Matt Terry (SEP Alum)

Here at SEP we are continually toying with practices to help us learn from our clients. Learn about their worlds. Learn about their problems. And in this case, learning about their domains. Event storming is a “cross-discipline conversation between stakeholders with different backgrounds” (from https://www.eventstorming.com/). Said another way…event storming is an activity that we use as […]

Previously I shared my “Reading Lately” list with a few books about motivation. Each publication from that list is still relevant in my thoughts, actions, and discussions with others at SEP. This time I am sharing 4 books that have greatly influenced the way I think about working collaboratively with people — whether on a […]

The last few years I have been part of a team that is building diabetes management apps for both iOS and Android. Our client partner is a global leader in the diabetes care market. We want our partner to be successful…necessarily we have to understand the constraints that they are working with in order to […]

With our guiding purpose of “making it easier to hire full-time engineers”, we chose to try out a self-selection process for our intern program. As I mentioned in my post about our intern program, we are expecting 7 interns for this summer. For 2016 we decided to level up our intern program with self-selection. Why Self-Selection? We believe […]

Over the last few years we have been making incremental changes to level-up our intern program. For previous summers we have solidified the purpose of our internship program…we have defined the outcomes we want to see from our program…and we have collected some goals that we want to shoot for while our interns are with […]

This week I facilitated a retrospective for a project that I wasn’t involved with. Immediately after the retro, I asked a few people for their input on how the retro went. One person in specific really enjoyed how I framed and conducted the retro. That person was relieved to participate in a retro that wasn’t […]

I was recently inspired by a blogger named Maya. She has a section on her blog called “Reading Lately” where she posts books/articles that she has recently read, or is currently reading. I felt like there was a lot of value in having a short list of reading material, with a short review about them as […]

Many teams around here are familiar with the “famous 3” standup questions… What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? What impediments do you have? This is a good way to get the team in the habit of communicating each day. A few of my teams have gotten even more value out of our […]

Recently I read a book called “The Art of Focused Conversations“.  This book gave me a lot of great advice on how to have better conversations, especially with people that I work with. The book is split into 2 halves- the first half is the ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ about conversations; the second half is […]