Articles on Process
Three Team Exercises to Start Your Next Project Right
At Carbon Five, we are always kicking off new projects with different teams, and we have a set of activities that we’ve found to be pretty critical in helping ensure our teams are aligned from the beginning. Here are three activities we’ve found to be particularly meaningful (and check out their templates here). Visions, Challenges, …
How to Use Actionable Emojis in Your Pull Request Reviews
Carbon Five has embraced emoji in daily written communication. They carry a lot of meaning in a small package, they inject personality and culture into our writing, and they visually stand out on the page as you scan a document. Pull requests are no exception. Love them or hate them, emojis ensure our pull request …
Building for Intersectionality in Tech: Intersectionality and Product Management
By Nicole Thayer & Tiffany Wong Note: This is the fourth post in this blog series on intersectionality in tech. Check out the first, second, and third posts. Welcome back to our ongoing series about how employees at Carbon Five approach intersectionality in tech. For more information on why we’re doing this and what we’re hoping …
Building for Intersectionality in Tech: Intersectionality and Software Engineering
By Nicole Thayer & Tiffany Wong Note: This is the third post in this blog series on intersectionality in tech. Check out the first, second, and fourth posts. Welcome back to our ongoing series about how employees at Carbon Five are approaching conversations about intersectionality in tech. For more information on why we’re doing this and what we’re …
How To Build Products with Cutting-Edge Technology Using Agile Methodology
During her three years as a software engineer at Carbon Five, Rose Karr has had the opportunity to work on several projects that involve cutting-edge technology. She has found that while working with this kind of tech can be exciting, it also presents a unique set of challenges. In a recent talk, Karr discussed some …
Lessons from Developing a Community Learning Platform – Bendable.com
An interview with Rick Wartzman and Sarah Zaner. In the midst of a global pandemic, Carbon Five client, Drucker Institute, launched Bendable, a community-based learning platform, in June 2020. We sat down with Rick Wartzman, Executive Director, and Sarah Zaner, Senior Director at KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society at Drucker Institute, to learn …
Greenfield Projects: Seven Ways to Set Yourself Up for Success
Greenfield projects have a hidden set of needs — and each one can be an opportunity for growth if handled well! But if handled poorly or if not handled at all, these pitfalls can perpetuate and multiply across the lifetime of the project, taking you further and further away from your treasure and further into the endless cave of despair.
Shifting to A Work From Home Policy: A Mini Survival Guide for Your Company
Given the COVID-19 crisis, most companies that can have shifted to temporary work from home policy. While about a quarter of those companies are likely already adept at working remotely — at least to some degree. The rest are completely new to this way of working and it’s not an easy shift. I’d like to …
Recap: Running Remote Product Teams Fireside Chat
Carbon Five has worked with a variety of clients across the globe and within our own five offices that require remote collaboration while maintaining a sense of camaraderie and team cohesion. With a lot of teams transitioning to remote workforces, we opened up the conversation to share some of our best practices. We would love …
What Are These $%^&* Chores Doing in My Backlog!
Beyond Just Features and Bugs Projects tend to have three types of “tasks” for developers to do: features, bugs, and chores. Features and bugs are mostly self-explanatory. Features deliver direct customer value. Bugs are features that are not working as intended. These two tasks focus on direct connections to the users. Chores provide indirect customer …