For the purposes of illustration, we’re going to imagine there’s a bug in some software the team has written. For some small but not insignificant fraction of the user base, the new feature we’ve built for them does not work as intended. We’re going to look at what the different levels of problem solving would mean, from least to most desirable moving down the pyramid.

I carefully organise when things are to make the most of my time; A lot of my 1:1 meetings with the devs in my teams are on Fridays, so I can wrap up the week and hear context as to how people were feeling throughout. What I’m showing here is approximately an average over two weeks, condensed down to a single day.

As a tech lead at Cleo, I want to learn to be a better writer so that I can help to support the people I work with, and so that I can communicate more efficiently and effectively. This blog post is my way of taking another step along that journey.

Writing an opinion piece allows for a well thought out and structured starting point for a debate, and the underlying piece can easily be altered as discussion continues. If enough people agree, it can become fact.

As one team member put it:

“I found it super useful. We have always suffered from long retros where the loudest people contribute the most. It was interesting hearing what quieter members had to say when they felt empowered to speak up. Can't imagine retros any other way now!”