We are committed to helping others. This requires communication, and most importantly, empathy. We learn how to work so well with our clients and each other that we make progress better together than either of us would alone.
For engineers and often all disciplines, this starts with pairing. Pairing is a process of collaborative problem solving.
Though pairing is often associated with engineering (pair programming), PMs and designers are very often paired with client or company counterparts, too. When we pair effectively, we learn at an order of magnitude faster than when we work alone. This means that we have a commitment to share our knowledge with our pairs.
For all of us, we’re also part of teams. We share what we know and have learned with our whole team, and we offer our skills to our teams whenever they are valuable.
And we’re also part of an office, regional group, and/or large multi-project effort. Our team might have solved a problem that another “near by” team is currently experiencing. We share our learnings with our peers on other teams, so that they don’t reinvent the wheel we’ve already invented.
And we’re also part of a global practice that spans the world. Teams in one office might have solved problems that teams in other offices or areas are running into. We work continuously to share knowledge and experiences between offices, regions, and countries, and we want each of us to be a part of that effort — our collective only works when each of us remembers to reach beyond our local tribes and form a truly global hive mind.
And we’re also part of a global company that’s more than just our consulting division. Our Tanzu R&D organization is continuing to iterate on XP, Lean, and User Centered Design at scale — and we have to understand those evolutionary steps to apply them with everyone with whom we work. They’re also building a set of products that help our companies address organizational and operational challenges at scale; we have to understand the value of those products, and how to effectively wield them.
And we’re also part of a global product development community, of which VMware is only one small part. We encourage each other to give back to the community, to share our thoughts, our knowledge, our craft. We encourage our Labs team members to write blog posts (we’ll publish them), give conference talks (we’ll pay for it), attend meetups — or even start meetups (we’ll host them!). We encourage everyone to give back and share our time, tools, code, and approach with internal and open source communities to maximize impact ❤️.
