It’s been just over a year since building my office shed so I’m finally getting round to writing this post about #shedlife. Last May I joined Surevine, a remote software company. It was my first remote role, we didn’t have any spare space in the house so I needed somewhere to be able to work. Because of the nature of our clients it needed to be somewhere where I could have conversations without being overheard....

When I joined Surevine my onboarding experience was fantastic, but I wanted to see if there was anything more we could do to make it even better, so back in June I asked twitter what would a great onboarding experience look like? As always the responses were great. This post summarises what I learned: Onboarding starts way before a person joins a company If someone wants to work with you, they will be thinking about it way before onboarding starts....

This year I was finally able to attend MapCamp 2019 with ~600 other people at Sadlers Wells Theatre, London. MapCamp is a conference introducing and describing the technique of Wardley Mapping, a tool for mapping strategy. I first came across Wardley Maps a couple of years ago through the medium book. I found it compelling, Simon Wardley has a lovely humble style of writing. He described how he went from ‘bumbling CEO’ to ‘having a vague idea of what I was doing’....

This post was originally published on the surevine blog. 3 months ago, I took the next step in my career and joined Surevine as a Team Lead. There were many things that first attracted me to the company, but one major benefit was that it’s totally remote, and so learning how to work collaboratively whilst remote was a challenge that really interested me. Sureviner’s are spread all over the country, and my team alone covers a geographical area that stretches from Durham to Plymouth....

Emily Webber recently asked if I could run an 8-minute workshop to energise people at the beginning of her regular Agile in the Ether remote meetup. (It is a very friendly meetup and well worth checking out). This is the detail of the game I facilitated: Objective Tell a story that develops iteratively and everyone in the group contributes to. Instruction Each person adds a sentence to a story, but has to repeat the preceding sentences first, then nominates the next person to go....