Category: Videos

Silly Baboons, Stubborn Elephants II: Navigating Culture Differences Across R&D groups

In September 2019 I published Silly Baboons, Stubborn Elephants: A Product Engineer’s Guide to Working with Platform Engineers. Since then I’ve expanded my thinking on culture gaps inside engineering organizations and how they affect our ability to collaborate across different groups with different motivations and incentives into a talk, presented at Reversim 2021 conference (right before Omicron hit and everything shut down again for COVID).

The talk is in Hebrew, so I’ve included the slides and my speaker notes (with bonus content I didn’t have time for!) translated into English after the video.

Update [September 2023]: I gave a short version of this talk at LeadDev Berlin in 2022 which is now available in English! Yay!

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Posted on by Rina Artstain

Better software design with mind maps

Have you ever tried to design a complicated bit of software and ended up with a great big tangled mess? Designing software is hard and formal processes can be frustrating. Is there a better way to approach this task? Mind maps are a fun and intuitive way to brainstorm and organize your ideas on paper or a whiteboard. In this talk I show how to use mind maps to design software well, convert your thought process into an excellent technical spec, and break it down into workable tasks while leaving lots of room for agility and flexibility.

English, from Wix Engineering Tech Talks
Hebrew, from Reversim summit 2019
Posted on by Rina Artstain