Failure Management and Response with Nickolas Means

Failure Management and Response with Nickolas Means

TableXI is offering training for developers and product teams! For more info, email workshops@tablexi.com.

Guest

Nickolas Means | nickol.as | VP of Engineering at MuveHealth

Summary

How can you learn from an engineering team's failure? Can you take the examples of how others have dealt with engineering problems to improve your team's day-to-day operations. Our guest is Nickolas Means, a software manager at Muve Health, who is fascinated by engineering failures. We talk about what you can learn from studying disasters, how to create a company culture in calm times that will works smoothly in stressful times, and how a successful engineering team communicates using stories and how they handle mistakes. Along the way, we talk about the recent incident at the Seattle Airport, the CitiCorp building in Manhattan, Three Mile Island and other engineering and team missteps. We have, I hope, a successful show about failure.

Notes

02:12 - Learning From Engineering Team Failure

• Seconds From Disaster

04:49 - Self-Reporting of Near Accidents

• How a change in hospital policy saved thousands of lives

06:54 - First Story/Second Story

• RailsConf 2018: Who Destroyed Three Mile Island? by Nickolas Means
• The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error 2nd edition Edition

08:46 - How the Airline Worker Who Stole a Plane in Seattle Exposed a Security Risk

13:44 - The Design Flaw That Almost Wiped Out an NYC Skyscraper

• RubyConf 2016 - The Building Built on Stilts by Nickolas Means
• 99% Invisible Podcast: Structural Integrity

16:33 - Focusing on Blamelessness and Building a Learning Culture on a Team

21:04 - Overpaging Engineering Teams

• Charity Majors on overpaging

25:21 - Story Communication

• Jeff Bezos Banned PowerPoint in Meetings. His Replacement Is Brilliant

29:44 - Helping Team Members Make Better Decisions

• The Boring Software Manifesto
• Dan McKinley: Choose Boring Technology

34:29 - How to Behave When Things Go Wrong

• The Johnson & Johnson Tylenol Crisis

Related Episodes

• Developers from the Perspective of Product Owners
• The Social Responsibility of Coding with Liz Abinante
• Agile Teams and Escaping Velocity with Doc Norton and Claire Podulka

Special Guest: Nickolas Means.