Hi there,

I have finally completed something that I've wanted to do for a few months, but with selling the house and moving I had to put it on hold. I'll share that with you at the end.

Okay, so I was thinking about a client I had a number of years ago where things wound up in an all-too-familiar situation. The development team turned into a unit of work. The client viewed the team as a production unit and attempted numerous ways to extract more productivity. The team itself lost its motivation and started to dislike the client and the project.

If you guessed that productivity and quality fell, you guessed right.

One of the things I started doing was weaving into conversations that the team was comprised of people who are experts in software. They are always using different software tools and thinking about how they want the software they build to get used and have seen numerous projects that they have built succeed and fail. In other words, there is a vast set of experience they weren't taking advantage of by treating the team as units of work.

Slowly but surely the client asked the team's opinion on ways to move forward and what options existed to build feature sets.

Motivation improved, and the product wound up being something everyone was satisfied with, and there were no outages on launch.

What does this mean for you? Encourage your product people and development teams to blur the lines a bit more and develop a partnership instead of a rigid set of responsibilities. The more they work across their lines the higher motivation gets, and the risk of the project lowers as well.

I teased at the top of my email that I'd tell you something I finally finished. I finished building my first ever online class. This class is everything I've learned in my decade of job-hopping and coaching others to navigate their careers to get the life they want.

I want 5 people to take the class for free.

Okay, it isn't exactly free. I'm going to ask you for feedback, a testimonial, and to refer it to people.

In return, you'll get to take the class that I'm selling for $1,000 for free, you also get a copy of my book, access to a Discord server where you can ask me questions, and worksheets to help you.

If you want to be one of the 5 people. Email me!

Have a great weekend.

Sincerely,

Ryan Latta