How to effectively grow a development team

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Jeroen talks about the aspects of putting together a great development team. He helped KLM to hire 35 developers mostly by creating a pleasant culture.

I recommend this talk!

This talk should be mandatory for every manager out there. Great talk, excellent delivered by Jeroen. In my opinion it wasn't chaotic. but dynamic and entertaining.

Very good and inspiring talk. I like the balance in the presentation: great information, examples, point of views and humour. Definitely a must-see

Excellent talk, brilliantly delivered.

I liked that the speaker used the running example of the Schiphol teams to make his points, which made it really clear and easy to follow.
The pace of the talk was good, and the speaker's command of the English language was also very good.

I didn't find it chaotic at all and do not agree with the speaker that he can't answer questions very well, because he can :)

Must see!

An excellent talk. I agreed with a lot of what Jeroen said. There was also a lot to learn, and I now have some new ideas to be applied very soon at the office ;) For example, "Code burn" sessions, determining shared team values, and doing Slideshare Karaoke.

The talk could do with some major chapters, maybe visually supported in a more clear way.

I guess this talk makes a lot of sense to developers as well as team leads as well as other kinds of tech managers.

Conference organisers: please consider inviting Jeroen!

This talk touches on many subjects quite briefly, and still manages to go in-depth enough so that you get inspired to think and do more with the content. I've seen a lot of the things he mentions work first hand at our company.

As a speaker, Jeroen is easy to listen to and I get the feeling he could go on for hours without boring me.
Certainly a refreshing subject, and absolutely _not_ only for managers. Rules and regulations can only be pushed top-down, but culture can start on any level!

If I had to give a tip, it would be similar to what Matthias said. A little more chapter-based story, taking us along the timeline at Schiphol a bit more. Maybe touch on how things changed from 5 to 10 to 20 to 35?

You presented us with some very, very comprehensive insights in building and facilitating your teams. Some of the information was already known to me, some of it was not. The absolute number one value of this presentation was the way you brought the pieces of information, the quotations from others, and your personal experience together in one flowing story. Furthermore, I liked your storytelling setup, for example your search for the meaning of "culture". You told us what path you took, what didn't work, and finally what you eventually ended up with. This helps me accept that I'm not the only one that doesn't have a clue what he's doing :D.

I would like to point you to a few focus points for a possible next time.

Firstly, you might want to cut down a bit in apologies for the stuff you tell being based on your own experience. Make it clear in the beginning that you're talking from experience, but do not apologise. Your experience is precisely what makes this talk useful.

Secondly, you mentioned "kill all the meetings" and had to kind of chicken out of that later. Maybe you can try and figure out a statement on or definition for "meeting" that will make clear which meetings are valuable and which are not. I realise this can be a talk in it's own right, but it was a bit unclear to me what you meant.

And thirdly, I would have appreciated a quick roundup of all the topics you covered. There were a LOT of them. Maybe you can mention all the "chapters" you will be going through at the beginning of the presentation and make the "cuts" between them during your presentation a bit more clear.

A last small thing to work on: try and look your audience in the "eyes" more. Choose three or four people evenly scattered among the audience and look at them (or their foreheads; it makes me more comfortable not to actually look them in the eyes) from one to the other to give everyone the feeling of them being looked at.

And to use the sandwich tactic, closing here with some positive feedback again: I think you had the right amount of jokes, and rightly timed as well. More in the beginning, to get people to "like" you and your delivery, and when it needs to be just a little less fun and games, you focus more on the actual content. I'd say: you did a very good job.