YouSaid · the spoken record

Heidi Helfand

lines on the record: 76
first: 2024-01-18
most recent: 2024-01-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I do. Yeah. I do that now. I like to work on a retainer basis, or I'll even join a team. So looking for the... For the next one.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can go to HeidiHelfan.com or Google My Name, and I come up Heidi at dynamicretaming.com, Heidi.healthand.gmail.com. You can find me. I'm out there. And yeah, I love to work with companies and teams going through change. And I do that in a variety of ways, teach workshops, do talks. So if any of this is interesting, reach out.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Catapulted. They built this Trebuchet that like catapult this fruit in the parking lot. I don't know how we got away with that, but we were in the early days, we did a lot of fun stuff like that. You could work with different people, build these larger relationships, which later makes it easier for retaming because then later if you routine, you're not strangers with people. So you want to cultivate the community. We had this department of fun, we would plan the fun in a variety of other ways as well.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had these hack days, and I think they do that to this day. So twice a year, we bring people together and we copied and learned from Atlassian. I remember we had calls with some coaches from Atlassian for how do they do their ship at day, or they originally called it FedEx Day, changed it to ship it day. We followed their model and we'd had this two o'clock on Thursday, two o'clock on Friday where we'd build whatever we wanted and we'd have a theme and then we'd have goofy prizes at the end that were like traveling trophies. Like one of them was like a clickety clack keyboard that we spray painted gold by the railroad tracks, but people could work on”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go, go, go the whole time. So I would ask other people that as well, especially if they're going through a challenge or burning the midnight oil or whatever it is, like, you know, what about self-care? How can you be kind to yourself?”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I ask myself that too. I used to run a lot in Santa Barbara at Elwood, which is a beautiful trail that you can go down to the ocean, you come back up. It's like a mesa, more mesa in Santa Barbara. And I would run and then I'd be like, God, this is so hard. And then I would walk for a little while and I'd think to myself, well, how can I be kind to myself? I mean, like, what am I doing here? Does it have to be fast? No. Like I'm here to like decompress and like enjoy. So how can I be kind to myself? Like I think sometimes I get hard on myself or have very high expectations kind of achiever mentality. And it's, I've learned through the years that like it's okay to slow down. It's okay to like.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a lot of really interesting places to explore. And I think it's just so much more interesting than some of the brand new kind of Stuff. So.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, back in the 80s or whatever, or in the 90s, you know, things can kind of remind people of other times. So I like that. I think there's information stored and unique items.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I travel around the world and I give talks on retaming. I do workshops, and usually I go to vintage and antique stores. I was just in Berlin. I was doing that. I was doing it in London. And yeah, I love thrifting, Salvation Army goodwill, you know, any of these places that we have in many of the U.S. cities, the Humana line of stores that I've been to in Europe and other places. I try to find this small, unusual antique places as well. My aunts and antique dealer in Michigan. And she doesn't specialize in vintage clothing, but I just love that idea of discovering unique and unusual things that maybe they remind you of times in the past. Like maybe you find that, oh my gosh, we had that mug.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very into vintage clothing, and specifically like real wool cashmere, not synthetic blends. I was like vintage blazers. A lot of the times where I'm giving a talk, I'm wearing a vintage blazer. I really like the clothing and design and kind of, you know, really, really love unusual vintage pieces that I could find. But they do need to, you know, a lot of the fast fashion that's out there today is a lot of these blends with these materials that you've never heard of, but there's like something special about like, you know, vintage cashmere, for example.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, they have some knowledge about what we do, what we build. Maybe they bring up that they've noticed something on one of the websites or a product launch that we just announced, just that maybe it's part of their story and their career. They're going in this direction and they heard about us and they thought, wow, I would love to work on that.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always like to ask people well, why do you want to join our company? What is it about working with us that would be exciting for you? Like, why are company as opposed to another one?”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did like the bear that cooking related show, the restaurant related show, and talks about the hospital, gets into the hospitality industry. I really like that. You know, movies, there isn't really one that stands out. I always look forward to being on an airplane to see what movies are playing. But no movie for you.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leading intelligent teams is one liberating structures is another one. And of course transitions by William Bridges. I also like Bell Leader's Guide to Participatory Decision Making.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If a marching band suddenly walked behind you, I'm going to point that out because it's in my field. I'm not going to ignore them. I'm going to bring that up. Right. So we pay attention to kind of the vibe and the feel in the room and where we're at. But then also if you're talking about something and suddenly you go like this or you have this kind of sudden pain in your neck when you're talking about this one thing. I might notice that you're doing this and like touching your neck because that's information. That's the kind of listening. And so I might ask you about that. Or if the face turns red or you look down or away, it's another kind of listening. So coactive training institute, coactive.com is my coactive coaching training. So I learned it from them. Henry Kinsey House and”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While listening is a muscle to build and to always work on, you got to put your attention out, focus on the other person. You know, sometimes like if I'm looking down, maybe I like reconnect and other things. I'm trained as a co-active coach, which involves different levels of listening. So you have level one, which is internal listening. Like if you and I are talking, but I'm thinking about like, what am I going to have for lunch? I'm in level one. I've got to redirect it out to you and focus on you. So when I focus on you is I'm in level two listening. I'm like putting my attention out and I'm like really anchoring towards you. It's a coaching skill, right? And then level three is like global listening, environmental listening.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it seems like she had such a wide vantage point and could kind of see the forest through the trees of the fact that all this company's doing well. And this is why we're growing and changing. And I remember one of my leaders, CTO John Walker, you know, Appfolio, he told me that once too. He was like, you know, I'd be like having a problem or something and I'd come to him and he'd always say to me, it's always great to be at a successful company, Heidi. And, you know, it's like, well, yeah, like sometimes you don't think about the finances when you're in your day-to-day and you have a problem with another person or they come to you and they have a problem with this other person, you know, but in the grand scheme of it, like how is the company doing? Like it's really like a critical vantage point that we need to remind ourselves of. But yeah, you know, I wouldn't say all change is always good. Your mileage may vary there. But the general idea that the company is doing well you're growing and changing. You're trying to make things happen. I think it's definitely in a space I'd rather be in than the opposite.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cycles. Like, you know, the company grows and changes and morphs and changes. The people in the teams do that as well. I have an ecocycle in my book where I talk about that kind of aging and changing. Then there's a disruption and you have a new beginning. We're part of these stories that are in progress. An unchanging, unmoving kind of entity that we work in Just be kind, be kind to each other. Enjoy your experiences, and learn as much as you can.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things evolve and change. It's just inevitable. So we appreciate what we have. A lot of us can look back on our careers and remember those times when we were, in my case, skipping through halls because I was so happy. And it was like, I couldn't even tell you like, well, why was I skipping through the halls at that moment? What was it? What was the people and the conditions and what we were doing and like the time, the era almost because yeah, it does change. There's a book by Itzaka Dezis called Managing Corporate Life Cycles. It's one that many of us read for years at Atfolio. Maybe the previous company as well, the Adesus Institute influenced some of our leaders and they influenced us with this. It talks about the different stages of companies from birth. And, you know, there's go-go stage, maturity, death of companies. You know, these are like lifestyles.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question How do we maintain our culture? It feels different than it was before. And the thing is, it is different. And our companies go through stages. The company of today is not the company it was a year ago. The people turn over and change what we work on turns over and change. You know, the whole kind of world and industry and global events change and put different pressures on us. And we got to live in this global context. So nothing lasts. And sometimes I have like a picture of myself with an earth holding an ice cream cone that's melting, you know, not to be a total downer, but, you know, it appreciate it when you're on a team and you love it. And it's amazing because, you know, these are our lives. And, you know, we have to have gratitude and appreciate what we have because naturally.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think sometimes you have that awesome team situation. It's an enjoyable experience. People are learning. You're looking forward to it every day. You're delivering the stuff that people love. You're telling people what's going on. You have that matched expectation where people aren't like breathing down your neck because it's late or something. You know, sometimes you want to keep that team together. You don't want to destroy that dynamic. But the thing is, you know, maybe that's a small startup that grows and you need to grow because you have a bigger vision and it needs to be more than these 10 people. And so, you know, there is sometimes this feeling of loss. Like this is our company. This is my experience at this company of 10 people. But suddenly we're 20 people. It doesn't feel the same like it did anymore. And it feels different. And people always ask.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an Appfolio story. John Walker was telling me back in the day that Yeah, he had this thought. I mean, he did this experiment. He had this thought that, you know, many of like we had this one team that was like, I guess they were delivering at this cadence that they love and they were building this stuff and there's this energy and you can almost feel it like let's just spread the people from that team across the other ones and then we'll have that and it didn't work like he didn't have that like it didn't happen and that was a visceral learning for him that It doesn't essentially work, you know, and, you know, people are like, you know, what does it take to be a high performing team, right? Like what does it take to have that magical team experience where there's that chemistry and the people are together and there's stories in the book, Damon Valenzona told was telling me one about how it's like it's a band and we're riffing off each other and like there's we're creating this music together. So you know John felt like he essentially destroyed that.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, one of them is people always think that retaming is you have a pool of people and you're assigning them to a bunch of different projects like, okay, you'll work 10% on this one, 5% on this one, 20% on this one. We are going to allocate the resources from our component-based teams into these different projects. I live that we did that in Waterfall like many years ago. But that doesn't really work. A lot of the times the percentages don't add up. It's very hard for people to multitask and be involved in like multiple efforts at once. It's hard for the brain with all the context switching that needs to happen in that case. So I call that the percentage antipattern. There's also, I probably wrote about it like poof you're poof they're gone or like suddenly they're here like you know re-teaming or having people suddenly show up and you weren't expecting them or suddenly they're gone and there's no communication around it.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard to be a leader, it's challenging, you know, but what kind of an environment or vibe do you want to cultivate in your teams? And what do you want the people to be like? I have a degree in teaching English and applied linguistics. And I remember studying like Paulo Freire and other educational problem posing methods of education. We have these teams that solve these complex problems and challenges and build these really cool things for customers. Let's involve them in some of the org decisions that are going to be like part of their daily life. You like that idea. You know, again, it's not perfect. You can't involve people on everything, especially if there's, you know, wide-scale changes that you just can't.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By an email, and we're just sending it out, or this small team change. And here it is, it's done. Goodbye. You know, or is it a little bit where you get people's input? And that in itself, you got a way, you know, what you're dealing with, you know, again. But I like to think about that. What kind of leader do you want to be? Leaders need patience.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, a lot of it is problem trading. You know, we have this challenge today. We decide, oh, there's a few ways we could handle this pros and cons of each solution. And let's, you know, it's like the kata. It's like the Toyota Kata, you know, like grasp the current condition. You will experience, you know, you have challenges. What's the next evolution or the next target condition? How might you get there? And then you're there. And you're like, okay, grasp the current target condition. What's it like? What are you experiencing? Oh, we might try this. You get to, you know, it's always we're always transforming from the current state to the future state. So, you know, to that, I would ask people, well, how do you want that to be? And how do you want to show up and be as a leader, right? You want to just be like, all right, you know, got to get this done. The reorg is done.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's a lot of wisdom to what your manager said and your colleague there. Because, yeah, I mean, as time goes on, conditions change. You know, we evolve and change. We're subject to different influences. COVID happens. We weren't dealing with that 10 years ago. You know, we grow and adapt and morph. We try to get together and make the best decisions that we can when we're faced with challenges.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Dan Pink's book Drive, When people are really given some agency in the opportunity to work a little bit differently than maybe that, you know, traditional boxed version you might see on my bookshelf. You can really create not only products that people love, but companies that people love and want to be at.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know there's ways to screw all of this up, you know, but there's other ways to do it well. I remember, you know, when we were at our first team at Appfolio and we did a grow and split, right? Like it grew and it split into two or three teams. I remember there was a loss for some of the engineers who wanted to pair program with some of the other engineers. And they started a regular rotation themselves from one team to the next, right? And that brought fulfillment. It brought joy. I mean, they would see each other in the workspace every day, but they wanted to work together. It brought them learning joy and fulfillment. And I love that. For those who are like, keep the team stable and the same forever. I'm like, well, what about that? Like, it brings me satisfaction and joy when I see my colleagues, you know, it's like autonomy mastery purpose.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when they left, it just becomes a challenge and a setback. And at the second, you know, at Appfolio, we share a founder between the first startup and the second startup. Many of their early engineers from that first startup went to the second startup, right? So I was 10th at Appfolio. I was 15th at Expert City. So we wanted to work together, right? So it was that global idea of switching them one by one or similar. But anyway, at the second startup, we had the chance to do things differently. So we had pairing and switching pairs and test-driven development. We had help to do that. But this kind of redundancy built safety into our systems, especially when, you know, Appfolio is processing a lot of rent payments. There's a lot of money. There's ACH going through. You know, those are critical systems. It's very important that things are safe and secure.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have multiple owners of a system, so not only one person is that tower of knowledge that owns that one system. There's some stories in my book where I interviewed Richard Sheridan, who is the chief storyteller and co-founder of a wonderful company called Menlo Innovations in Anarbur, Michigan. They built their company Menlo to have people work in pairs, not just the software engineers. team members work in pairs and they switch pairs at a regular cadence and you know that when you're joining the company because you're involved in some kind of pairing so there's parity from when you're interviewing to when you're at the company but switching also helps build that knowledge redundancy in your company a little more fault tolerance so if someone leaves they don't leave with that all the information in their head we had that we had at that first startup expert city we had that some single owners of systems”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because, you know, maybe we're going to have some more changes this year, maybe companies are going to be hiring less. Of like the thought of companies downsizing or having layoffs or anything like that, but you know, I think to myself, well,”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, forming, storming, norming, performing Tuckwin's model, he forgot the phase called stagnating. Sometimes it feels like we're in a team for too long. We're tired of working with these people. We want a little variety. We want to work with that person over there. Or maybe we want to work on a new system. We don't have the opportunity to do that in our current team. But what if we could work on that system over there with those people? It could totally refresh us. It could be like having a new job within our same company. It could extend the lifespan of the amazing employee in your company, right? So switching is tied to that kind of fulfillment, which is one of the reasons why I made it separate from one by one and tied that to the company. And the other thing with switching is that you could create safety nets in your company through switching. I just wrote a newsletter post about this yesterday.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, where this merged entity now, like, what's next? Like, looking out to the future, so we have the same shared vision. So I love doing that. There's different tactics you can do before, during and after each of these patterns. Yeah, so that's merging isolation. We talked about before put the team off to the side, give them process freedom, have them report up to a decision maker, tell the other teams not to bother them, let them work at the cadence that they want to work at. That makes it easier. If you are doing a short-term thing, you got to work it out with the larger entity so you don't create something in isolation that other people have to maintain. Like, you know, there's ways that this can be messed up. And then switching. So switching pattern is really tied to learning and development and fulfillment. It could be that you want to work with other people. Like you.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Makes a timeline of they stand in order of when they joined their team and they make a timeline with milestones of when they joined their team, when people left, and significant events and things they created that they're excited about and that they're proud of. And that they branch together with their newly merged team. And then it's good for to get a shared sense of history. So you have these teams or companies that come together. They make shared timelines. They share their milestones and things that they built that they're proud of. They tell each other about it. And then they have a sense of like, wow, like we didn't know that. Oh, I didn't know that you have built a system like that. We did too, or we've never built anything like that. That is so cool. Like, you know, what did you learn from that? You know, we get to learn about each other. And then we're together or like, all right.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And having another vertical in their SaaS company, we acquired a company at Appfolio to bring us faster into Workflow software for law firms. So we acquired a company based in San Diego and that got us a couple of years ahead, I remember one of the leaders saying that. So, you know, again, we weren't involved. I wasn't involved in this decision as an IC at the time. So it could be a business decision for merging at that level. It could be that people leave there are departures and teams and responsibilities consolidate together that's merging. So it could be that kind of shrinking that we're seeing. It could be that the company is having one leader instead of three and there's a consolidation and the teams kind of merge together. So it's the opposite of grow and split. One activity I do like to do with teams that merge is called story of our team. That's in chapter 13 of the second edition. So with story of our team, each team”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Merging is the opposite of growing split. Two or more teams combine together or at a higher level, a company acquires another company and then there's like a merging that happens. So merging, I think, is related to when companies downsize or shrink. Things consolidate, come together, or again when at the company level, you know, companies combine, you know, one acquires another, gets acquired. How that goes down varies, but there's this concept called panarchy that I write about in my book that a lot of these changes, there's changes, you know, at the individual level, the team level, the team of teams level, department level, the company level. So yeah, so merging. So there's a business decision that the companies merge together and then changes might ensue. So maybe the company wants to get ahead on building”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just have one designer. We just have one person who helps us anticipate quality challenges. So, you know, it's a lot of problem trading when you do a lot of this stuff, like anything. You know, you have a challenge. How might we solve it? Well, there's option A, option B, and option C. Okay, so this grown split. So then, and it's very common, I think, when your company is growing and changing, kind of like that.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Easier when there were like five of us, but now they're a 13. The work becomes divergent. They're working on this one thing, they're working on something else. No one's paying attention in the stand up so much anymore because this work has diverged. And those are a few of the signals. And then someone typically brings it up. If you normalize the idea that it's okay for teams to have input into their future structures, maybe they'll bring it up and decide that, hey, it might be better if we split. Sometimes splitting though can create dependencies that weren't there when you were together as one team, so you inherit other problems.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grows bigger and then splits into two or three. So when the teen gets bigger, facilitation and communication tends to break down. So some signals that teams might bring up when they feel like a change might be helpful is the meetings are taking longer. You're in that case where it's harder to make decisions.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Joins and they become their manager. But what if that person wanted to be the manager and then they brought in someone from the outside to become the manager? Right. So you need to pay attention to the new hires that are joining, help them feel a sense of belonging, get them to talk about themselves, which is said to increase their sense of connection and retention. There's some research in the book The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, which talks about that. But then it's also important to coach the people through change that are already at the company, right? Especially if they weren't involved in the particular decision, bringing on this new leader that comes in and brings in all their people, right? So you got to pay attention to different people. Grow and split is a natural thing that happens when you're like startup scale up and growing bigger and bigger. The first team probably”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and in the book it might be a little blurred because this is like some of the. Switching in one by one sound very similar, and they do have some kind of Venn diagram overlaps, but I'll distinguish them on my side, talk about them. Cool. So yeah, so one by one, someone joined your company or they leave your company, right? So the tip with one by one is when someone joins, help them build a sense, feel a sense of belonging. And you can do that through not having their first aid be them sitting over there alone, right? You could have someone have a first pair. There's a chapter in my book about onboarding. This is in the space of onboarding. Also with one by one, when people join, you also need to pay attention to the people who are already there. And it's good for them to know when someone is joining the company, that it shouldn't be a surprise. So visualizing the hiring and the opportunities is something that I think is a really good idea. It could be challenging for someone if somebody”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's really, really important. I will also say that, you know, things don't always succeed 100%. I've seen isolated teams within companies where someone has the opportunity to sell something and they talk to their friends who are the engineers who build the feature for them, but then it leaves something for other people to maintain later and they weren't involved in the decisions and it can be a big mess. You know, for all of these patterns there are It's like kind of like balconies and basements. There's, you know, you can screw it up too. You know, it's not all, you know, stuff is hard. You know, that's why I like to lean into it and written about it. You know, things take effort. You got to, the tree is going to drop the leaves. You got to sweep them up. You know, everything takes work and effort.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Became like another product, that at folio was very, very successful at one point. I think it was before we went public. It branched off into its own separate entity. I think maybe they shared like a board member or something. I don't know how that worked. But it became its own entity. CureDox became separate. And then it grew from there. And then it became this like, you know, wonderful, successful product that was recently acquired. People come and go at companies and companies grow and change and morph. And, you know, that was like one case of departures that, you know, it's like that are sweet, right? You're happy for your friends and colleagues. Say, oh, he's going to be a CTO. It's going to be the CTO. Like, there's this entity. I remember visiting their office in Santa Barbara. You know, it's great to see your friends succeed and thrive.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really has decision making authority and decisions won't get reversed, or they have to go through some complex like web of like, is it okay if we do this? Now you need kind of like a clear decision making structure. They saw that at the McDonald's case study as well, which is not in my book, but it's in this other book called Teamwork. And then, you know, that group having that senior leader that they report into, you know, getting the clear lines of communication there is also really important. So not having this, you know, like heavyweight, like bureaucracy of, I don't know, quarterly business updates where everybody's like making a slide deck for two years before they go to that meeting. Like trying to like relieve the team of things like that and kind of make it lighter. And yeah, you know, and some of these teams like SecureDocs.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then it frees people to not be the only owner of a system in chain to a system. And yeah, so isolate them, tell people not to bother them, do pairing and have shared ownership so it's easier for somebody to switch into something like this. Process freedom again, they can do things differently. Ideally, they report”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To shed their skin of the other things that they're working on. If you take a bigger picture kind of forced through the trees picture, you want people pairing and switching pairs so they're not single owners of a system. So when they have an opportunity to do something that could be really important to the company like be on one of these isolated teams, they can kind of fade out and not be the only owner that has to transfer knowledge and then field questions for two years on how that system works. You want to build this redundancy in your teams, right? So that's like, if you really want to plan ahead, do that first, you know, have that as part of how you operate building this team redundancy and switching.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so one isolate the team or put them in a different area. We could still see them. We were in this big open room, but they were, it was their team area. I mean, we had these impermanent walls between some of the teams. Like it was their region and they claimed it and they named themselves. And so one, you know, separate location. There's another story in the book about a team that incubated a product idea within Citrix and they were in a garage of all places. So they were like really isolated, but just put the team in a different region, make it that area. That's number one. Number two, tell other people not to disturb this team. That's key. And hearing it from a leader is really, really important. No, you're not going to pull them into something else. They're working on this other thing. So, you know, people need to.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Appolio, we did this so there's a company called SecureDocs, it branched off into its own company and it was just acquired, I believe, in 2022 when SecureDocs was happening. I was not on that team. I was like, I was on the other teams and I was watching. And again, same pattern. A team was created off to the side. And they were given process freedom. They worked in more of a daily sprint style as opposed to the two week sprint style that our other teams were doing at the time at Atfolio, early Appfolio.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Left teams went to, we brought a consultant in, went into a conference room for a couple of weeks, figured out some major changes that needed to happen, solved them, went back to the teens. This is not a new concept. The chicken McNugget was saved by an isolated team, SWAT team. There's a book called Teamwork. It's an old book from, I think, the 70s. I have in my bookshelf here. And there's a story of the chicken McNugget that you can read about where they brought in a consultant and had a very small team and worked in a different, they didn't work in their same plant where they were developing the product. They worked in a different plant. They reported straight up to one of the executives that McDonald's. And yeah, the chicken McNugget lived on because it was like having challenges in the test marketplace in Indianapolis. So, you know, we didn't make this up. It's just like some of these things are kind of like, oh, it's like a noticing. And then.”
2024-01-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source