• Recent weeks were amazing. The conference we were building - QLTY PULSE - finally materialized as well as I had a chance to give my talk in another conference. As a guest speaker. That still amazes me, but probably it is something that I can do now. OK, back to the point…

    • The talk I prepared was based on my Journey to Product Principles (in a mix with explanations how I think, how I progressed in my career, what am I solving now), it was captured as a video and now stored in Youtube - “Striving in the Gap. Impact Engineering”

    • The conference we built was a massive success to my judgement. It took months and months to prepare and the event day passed in a flash, but it was worth it. All the quality talks, all the conversations, challenging questions, engagement from the audience, networking, after party - it had them all. I was hearing a lot of and it popped in my head several times - “what’s next?” Let’s leave this unanswered for now.

    The next day after QLTY PULSE conference I felt very happy. I felt proud with our organizing team as well as with all the people who joined us as sponsors, supporters or attendees. I felt we did a great job and I was very satisfied.

  • Currently, I am working on a new talk - “100 years of Quality and Testing. From Deming to DevOps.” That will be my interpretation of John Willis’ talk (and book). As I already gave this talk two times, I knew how it went - the good, the bad, and the ugly - so I was improving the slides - adding more picures, removing lots of text, re-thinking the message I was trying to shape. And then I thought to put more focus on how Deming talked about respecting employees and eliminating all the obstacles for them to achieve pride in their craft. “The Greatest Waste” is a great (and short) read that covers the main principles for transforming the Job Satisfaction (looking from the context of USA quality crisis in 1980s). Those principles look pretty valid to this day.

    • respect people

    • provide joy in work (tell how their work contributes to providing customer value)

    • allow those doing the work to improve the process for doing so

    • provide support (training, coaching, job instructions etc.)

    • put people in the position to succeed

    • avoid creating pressures that run counter to doing this

    • support intrinsic motivation

  • At a very similar time Charity Majors published her latest article “How Hard Should Your Employer Work To Retain You?” which covers employee-employer relationship from the employer (or manager) perspective in a great detail. I admire how Charity is straight to the point, and focuses on maximizing potential, growth, productivity with a healthy balance of empathy, and covers even some of the more contraversial directions.

    • For example - “Your manager should also be honest if you could find better opportunities elsewhere.” It happened to me once from the person I respect a lot, and probably, that made me respect that person even more (understanding her perspective and potential loss to her, and still, advising me that).

    • And more…

    But I will not spoil more. Read it. It is great.

  • Another article that summarized some research about “The Real Reasons Employees Leave Companies” also concludes towards Job Satisfaction as a key factor. Interestingly, “high performers are generally less likely to leave.”

  • In my eyes, Job Satisfaction is one of the cornerstones of Quality Culture within the organization, and I reflect that in Product Principles. Currently, one of my goals it to keep adding to and keep refining those principles one by one, bit by bit to keep track of all the great tools for quality improvement. Stay with me in this journey, it will be fun!