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.

September 10, 2019October 27, 2019

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.

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December 31, 2018September 10, 2019

The challenge for the enterprise blockchain

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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September 3, 2017March 14, 2021

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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June 29, 2017September 10, 2019

How to win a hackathon

A hackathon is to coding what a marathon is to running. Hackathons bring together coders and designers to work on a problem, or challenge, and produce some result, usually presented in a pitch slam at the end of the event. I have completed three different hackathons with three different teams and won a total of four prizes with them. This post is about how my teams did it.

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April 7, 2017March 31, 2020

Designing a cohesive brand experience

In a small business, it is often the case that a single employee can play a critical role in boosting (or sinking) the business’s brand. And so it is important that at every touchpoint a potential customer receives a consistent message. In today’s world we focus a lot on the digital realm but I want to explain how to do this across both the digital and analog worlds in a way that showcases a business’s values.

efoxx Hair salon façade.

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