Forem: Daniel Maurer

Customer success is our success

Daniel Maurer — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 15:19:31 +0000

One of the principles of the company I work for is this:
Customer success is our success.

What do you think that means?

And how should a developer apply this principle in their day-to-day work?

Thankful,
Daniel Maurer

Six colors that can change all your meetings

Daniel Maurer — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:32:17 +0000

Have you ever been in a meeting that looked like it would never end? Or in a room where there was no way for people to reach some kind of consensus because their opinions were very different? Have you ever attended a meeting where you were literally in the middle of a war camp where participants were confronted? Then the method of the Six Thinking Hats might be a solution. By reading this article you will get a complete summary of the Six Thinking Hats method.

Difficulty in communicating during the analysis of a situation will certainly make the moment exhaustive and disorganized. This method was created in 1985 by Edward de Bono to avoid long meetings where there were only discussions and that led nowhere and will help you to:

Develop ideas;
Making decisions
Understand something;
Solve something;
Enhance the capacity of your mind;

The six hats

The method consists of wearing six types of hats, one each time they give you super powers to see the situation from a perspective you wouldn't see, below is a short list of the hats.

White Hat - Logical Analysis
Black Hat - Negative Logic
Yellow Hat - Positive Logic
Green Hat - Creativity
Red Hat - Intuition and Emotion
Blue Hat - Reflection

Each hat has a color to distinguish its type from the others and all participants in the meeting always wear the hat of a certain color at the same time. This way, instead of the participants confronting each other, everyone always looks in the same direction, so this is a method that will organize the whole dynamic of thinking.

Below is a brief explanation of each hat and I hope you remember that these six colors can change all your meetings. So pay attention and let's go to the methods of the six thinking hats.

White Hat

First of all, I need you to remember that these hats give you super powers. At the same moment that, in your mind, you wear the white hat you will notice the magic happening and you will see all the facts. You will analyze every detail of forming a calculator by looking at all the facts in a logical way.

At this moment no interpretation is accepted, only current or past facts and figures. These facts can be separated into proven and unproven facts, but it must be questioned whether or not the fact should be proven through research. Also note that you can express your opinion but the opinion of another person is a fact.

Black Hat

By wearing this hat you will have the power to see everything on the negative side, so that you know everything that can go wrong. We are very prone to the negative side because we have naturally evolved to predict the negative and this is the time to take advantage of it so that we can be cautious and careful.

Yellow Hat

This hat will open your mind to see the positive points of what is under discussion. We need to develop value sensitivity to points so that we are as sensitive to value as we are to danger, this is a matter of evolution. This hat has a logical basis and seeks the reasons to increase the value of an idea, so it is not based on fantasy but on finding out what the values are, for whom and in what circumstances. The creation of proposals and their valorization is summarized with a positive logic to see all the chances of succeeding and all that is viable.

Man's progress depends on his desire to make things happen and history is full of little practical visions and dreams that have come true. So if we limit this hat to what is solid and known, progress will be minimal but remember that we can never be as sure of the future as we are of the past.

Now we have many facts and details but not everything is possible to solve in a logical way.

Green Hat

With this hat you will gain powers to plant new ideas, options and alternatives that include the most obvious and unpublished. You will also be able to suggest modifications to an idea to avoid difficulties in a fantastic way. As you improve your creative thinking, you will find that the production of ideas will increase. The green hat benefits us by making creative thinking a formal part of the thought process.

Creativity implies provocation, exploration, risk, and thought experiments. Often, the most creative people are just people who spend more time trying to be creative because they are motivated by creativity. And when the idea arouses enthusiasm, it is very likely to succeed.

With the powers of this hat you will have miraculous and often pointless ideas, but they will be creative ideas, and you will be able to make the seeds of ideas come true because this hat is not logical, you will use the other hats for logic.

Red Hat

By wearing this, you have the time to express your feelings, sensations, emotions and intuitions without the need to explain or justify to the group. In this way we can discover in a discussion when someone's thoughts are dominated by emotion or when someone is fighting for their own interests and not those of the group. Emotions are present in humanity and we have a lot to learn from our intuition, something very complicated but necessary and with this hat we can be more complete.

Blue Hat

With the hat you will be able to be as reflective as ever, it is not about intuition and analysis but it is reflective and with it you will arrive at the results that can take the form of a summary, a conclusion, a decision, a solution, etc. With this hat, beyond the conclusion, you plant the purpose of the section and what you want to achieve with it and organize the sequences of the use of the other hats.

This hat can be used at any given time to provide a summary of the achievements to date and can define a new focus of thought that will become the task of a new section of thought. It is often also used at the beginning and end of meetings.

How to wear the hats?

There is no set order to wear the hats and each hat can be worn more than once as well. There are infinite possibilities of sequence of use and each one can be used for a different problem, like raising ideas or solving a problem. Experimenting I am sure that you will find the best order for each given purpose.

You can use the six thought hats method for both group and individual use, but of course, being in a group is always better.

I hope you enjoyed it, this article was written carefully for you.

Grateful,

The Art of Making It Happen

Daniel Maurer — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 12:09:57 +0000

Getting Things Done, or simply GTD, is a task management system created by David Allen who also wrote a book with the same name. After reading the book I'll write this as much as possible, brief summary.

The method aims to leave those who have adopted it with the mind as water, a state of mind where you are no longer concerned with remembering what to do because you can trust that everything you need to do is already written down so you can focus so well and exclusively on what you need to do at the moment. With this method you will capture all your disorder in an external system and it is this system that will help you organize what you need to do and have everything under control.

The GTD is based on five steps to make things happen:

Capture everything;
Process;
Plan;
Review;
Begin to work.

Capture everything: Literally take all the tasks out of your head and move on to an external system that is more reliable.
Process: At this point you must process everything you've captured in clear action steps that require action. Decide if the items are a project, next action or reference.
Plan: It is important to have your lists organized so put everything in the right place. Add dates to your calendar, delegate projects to others, archive reference material, and sort your tasks.
Review: This is the time to review the entire system to update the information and gain perspective.
Get to work: It's running knowing what you're doing at that moment, the most important thing you should be doing.

The method still relies on the rule of two minutes, which basically is to perform at the current time, now, everything that takes less than two minutes.

The key to any productivity system is to keep it as simple as possible and use it as often as possible.

Do you have a question or do you want a hint? Use the comments!

Thank you for reading!

Best regards,
Daniel Maurer

You can release better products. The Validation Process

Daniel Maurer — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 23:52:40 +0000

The validation process will determine whether the product functions are meeting the requirements of the project, whether they meet the organization's objectives, and ultimately, and perhaps most importantly, whether they meet the customer's needs. Usually this process is performed as a final step in the development of a product evaluating the accuracy of the product that always concerns the satisfaction of the needs and requirements of users.

It is interesting that the validation is performed preferentially by a team that does not participate in product development, that is prepared to analyze the product with a customer's perspective and is focused on identifying non-conformities and also suggesting the best resources for the market. It is important that the team is also prepared to verify if the product will integrate into the customer's environment.

It is very important for the quality of a product that all non-conformities inserted during development or maintenance are discovered before the release and because of this it is interesting to apply a validation process. But for how long should this process be carried out? This depends on the fault tolerance that the project may have and there is no defined response but usually the interval of the occurrence of detection of a non-conformity is used as the indicator. This indicator is used to define that the testing investment no longer pays off because of the high time to find a non-conformity.

Do you have tips for more effective testing? Answer the comments below!

Thank you for reading!

Best regards,
Daniel Maurer

Ten Leadership Lessons from The Lion King

Daniel Maurer — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 02:30:38 +0000

I leave below a list with lessons about leadership that I took from the movie The Lion King.

Leaders need to teach future leaders because they know that time goes by and they have played a very important role, and a well-prepared successor is needed.
While many only want to have and receive the leader will have to offer.
It is not necessary to be present at all times but there will be times when the presence of the leader will be indispensable.
Only use your authority when it is inevitable.
The leader cannot follow all the councils, he will have to know how to analyze and only follow the wise and correct councils.
The leader has a lot of influence to change the future, both to improve and worsen the current situation, be wise.
If in some moments you don't act like a real leader you can disappoint, always be prepared.
Understand that the leader is the reflection of other people and how everyone is highly influenced.
The leader has to protect like no one else everything that has been assigned to him.
For being seen by many, there may be people who will laugh at his wisdom, the leader will have to be strong.

If you have any consideration or have noticed other details of the movie, please leave your comment.

Thank you for reading!

Best regards,
Daniel Maurer

Why wake up at 4 am may not work for you?

Daniel Maurer — Sat, 10 Aug 2019 00:05:24 +0000

Why do you think getting up early might be good for you? Why do some executives wake up at 4 am?

Some people cite the benefits below waking up before everyone:

Minimal distractions before sunrise
Nobody's sending you messages
There's less to see on social media

But be smart, for most people waking up at 4 am will not work because the big question is not what time you get up, or how many hours you sleep but it is about what you will do while you are awake. I am sure that if you analyze how you are spending your time for a month you will find that in some moments you are wasting a lot of your time.

So if you believe that things are not happening don't think you need to wake up early but think about how to optimize your time. Set goals for your day and try to avoid everything that doesn't contribute to that goal.

If you dream about something, and say you want to achieve something, your actions need to reflect that. If you want to be above average you need to do what the average does not do. So think about it. Your future will simply reflect what you do today.

Planning vs Execution

Daniel Maurer — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 00:26:16 +0000

In fact, everyone who spends more time thinking and planning than they do is valuing the wrong thing.

We believe that planning will eliminate risk and waste but we have to be careful because planning too much can be a trap. I say this because planning brings a decreasing return, that is, the more we do something, the less value it will generate. We need to plan up to a certain point but soon after comes the time to present this planning to the world and execute so that at that moment we can get the feeling of execution.

The world turns in a very different way than we think but in our planning we are biased and try to shape the world for the ideal scenario and then we need the feeling of the thing.

The value of any idea is in the execution and not in the planning, what do you think about it?