Every lead and every dev manager has been here in the past two years: The star developer on your team sets a fifteen-minute meeting on Friday morning for 2:30 pm that afternoon, with subject “Meeting.” Uh-oh. And the meeting starts with a big sigh: “Well, this is hard to say, but…”
You’re about to have ten business days to do lots_of knowledge transfer. You’re about to revisit every roadmap and try to understand what’s about to happen to your velocity. There’s got to be a better way than just imploring that “everyone document everything.” And there is!
There’s a number of specific, useful things you can do to be prepared for turnover. You can implement specific strategies of team makeup, rotation of responsibilities, and flexible estimation that will not only take the dread out of “star performer” syndrome, but will also make everybody’s job simpler, more productive, and more fun.
Ironically, being ready for team turnover can actually reduce team turnover. And it’ll take some of the dread out of Friday afternoons!
This talk will be about specific, actionable strategies to prepare for turnover – roles and responsibilities, documentation practices, anti-patterns to avoid, and even “chaos monkey” style games – that you can use immediately to make life better both for you and for your team.
