Team Leader Toolbox - Book Announcement

TLDR: I’m writing a book about tools & techniques useful for software Team Leaders.

Uffff… feels good to blurt it out. Yes, I’m writing a book. It is official now. 🙂

The whole story began a few months ago when decided to write down all useful tools, techniques and concepts related to team leadership that I know. Then, I looked at the list and I had this aha-moment:

“Hey, there are pretty interesting things here! Why not share it with the world?”

And so it all began.

What is inside?

The tools and techniques I write about are a mixture of dev wisdom, agile best practices, sociocracy occult science, metrics black magic, management 3.0 incantations, organizational lore, all with a grain of facilitation tricks plus some common sense. I’m rarely – if every! – an originator of the concepts I describe. I’ve been using (and abusing) them, I’ve been adjusting them to my needs, and I’ve found their bright and dark sides by doing so (AKA “learning the hard way”). And in my opinion, this entitles me to share their secrets with you.

The structure

The book is composed of short sections (few pages each), each presenting one tool / technique in the following manner:

Intro
- The problem: Description of the problem the team faces.
- The solution: Few words about the solution (tool / technique) that will be discussed.
- [optional, only if I have sth. really good] The story: Some story/situation – ideally from non-IT context – that would illustrate the problem and/or the solution. So that the reader could have some mental hook to easily digest the content of the chapter.
Main part: Description of what is to be done & how to apply the technique.
Tips & comments: Best practices & things that for whatever reason weren’t mentioned in the main part.
Old cynic vs. excited fanboy: a duet of strictly opposite opinions regarding the technique presented in the section. One grumpy and disbelieving, the other one falling in love with the concept. The idea behind this is to 1) deflate the silver-bullet balloon 2) have some fun 3) give a reader some food for thought (“is this technique really applicable in my context?”)
Links to relevant websites (including my blog posts & some downloadable extras that I plan to put to my blog).

So, this is my plan. Now, all I have to do is to eat this elephant, one bite at a time. 😉

FYI, I already wrote few books before (see http://kaczanowscy.pl/books/) so I know what I’m doing. Not sure if I continue with self-publishing this time, though.