a process as you need to go back and check everything to make sure everything is attached in the proper position.

After our organization, we then brainstormed our next phase or sprint for our project, Phase 2.0. In the google sheet above you can see our task breakdown for this next phase. We also decided to create an abstract class as the base for all of our enemies. We realized that the abstract class needed to be done asap, and so immediately after we brainstormed our next run of tasks, we scripted out the abstract class together.

As you can see, our abstract class is a very barebones skeleton of an enemy. It has all the base functions you would find on most enemies in any game. Movement, Weapon Fire, Damage taken, etc. We decided to do damage a little differently than I am used to. Instead of putting the collision detection on the enemy, we decided to put it on the weapons since Kurt and Mar had already scripted the damage functions onto the weapon. So to allow this, we created a Damage function that we can call in the weapon script to communicate with the enemy how much damage was taken. And actually, there was one weapon we used collision detection for on the enemy, the charged laser beam.

After our abstract class was complete and we were all satisfied we then moved on to our favorite topic, gitHub. With our initial phase now finished, it was time to push a new baseline to the upstream. Around we went, one-by-one pulling from the upstream to our local dev branch, merging with our latest feature branch, and then pushing back to the upstream dev branch. So as of right now, we all have the latest baseline version of our program on our computers.

Other than all I have mentioned, not a whole lot of work done on the project. But I think today was very important for all of us from a growth perspective. I think working through our next round of goals and organizing everything is going to pay off down the road. Hopefully, with our goals laid out clearly, we will all be able to progress quickly in the next day or two.
Developer- Nikolai Muhhin
Tags: Funderbeam, Funderbeamers, Team

Developer- Nikolai Muhhin

“Compare Yourself to Who You Were Yesterday, Not to Who Someone Else is Today” Jordan B. Peterson

A very applicable favourite quote for our newest Developer at Funderbeam. Throughout his life, Nikolai has chased what he finds excitement and passion in. Be that making games with friends as a child or picking up Latino Bachata as an adult, he is driven from within.

“Very smart. Loyal. Deep in his soul and besides everything, Nikolai loves exceptionally good bubble drinks. The newest addition to our super strong engineering team and obviously this team is not letting the quality drop” Kaidi Ruusalepp, founder and CEO.

Joining Funderbeam from Microsoft in early 2020, Nikolai joined at a tumultuous time in everyone’s work life and was quickly tested.

“Nikolai quickly settled into the company and our technology, and in just a few months, the first change he wrote became available to users, and by the beginning of the summer we came up with the Market Alerts solution, where Nikolai was the main developer. He is extremely fast at getting deep into things.” Taivo Tender, CTO.

For those unfamiliar with Taivo’s sunny disposition or the typical Estonian developer, these are some of the highest words of praise. Considering his ability to take to remote work while catching up to speed with the rest of the team, Nikolai has more than earned this appreciation.

However, when we asked him directly, he humbly commented that “I hope my contribution will be felt here soon”. This humility and desire to drive the team forward is something other Funderbeamers love about Nikolai.

“He made a good impression already at our very first meeting, and this impression has only grown positively over the time. As a passionate developer, he really cares what he does.” Viljar Poopuu, Senior Developer

Outside of work, Nikolai let’s the diversity of his passions run wild!

Sailing? Doing it. Cooking? Loves it. Kūdō? He’s got a few belts!

He’s a versatile man about town and loves throwing himself into new hobbies and challenges. When he isn’t conquering the Greek and Croatian seas, Nikolai has an (ever increasing) stack of books he can’t wait to lose himself into.

Funderbeam is grateful to have welcomed a colleague excited to continue to grow himself and the team around him. Much like some of our other artisans, you may not notice his signature on the code around the website, but he has quickly become an integral part of the team. Both professionally and culturally.

A book to read or a blog or podcast to follow?https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life/
Forming an A-Team
By: Navaneethkrishnan Nambiar
Tags: Teamwork, Culture, College, Students, Team

A Driven Team

What is it with leadership that it’s a buzzword now-a-days. Everybody wants to be leader. But can a team really thrive then? Leadership is an essential trait; no two-ways about it. But being a follower is often overlooked.

I remember having a candid conversation with an alum once about placements and what really goes on. He confided that he had the same nagging question and approached his Hiring Manager. He found out that landed the role in a globally diversified conglomerate from amidst all the other stellar profiles that had applied that year — solely because he was willing to be a follower while everybody else went on and on about what stellar leaders they were.

College offered me the opportunity to play diverse roles amidst the various collegiate bodies on campus — donning various hats. And right from selecting the Committees and Forums; to driving them a year later — the choices were tough. Each of these represented a very different team culture and working style. Some that I really enjoyed and thrived in and some that weren’t the best fit. But what eventually happened — was that I got to learn about myself better. What kind of a person am I? What kind of a culture do I fit into and why?

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast is often quoted in a Bschool. But its probably these organizations that taught me why more than any classroom lecture ever could.

I’ve often tried to decode how do I create the right team ? What makes a team tick? Some blaze to high heavens and leave their mark — while others fetter down and don’t succeed despite often having access to the very same resources and probably equally talented folks too. And honestly I haven’t found my answer yet. I keep searching and hope that I will.

But the recruitment process for the junior batch — right from conducting interviews to deciding on the very team that would drive the process the next year was filled with immense learning. I had the privilege to be on the Interview panel for multiple student bodies — each with very different skill requisites, team culture, etc. It’s an understatement on how much you can learn during the interview. An interview to me has always been a two-way street; I’m assessing the candidate and I want them to assess me and the committee or forum I represent and decide for themselves whether they see themselves within.

Post the interviews — selecting the right candidate to ensure they’re a good fit culturally and possess the essential skillsets to be the right candidates was challenging and critical. And ensuring they’d all get along well with another — not just courteous pleasantries; but people who’d grow to be more than teammates — to best buddies was what we strived to do. Only time will tell — how successful or not we were. But I sure do look forward to it.
Chi siamo
By: Domenico Monaco
Tags: Digitalizzazione, Chi Siamo, Experience, Team, Web Development

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Birlikte Başarmak
By: İlker Güneş
Tags: Success, Team

in In Bitcoin We Trust
21 Days Casino
By: Felicia Liu
Tags: Innovation, Startup, Casino, 21 Days, Team

21 Days Casino Contest (Credit: Kulang Hong)

Legit my passion and motivation everyday, never knew project would be this much fun！！！ This must be how it feels to initiate a start, and honestly the reason why I want to launch one in the future.

It’s really amazing to see how a group of people start from 0 to 1 and build from scratch to a model. The entire process returns such a great sense of achievement and fulfillment, as one can see the model grows day by day and be excited about its endless potential.

📌 What is 21 Days Casino

Founded by a group of 8 NTU students who took the course 【Introduction to Leadership】this semester, we are committed to help NTU students to build habits in fun and innovative ways, thereby becoming the ideal version of themselves.

According to the research from Maxwell Maltz in 1950, 21-days is the minimum requirement for cultivating a habit, therefore we incorporated this reference in the title.

For more information, visit 21 Days Casino Facebook page.

📌 Why did we start 21 Days Casino

Prior to public exposure, the team conducted a survey on NTU billboard to collect opinions on habit formation and 61 NTU students helped fill out. We came to realize that busy life is one crucial factor that hinders habit formation, therefore we incorporated ‘Casino’ and ‘Bet’ elements into the project to increase incentive for the contestants to complete 21 days of habit formation.

📌 What is the value of 21 Days Casino

Habit formation is a very very broad and difficult subject that involves multidimensions and has long been discussed yet without really effective methods being proposed. 21 Days Casino, frankly, will not be the solution to habit formation as it requires one’s inner transformation that acknowledges the values and benefits of forming habits, thereby initiating the habit formation cycle on one’s own will. However, 21 Days Casino intents to open up the entrance and opportunity for more to get to know and try out habit formation, taking their first step onto this long journey, seeing the fruits and benefits of forming habits, therefore develops interest and motivation to attempt such journey in the future.

For me, 21 Days Casino is a liberation and exhilarating experience. Not only is it so much fun and has great potential yet to be discovered, I am truly grateful for my wonderful team who really gave me the one-and-only startup experience.

This time, the bet is not about probability, it’s about yourself.

Can’t wait for the contest to begin tomorrow ❤️
Dude, this is amazing. We’ve started using teams at work and this will be great to share.
By: Ryan Dejonghe
Tags: Teams, Sharepoint, Microsoft

Dude, this is amazing. We’ve started using teams at work and this will be great to share.

Is there a way to share files from SharePoint on teams, including giving everyone permission?
My journey of Creativity!
By: Yug Sarin
Tags: Journey, Experience, Design, Creativity, Team

I count myself lucky to be one of those people who really enjoy doing what they do. Design, as a whole, has been an integral part of my life and it has defined the way I do and see things.

And since I never get tired doing what I do, I do it the best way I can.

My journey with ByteDance started in the fall of 2018 and I must say my experience here has been the most unique. The reason I joined bytedance was that I wanted to be part of the global expansion of an exciting business. As the first member of the design team in India, it has been an unparalleled experience witnessing the growth of the business and development of the organisation.

The uniqueness of Helo and the heart of what I do

At Helo, I work on the creative side of the visual designs for our global and local product promotions and have had the chance to work on over 300+ UGC (User-generated content) campaigns, and activity operations. I am part of the International UED (User Experience Design) team and it is amazing to be working with like-minded people who all share the same vision for building a creative platform. The collaboration with the cross-cultural teams has been significant in Helo’s growth and I feel super proud to be a part of this team.

Aside from the exciting technology and rapid growth, what has been so compelling about my time at ByteDance is the opportunity to work with such a diverse team at Helo. Throughout my career, this was the first time I was introduced to such a diverse workforce with language expertise across so many languages. The Helo team has such a collaborative spirit that working on so many different projects and campaigns have benefited in inspiring my best creativity and innovation and has also helped produce out of box ideas.

Another aspect that I have truly found to be unique in Bytedance’s culture is the bytestyles that we have. Out of all the bytestyles, Aim for the Highest resonates with me the most -

It means that we need to be innovative, transform ourselves to become more agile and open to challenges, fail wisely and replenish extensively.

My life at Bytedance has been full of such rewards and recognition, and lots of employee engagements. Working here is all about making work fun, having a good work-life balance, as well as good synergy between work, culture, and productivity.
MSIGHT Team Value: Our Attitude Towards Failure
By: Aulia Amin
Tags: Values, Culture, Telkomsel, Team

One of the perks of working in MSIGHT is that we got to experiment on so many things outside the telco domain. Naturally, experimenting in a new business is full of uncertainty and blind spots. The spectrum of outcomes is very wide from a total success to a total failure. Research says that 9 out of 10 experiments will end up fail.

Admitting a failure is sometimes difficult when we are inside a big company where success is our day-to-day menu. There is always a tendency to provides positive-only reports to stakeholders.

The challenge is to maintain a delicate balance between admitting mistakes/failures and preserve team morale. How to openly discuss failure without letting it knock the team morale down. How to stay positive and motivated while discussing mistakes.

Another thing is balancing between telling the (ugly) truth to stakeholders and maintain their confidence. It is wrong to assume that we have unlimited time and resources to experiment. The window of opportunity is limited and closing fast. On the other hand, a team needs a psychological safety to try and move forward.

We have been trying to keep this delicate balance, not perfect yet, but here are some tips that might help those of you who are facing similar challenges:

Maintain open communication with the team and stakeholders. There should be no communication barrier at least among direct reports. And make sure that people are comfortable in discussing anything, especially bad news. Manage expectations, that the road ahead is “perilous” while maintaining a high spirit. Learn from another startup journey and listen to what other people went through before reaching their success might be useful. Take good documentation of every experiment, so we can learn from it and try not to repeat the same mistakes in the future. Take note of every decision made. This is important because what we think is correct for now might not be the case in the future. In the future, people might not understand why we took such a decision (outcome bias). Be prepared to kill & pivot failed initiatives. Sometimes we must admit that it is better to re-allocate the resources to try another thing, take a turn rather than keep pushing forward. Avoid blaming and focus on solutions. It sounds easy, but it is not. It needs practice, personal bonding among team member, and trust.

Ronald Reagan once said in the aftermath of the Space Shuttle Challenger accident: “…we learn from our setbacks as well as our successes. And although the lessons of failure are hard, they are often the most important on the road to progress.”

This statement resonates very well with us in MSIGHT. We’re not perfect, we are still learning, and we sometimes fail.

After all, how can we solve a problem if we don’t admit that there is any?

(The original article was published in https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/msight-team-value-our-attitude-towards-failure-aulia-rahma-amin/)
3 Things Every Founder Should Consider Before Adding to the Team
By: Marketing Magnet
Tags: Consultant, Expansion, Founders, Team Culture, Team

3 Things Every Founder Should Consider Before Adding to the Team

Like any growing business, you’ve realized quickly that you can not do it all. So you have arrived at this place of expansion that most of us hope for: the time to hire your first employee.

But, like anything, with a new step forward comes trepidation.

Where do I find people to hire? How do I ensure my new hires are a good culture fit? What do I pay my new hire?

These questions plague all of us. But the answers in what makes SMART hiring decisions for an entrepreneurial team are usually found outside these obvious questions.

Whenever I am considering expansion in my business or in those of my client’s, I ask them to consider the following options before they take it to the next step.

Lesson ONE: Growing Businesses Need Effective Consultants and Less Junior Hires

As a start up, you are at the breaking point. Business is picking up, the founding team is overworked with early mornings, nights and weekends, and you have to get a team in place — yesterday.

What do most companies do in this situation? They rush out and try to add a permanent member to their team. But the thing is, what they can afford to hire and what they need are two different ends of the spectrum entirely.

Here is a real world example of how an ad agency was approaching a new marketing hire.

I was networking with another agency owner who is looking for a marketing person for the agency itself. The President was BURNT OUT and wanted a marketing guru to delegate ALL the internal agency marketing tasks to. She was looking to say goodbye to the agency content strategy, sales and web copy, video and testimonial creation and media calendar of PR opportunities and outreach.

The catch? She could pay an entry level salary with with the promise of unlimited commission.

Do you really think hiring a low level marketing person will grow your business quickly?

Sure, there is a commission, and lots of it…an attempt to inspire greater returns. But no commission alone can make up for experience. And if you are looking for a delegation model, you are better of hiring a more senior team to create and launch a successful marketing strategy and process, then hire a junior team to keep it going.

An outsourced marketing, tech or sales team can be your secret weapon in fast and smart growth. The world now allows for ALL to hire experts, folks we could NEVER afford in a full-time capacity but can access with the beauty of a consulting relationship.

This year alone, I hired these roles:

Bookkeeper

CFO

COO

…and NONE of them required benefits or a long-term commitment because they are consultants. So I get the best of both worlds — access to the best talent, at a fraction of the cost.

When are you going to stop thinking full time hires is the only way to grow? You can get 10x the value at the same cost with the RIGHT outsourced team.