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The recruiting process I used to build Team SNAP

In 2022 I set out to build a new ServiceNow development Team for my department. This is the story of how I found 6 developers, a business analyst and two product owners in 7 months. In case you are wondering why two product owners, one product owner left after four months.

The principles behind the search

I learned a lot from executing the hiring process repeatedly. These are the principles I used throughout the hiring process.

Take the stress out of it. There is a good chance you’ll make a hiring mistake. You spend about 3-5 hours with a candidate before offering them a job. That is not enough time to learn everything there is to know about a person and how they work. Would you get engaged with someone after taking for 5 hours? That is basically how this process works. Do everything you can to have a solid process. But don’t expect the process to deliver perfect results.

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Learn to identify the capitals of the countries of Europe on a map without annotations of any kind. The landscape is your only reference. After every choice, the correct choice will be highlighted and the map will be shown with annotations, so that you can see the country borders and neighboring cities.

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Iterating a design

This is the second post in a series. If you missed the start you can read it here. 

This post series is about the design and development process of a product that will solve a problem. Through this journey, I will share the decisions I took and those that I ignored or postponed for later. 

In doing this post series I hope to help you learn about the digital product design and development process and, with your feedback and questions, learn about my process as well. The world needs more people that understand how to build digital products.

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Building a product

This post series is about the design and development process of a product that will solve a problem. Through this journey, I will share the decisions I took and those that I ignored or postponed for later. 

In doing this post series I hope to help you learn about the digital product design and development process and, with your feedback and questions, learn about my process as well. The world needs more people that understand how to build digital products.

The product

One thing I want to do better in the future is to keep track of ideas, insights, achievements. To capture these ideas I need to reflect and somewhere to store them. I wish I had a camera for my ideas and, like with photos, look back at them over the years, share them with friends and family and rediscover situations and lessons in my life that I might have not thought about in a long time.

The inspiration for this product came from “memento mori”, remember that you [have to] die. 

The @stoicreflections instagram advertises a “life calendar”, a grid of boxes you tick off to remind you how time is passing by and how much time you still have. Steve Jobs also said the that thought of death was a great motivator and helpful to identify the important. 

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A design thinking workshop in the times of CODIV

Sometimes pressure and time constraints lead to some interesting ideas. In September, with very short notice I prepared and ran a Design Thinking workshop for my team that paid for itself three times: my team learned a few new things, we worked on our product and we had a lot of fun. 

Here is the recipe for the workshop

  1. Consider each of the user groups of your product
  2. Create a team for each user group (two people can be a group)
  3. Each team goes through the design thinking process for their user group

My team of eight was split into four groups of two, each team with the task of going through the design thinking process with one user group of the product we are building together. All resources where prepared so that the workshop could be done remotely.

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Test ideas with design thinking

If you cringed when you read the title, then this article is for you. I was in your shoes when I did my first design thinking workshop, skeptical. Eight years later I can say that the design thinking process and the skills you develop by using the process have been invaluable at work and my personal life.

Here are my top three reasons why you might want to take another look at design thinking and incorporate it into everything you do. 

Photo by Dan-Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash
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Complexity and story points

Story points as a measure of effort

In agile methodologies, the story point is used as a way to estimate the effort  it would take to complete a piece of work. The inputs to estimate story points are the complexity of the task and the amount of times that the task must be executed. 

During agile rituals (sometimes called meetings), the number of story points for a task is estimated by all the members of an agile team. The value of this estimation process is two fold. 

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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The challenge for the enterprise blockchain

Blockchain nodes connect and gossip with each other.
Blockchain nodes connect and gossip with each other. Redundancy leads to a robust system, and perhaps higher requirements on the network. Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash

Blockchain technology can help the C-suite implement robust digital systems that reduce fraud and increase data reliability. But preventing scandals is secondary to meeting revenue and EBIT targets. With enterprises still busy switching from paper to bytes (read digitization), the enterprise blockchain can use this phase to polish its technology and demonstrate its value added.

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Three steps to getting user stories right

The user story is a great way to put yourself in the “user” seat and do a reality check for whether what you are planning to build is something the “user” really needs or wants. The user story formula goes

As a [user description]
I [want, need, wish] to [some goal]
so that [some benefit].

Though this formula appears simple, I often see it applied in the wrong way.

Post its on the wall.

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