Radek has started a job in manufacturing… pro bono manufacturing of face shields for hospitals in Poland.

No, really. Over the last few weeks, Radek has been applying what he’d learned about CAD, laser cutting, and lean manufacturing at the Warsaw Hackerspace to set up a face shield production line.

In three weeks, they produced over 30 000 face shields.

This episode is a new, experimental format. It’s just Radek calling Michael to chat about work. Like they normally would. Except that it happens to be recorded and published, so you can get a glimpse into how we do it.

In this chat, we’re trying to figure out how to institute cultural change at the company, and make Kaizen part of our everyday work and thinking. Also, Radek’s frustrations with UI work, and change of direction for 2020.

Make a huge impact with just 2 hours per day. Discussing Michael’s latest productivity hack and how this simple change allowed him to be way more productive this year.

How we apply Lean philosophy to the Nozbe Teams development process:

- Weekly release train

- Phased releases

- One-day pull requests

- CI/CD

- Asynchronous testing

- Feature flags

- Bug fixing Mondays

- Dev responsibilities

- Roadmap Rangers

- Time scoping

- Kaizen in customer support

- Text daily standups

- Kaizen math

Feel free to follow us on twitter: https://twitter.com/msliwinski and https://twitter.com/radexp

We dive deep into Lean Manufacturing - how Ford’s mass manufacturing changed the world, how Toyota dramatically improved on the process - and why it matters even if you’re not in manufacturing.

In life, there’s a limited number of f’s you can give — very few in fact. And yet we give them out left and right, robbing us of simple tranquility in life.

We discuss the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k — a modern, approachable guide to stoicism.

Celebrating nearly 5 years and 199 episodes of The Podcast, and giving our recommendations for the best stories and recommendations we’ve recorded so far.

When we receive feedback, or an idea, a suggestion, we tend to become defensive. We’re sure they’re wrong and we’re right, and we stop listening. And thus we miss out on good insights.

Or do we? Perhaps the real problem is the culture, people being too delicate, and so we are forced into unnecessary niceties instead of giving and receiving feedback straight?

Like every year, we’re taking this moment to reflect on 2019, review our successes and failures, set some goals (not resolutions!) for 2020, and put in motion a process to ensure it’s going to be a great year.

Exploring the idea of abolishing (or enhancing) the hierarchical structure of companies in favor of dispersing responsibilities broadly into a mesh — not based on rank, but particular skill, specialization, experience.