I was born and educated in Italy but I lived one third of my adult life in Australia and the US. I am currently an independent Product Manager and facilitator.
You can find out the full details of my professional experience on Linkedin.
About my journey
I’ve been in the IT field since 2001, mostly as a software developer. In 2007 I moved to Australia where I worked until 2013. I went traveling for a few months (in Europe and the US). In January 2014 I relocated to New York City, then Colorado and finally Los Angeles. I like moving around and meeting new people.
Caring about shifting patterns in complex adaptive systems
In the last 4/5 years I was looking more and more in to retrospective facilitation. I was always attending 3 columns retro that felt dull. I call them whack-a-mole retrospectives.
I read all the books out there about retros and found a mentor (2017) which wrote books and is close to the people that came up with the “Agile retrospective” term. That helped giving me exposure and make me see the complexity around us.
I realized how linear and reductionistic was most of the work I did writing software and that most of the challenges are between people communicating and tech in just in the mix of this complex adaptive system.
The Event Storm class I took (2017) gave some insights in to that… how sometimes the problems don’t require any software change.
I noticed I started blogging and reading more about retros, facilitation, complexity than tech. I switched career track to product management in December 2017 which was a gateway to more visual facilitation.
I’ve been using different tools based on the client context and their needs. Impact maps and event storms have been useful but mostly facilitation for group decision making, visual facilitation and Cynefin. I did an online 9 weeks class on Cynefin and I am part of Cognitive Edge network where I ask noob questions :)
Last year I started a retrospective facilitation podcast where I chat with other facilitators.
What I am always looking for
I like to:
- facilitate group discussions
- conduct user research
- help product managers
- designing for emergence in complex systems
I’d like to run and setup introductory workshops (on facilitation, visual facilitation, agile principles, cynefin) but with the concept of praxis. I want to follow that up with work that put the theory in to action.
When I am collaborating with others I want to work with folks that appreciate the complexity around us and deal with it without claiming “we’ve done it before” we have the “solution” to your problems but rather that “we’re shifting patterns”.
I’d like clients that want me there. I am ok with skepticism but when it’s clear that I am not needed I’d rather not be there. It’s like forcing someone to pair program against their will.
Caring about my craft as a developer
As the years went past the first VB6 programs to generate WAP pages I kept looking for a way to write more maintainable code.
This lead me to automated tests (~2004), TDD (~2007) and Domain Driven Design (~2009). I struggled to apply DDD within Ruby on Rails (you can find posts on my blog about it http://teotti.com/topics/component-based-rails-architecture/ http://teotti.com/topics/maintainability/ ). When I had the opportunity to switch to Java I took it (~2015).
On the frontend it’s been a rollercoaster but the last tech I touch was mostly React.
I worked with React Native on a mobile driving license app for the NSW government (2017).
Another highlight of my time as a developer was a distributed load test on a cryptocurrency tracking app for 300K requests per minute (2017). You can get a lot more details of my tech background on my Linked-in.