“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” ~ Albert Einstein*

It doesn’t matter how efficient you are at getting things done if you are solving the wrong problems.

To produce the best results, you don’t just need to understand the problem statement, you need to understand the problem. By addressing the root cause of a problem instead of just alleviating the symptoms you can produce elegant, less costly, and longer lasting solutions.

Let’s examine an example of what it means to understand the problem not just the problem statement. …

Why is it that some teams excel and other teams fall on their face? Is it talent or luck? Is there a magic sauce we can sprinkle on a team to make it high performing?

There is no magic. No key to turn or mantra to follow. But over time you can build teams that perform in excess of the individual talents of its members. Talent does matter, but a good team of average individuals will, with consistency, outperform a mediocre team of super star individuals.

To create a high performing team, you need to do four things:

1. Provide a psychological Safe environment for…

Code reviews are critical for creating quality software but they are often done poorly and inconsistently. By adding process to your team’s code reviews, you can reduce bugs, increases code quality, and help your engineers level up.

Here is a checklist that will increase the value of your code reviews.

Code Review Checklist

1. Do you understand the problem you are trying to solve?

2. Does the change solve the problem?

3. Can the code be easily maintained?

4. Is the code readable and easy to understand?

5. Does the code deal with performance appropriately?

6. Are team coding standards adhered to?

7. What improvements can you suggest? …