Neo Vision’s Weekly Rant #23
Where we RANT about what goes exceptionally good and wildly bad when you turn your company digital
How do you feel now that you have crossed another finish line?
We can imagine every year as a race in a more significant competition called life. Every race is different. Ideally, we should perform better race after race if we gather insight and act upon it. But there are always things that happen during the race that we can’t control, so in the end, we should be grateful that we could participate and be sure to write down what we learned.
What insights have you gained this year that you want to carry into the next race?
As we reflect on another year, it’s natural to think about everything we’ve learned and accomplished. But rather than keeping these insights to ourselves, why not share them with our colleagues and create a ripple effect of learning and growth?
That’s why I found these days a good occasion for engaging my colleagues in a conversation about the lessons we’ve learned the hard or easy way this year. By sharing our experiences and insights, we can better understand the circumstances under which our teammates perform best, hold ourselves and others accountable, and spread knowledge as evenly as possible throughout the company. And by writing our ideas down somewhere, we can refer back to them and track our progress over time.
So let’s start a conversation about what we’ve learned this year. Share your insights and experiences in the comments below, and let’s continue to learn and grow together as we move into the new year.
22 lessons we learned through our work at Neo Vision in 2022:
You need project management for the client, not for the team. Project management must be used as a tool to set objectives and deadlines. The primary purpose of project management should be to learn what the client wants and to create a timeline with clear milestones that the client can track. On the other hand, the team doesn’t need Agile or Waterfall methodologies. They must deliver quality code (or any other deliverable) and respect the deadlines. Daily standup meetings, story points, and sprints are tools that can help you track the progress of the milestones and enables you to adjust the milestones fast if needed, but if your team delivers good code in time by doing a three-day marathon of nonstop coding and then sleeps for the next two days let them.
Information is helpful if it is appropriately organized - I use at least three apps to talk with people daily. When it comes to business, you need a person that takes all the information from all the used channels and organizes it properly. There should be only one document with all the information you and the client validate.
Work is work, and free time is free time. Never mix them up. Most people have nine-to-five jobs because they know precisely when they have to work and when they can do whatever you want. People that don’t have a nine-to-five job or have flexible work hours need to set a schedule. Otherwise, they will end up in chaos.
Rest when you feel the need. Otherwise, you go into burnout, and the time it takes to escape it is infinitely huge.
Give feedback when you are asked, don’t just say, “everything is ok”. Nothing is ever perfect. Who wants “yesmen” around?
When you get stuck during a task, take that fucking break.
Don’t wait too long before asking for help. It makes no sense to swirl into a problem without knowing what you are doing. You know best what your time is for discovering on your own and when to prevent wasting time.
Always be number one. Do whatever makes you happy. Truly happy. When you are happy, you can also help family and friends to become happy. Don’t make it the other way around. Don’t be miserable to make others happy, hoping it will make you happy in the long run.
Always be transparent about known technical debt.
“Continous Refactoring” is golden. If you work on a feature change and that particular code is smelly, refactor it. Agree with your PM, take the necessary time and do it. Ultimately, everyone will benefit from it because “there is no his/her code, only OUR code”.
Even if your progress seems nonexistent, it’s there. Trust the process and trust time (I love and empathize with this one a lot).
Persistence and curiosity are good—even 1% more perseverance and curiosity about what you are doing lead to improvement.
Write things down, particularly if you have the attention span of a goldfish and even if you think you don’t (In the abundance of information we live in, this should be the standard).
Experience is more valuable than skill. During relaxed periods, a person with three months of experience may be able to do the same daily tasks as a person with three years of experience. But the experienced person will always rise to the occasion during an impactful event. That’s why their remuneration may seem unfair to newer people during regular periods.
If you spend one year in a domain and feel like you don’t know anything, you are most likely right. Naval Ravikant’s words are living in my head rent-free: “Be patient, it takes ten years to build a career in anything”.
Even though you don’t see the immediate benefits, going the extra mile will always be worth it. Trust me on this one.
Being the dumbest in a room isn’t for the faint of heart but something you must embrace and be open about to become a better version of who you were yesterday.
Suppose you improve on every important aspect, even apparently insignificant ones. In that case, you will have a more significant result than perfecting just one thing and ignoring the others.
The world moves at such a blazing-fast speed that significant opportunities appear every few months. Stay knowledgeable and be willing to experiment with every new tool that appears, and you will most likely gain an unfair advantage.
Make yourself a habit of avoiding judging just based on appearances. Dig deeper, and you might find some value. Even if you don’t see any, you can be at peace knowing that you did your due diligence.
Creativity needs imagination. To boost it, you need to trigger your artistic vision in every way possible. Any domain can lead you to an idea you can adapt to your work. Wood sculpture, opera, nature, anything can be artistic if you are sensitive and look around you enough. So, improve your creativity and imagination by constantly having your creative mind awake and open to something that can lead you to an idea anywhere you look.
What I learned by living in Romania is that every individual is sensitive to a different type of art. And every country has its beauty. By coming here, I’ve exposed myself to new things which amazed me and have led to expanding my creativity by exploring new artistic directions and mixing them with my artistic baggage. Being open to the beauty of other cultures can be very helpful in boosting your creative resources and finding new ways to express it.
As you can see, 2022 was full of lessons for Neo Vision’s team, and I’m sure these will guide us to a much better new year. We hope that you've found value in all of this year’s weekly newsletters (this one included) and that it has inspired you to think about your own lessons learned and insights gained over the past year.
We wish you all the best in your personal and professional endeavors, and we invite you to join us for more great content in the coming year! Thank you for reading, and here's to a bright and successful future for us all!