Tech Lead Journal

“3 core ideas in game thinking: super fan funnel to find the right people, loop design to create the experience people want to stick around for, and concept testing to figure out the user experience."

Amy Jo Kim is a game designer, startup coach, author, and co-founder of Game Thinking. In this episode, Amy shared how we can use game thinking to build better and successful products that people want. She first described some top reasons products fail and gave a few tips to avoid product failure by validating our ideas before building the product. Amy then explained in-depth the 3 core ideas in game thinking, which are identifying super fans, building a sticky core habit loop, and validating the product concept using storyboards. Towards the end, Amy shared how we can get started with game thinking and why we should do it early in our product journey.  

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Amy Jo Kim’s Bio
Named by Fortune as one of the top 10 influential women in games, Amy Jo Kim is a game designer, community architect, and innovation coach. Her design credits include Rock Band, The Sims, eBay, Netflix, nytimes.com, Ultima Online, Covet Fashion, & Happify.

Amy Jo helps entrepreneurs & innovators bring their ideas to life through at gamethinking.io. She pioneered the practice of applying game design to digital services and is well-known for her books Community Building on the Web (2000) and Game Thinking (2018).

In addition to her coaching practice, Amy Jo has taught Game Thinking at Stanford University and the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where she co-founded the game design program. She holds a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Washington and a BA in Experimental Psychology from UCSD.

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/127

“The vertical altitude of the organization leaders sets the ceiling for how effective the organization can be."

Ryan Gottfredson is a leadership development researcher and a Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author of “The Elevated Leader”. In this episode, Ryan explained the concept of an elevated leader and why it is important to have elevated leaders in an organization. He described the role of vertical development in elevating leadership and how it differs from the horizontal development that many of us are familiar with. Ryan described in-depth the 3 different levels of vertical development, including the cognitive and emotional aspects associated with each of the level. Towards the end, Ryan explained the 4 different types of mindset and why it is important for leaders to understand and heal from past traumas in order to become elevated Mind 3.0 leaders.  

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Ryan Gottfredson’s Bio
Ryan Gottfredson, Ph.D. is a cutting-edge leadership development author, researcher, and consultant. He helps organizations vertically develop their leaders primarily through a focus on mindsets. Ryan is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author of Success Mindsets: The Key to Unlocking Greater Success in Your Life, Work, & Leadership and The Elevated Leader: Leveling Up Your Leadership Through Vertical Development. He is also a leadership professor at the College of Business and Economics at California State University-Fullerton.

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/126

“A good API doesn’t expose the internal data models or internal logic too much. And the more your clients are not under your control, the less you want to do that."

Daniel Luebke is a software architect and the co-author of “Patterns for API Design”. In this episode, we discussed some API design patterns and best practices taken from his book. Daniel first shared the importance of understanding domain requirements for building APIs and several API and message best practices, such as API first design, how to design loosely coupled message exchanges, the tradeoff between generic and specialized API operations, and the risk of exposing too much internal data model and logic in our APIs. Daniel also introduced the microservices domain-specific languages (MSDL) as an alternative to Open API for specifying APIs independent of the technology implementation. Towards the end, Daniel explained the importance of defining the API lifecycle, how to support backward compatibility, and the different API versioning strategies we can use to evolve our APIs.  

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Daniel Luebke’s Bio
Daniel Lübke is an independent coding and consulting software architect with a focus on business process automation and digitization projects. His interests are software architecture, business process design, and system integration, which inherently require APIs to develop solutions. He received his PhD at the Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany, in 2007 and has worked in many industry projects in different domains since then. Daniel is author and editor of several books, articles, and research papers; gives training; and regularly presents at conferences on topics of APIs and software architecture.

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“The business technology divide was apparent in many companies. The idea of the value flywheel effect is to join the business and technology goals and create this flywheel effect momentum."

David Anderson is the author of “The Value Flywheel Effect” and the co-creator of The Serverless Edge. In this episode, David described the value flywheel effect concept and its four stages: clarity of purpose, challenge & landscape, next best action, and long-term value. David also explained the importance of Wardley Mapping and how we can use it to help improve the organization’s situational awareness within the value flywheel. During our discussion about the four stages, we also discussed several important concepts, such as the North Star Framework for clarity of purpose, understanding the team’s psychological safety and sociotechnical systems landscape, serverless-first paradigm as one way for the next best action, and using the well-architected framework and sustainability as guidelines for ensuring long-term value.

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David Anderson’s Bio

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“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. What people want in these traumatic moments is somebody to listen to and acknowledge them."

Katharine Manning is the President of Blackbird DC and author of “The Empathetic Workplace”. In this episode, we discussed how leaders can deal with traumatic experience in the workplace. Katharine described what she means by workplace trauma and explained the impact of such trauma on employees’ performance and organizations’ productivity. She shared the importance of leaders showing trust whenever employees come forward and share their trauma, and why leaders should avoid problem-solving in response to their situation. Katharine also touched on the importance of empathy and gave a few tips on how we can be more empathetic towards others. Towards the end, Katharine shared her LASER method, the five steps we can do for a more compassionate, calm, and confident response to the workplace trauma.

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Katharine Manning’s Bio

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“In a world that runs on software, when we develop and deploy software, we are part of a larger system where our failures are no longer about us, they are also about other people."

Kevlin Henney is a consultant, writer, and speaker on software development and has written and edited several popular books. In this episode, Kevlin shared his 3 favorite things every software engineer should know based on the two books he edited: “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” and “97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know”. He explained the importance for developers of taking an occasional break when working on deep work, putting code comments wisely, and using testing not just for checks but also for communication tool. Kevlin also brought up some timeless software development concepts developers should learn from the past on cohesion, coupling, and code quality. He also explained why he becomes associated with public software failures widely known as KevlinHenney screens and how the trend started in the beginning. Towards the end, Kevlin shared his views on why it is important for developers to improve public speaking, writing, and having more compassion towards each other.

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Kevlin Henney’s Bio

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“Creativity at work is a type of thinking and a process of developing ourselves and our ability to create and bring novelty to our professional life."

Oana Velcu-Laitinen is the author of “How to Develop Your Creative Identity at Work”. In this episode, Dr. Oana shared how we can develop our creative identity at work and in our personal life. She first started by describing the definition of creativity in her book, its relation with intelligence, and explained why creativity is important for maintaining our sense of engagement and motivation. Dr. Oana outlined the 4 different types of thinking that can help us foster our creative diversity and shared several tips on how to explore our creativity by channeling our curiosity, choosing our audience, finding time for creative work, and overcoming the fear of rejection. Dr. Oana also shared some potential barriers hindering our creativity at work and why we should avoid them to foster more creative innovations. I also shared my own creative journey, including how I ended up doing this podcast. If you are looking to exercise more of your creativity or thinking of starting your creative journey, check out this episode.

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Oana Velcu-Laitinen’s Bio

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“Everything in software architecture is a trade-off, and the why is more important than how."

Neal Ford is a Director and software architect at ThoughtWorks. In this episode, we discussed all things about software architecture covering his three most recent books: “Fundamentals of Software Architecture”, “Software Architecture: The Hard Parts”, and “Building Evolutionary Architectures”. We first discussed the definition of software architecture and how it relates to software design. Neal then described the two important laws of software architecture related to trade-offs and the why. Neal then explained why software architecture is difficult and discussed the hard parts, such as finding the least-worst combination trade-offs, understanding the importance of data, and managing coupling. Towards the end, Neal shared about the evolutionary architecture concept and some of its principles to support making incremental change across multiple software architectural dimensions.

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Neal Ford’s Bio

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“If you have self-organizing teams, your power as a leader is determined by your ability to enable others to grow and take responsibility."

Ron Eringa is a leadership developer and the co-author of “The Professional Agile Leader”. In this episode, we discussed insights from his book on how one can become a professional agile leader. Ron started by sharing his view of why agile transformations usually fail and gave advice on how companies should adopt agile in a more effective way. Ron then described characteristics of a professional agile leader, including how to apply situational leadership by understanding the 4 different leadership styles (combative, compliant, competitive, catalytic). Ron also explained how leaders can build high-performing teams by being aware of the two domains (visible & invisible) the teams are operating in and by understanding the interconnection between structure and culture. Towards the end, Ron shared his utopia view of how organizations would look like if they already become fully agile and also shared some patterns for effective leadership.

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Ron Eringa’s Bio

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“When blame is our focus rather than understanding what happened, people spend as much or more energy avoiding the blame and less time to be productive, creative, and energetic."

Diana Larsen is the co-founder of Agile Fluency Project and co-author of the latest book “Lead Without Blame”. In this episode, we discussed insights from her book about building resilient learning teams by moving away from blaming culture. Diana first described the definition of blame and its characteristics, and explained the negative impacts it can bring to an organization and its culture. Diana advised that instead of a blaming culture, organizations should build a learning culture by adopting the 3 essential motivators (team purpose, autonomous teams, co-intelligence) and the 4 resilience factors (collaborative connection, embracing conflict, inclusive collaboration, minimizing power dynamics).

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Diana Larsen’s Bio

Through the Agile Fluency Project’s programs, Diana shares the wisdom she’s gained in over 35 years of working with leaders, teams, and organizations. To serve her communities, she delivers inspiring conference keynotes, talks, and workshops around the world.

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Skills Matter is the global community and events platform for software professionals. You get on-demand access to their latest content, thought leadership insights as well as the exciting schedule of tech events running across all time zones.

Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags available by visiting techleadjournal.dev/shop. And don't forget to brag yourself once you receive any of those swags.

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