Heidi Helfand
Heidi Helfand is the author of Dynamic Reteaming, which outlines practical strategies for orchestrating successful team and company org changes. Her work is informed by more than 20 years in the tech industry at notable companies like AppFolio, Procore, and Expertcity/GoToMeeting.
Engineering Skills
Regularly rotating engineers between teams and pairs prevents knowledge silos and builds systemic resilience.
"Switching also helps build that knowledge redundancy in your company... have multiple owners of a system. So not only one person is that tower of knowledge that owns that one system... pairing and swi..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Assessing a candidate's specific motivation for joining your company reveals their level of research and alignment with the mission.
"I always like to ask people, 'Well, why do you want to join our company? What is it about working with us that would be exciting for you? Why our company as opposed to another one?'"
Successful onboarding prioritizes immediate social integration and belonging through collaborative work like pairing.
"So the tip with one by one is when someone joins, help them feel a sense of belonging, and you can do that through not having their first day be them sitting over there alone. You could have someone h..."
Transparent 'whiteboard reteaming' reduces anxiety and improves organizational design by involving the people affected in the feedback loop.
"I really like it when there's transparency in reorgs... We rolled these whiteboards out and it had the team structure with everyone's names on it. It had the name of the team, the mission of the team,..."
Creating a shared history through storytelling helps merged teams build empathy and a unified identity.
"One activity I do like to do with teams that merge is called story of our team... each team makes a timeline of... when they joined their team, when people left, and significant events and things they..."
Spreading high performers from a single successful team across the organization often destroys the unique chemistry that made them high-performing in the first place.
"There's one team that was like, I guess they were delivering at this cadence that they loved... let's just spread the people from that team across the other ones and then we'll have that. And it didn'..."
Leadership Skills
The RIDE framework provides clarity by defining specific roles for requesting, informing, deciding, and executing a change.
"She taught us the RIDE framework for decision making clarity and it's who's requesting the change, who can give input to the change, who's the decider on the change, and who's going to execute on the..."