Christina Wodtke: commitment

Transcript context

…Cool. I didn't expect the question to go in that direction, but I love it. Two more questions. What's something relatively minor that you've seen a company you've worked with change in their product development process that's had a tremendous impact on their ability to execute and ship crates? I will never forget when people stopped sitting with their disciplines and started sitting with their teams. I think that we in tech want everything to be tech and be remote and everything, blah, blah, blah. And there are definitely jobs that are wonderful remote, but if you're trying to innovate, there's nothing like getting the product trio to sit together, and preferably with walls. Walls are really underrated. If you can just give them a war room where they can put stuff on the wall, or I hate to say it, cubicles, I'd rather see offices, but if you can give people walls, it becomes part of your memory. And then you're not using your short-term memory to remember stuff. You're using it to think, and so the war room becomes a living memory so you can make connections. I mean, it's one of the hardest things I have to teach my students too, is that some things are just better done analog and that's okay. Reminds me of a story I just heard from a friend where there was a team sitting next to a data science team and they were one table apart. They're right next to each other. And the data team just had a lot of concerns with what that team was building. They didn't believe in what they're doing and they're just like, "Why are we wasting these resources on this thing?" And the head of data science put one of the data people on the team and had them sit just one table over with the team and everything changed. They're just like, "Okay, let's do this. This is great. We're going to build some awesome products."…

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