Heidi Helfand
Consultant, Coach, and Author, Heidi Helfand Consulting. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
authoroperatorexecutiveother@heidihelfand ↗LinkedIn ↗heidihelfand.com ↗
She is the author of Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams, which explores deliberate patterns for reorganizing engineering and product teams. Over more than 20 years in tech, she held leadership and coaching roles at AppFolio and Procore, and was on the original team that built GoToMeeting.
1shows
1appearances
18statements
4resolved
3supported
0contradicted
75%fully supported
Everything Heidi Helfand said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Helfand: Fast-growing companies must embrace dynamic reteaming instead of static structures
“A lot of the books I would read on teams And the advice that I would get from people would be, ah, you know, you really want to keep your teams the same. You want to go for that forming, storming, norming, performing kind of thing. And I had thought about that…”
Helfand: Splitting high-performing teams to distribute their talent destroys their chemistry
“He had this thought that, you know, maybe if like we had this one team that was like, I guess they were delivering at this cadence that they love and they were building this stuff and there's this energy and you can almost feel it. Like, let's just spread the …”
Helfand: Companies should include employees in organizational change decisions
“The reality is we're humans together, and there's a lot of opportunity to build companies that delight people, where they're excited to be included in decision-making about how the organization grows and changes or shrinks.”
Helfand: Collaborative reteaming should be kept short to avoid organizational distraction
“Make a schedule, right? Bias towards shorter as opposed to longer. You don't want to deliberate on this forever because especially as you include more people, you know, it can be distracting. So you want to like proceed as expediently as you can.”
Helfand: Creating isolated teams with process freedom catalyzes new product lines
“Isolation is, or innovation by isolation, start a new team off to the side, a beneficial silo, give that team process freedom. Great for catalyzing new product lines within your existing company. Also great for emergencies”
Helfand: Expert City would not have innovated fast enough without team isolation
“If we would have stayed within our teams and we would have had to Develop with pixel perfect mockups done in Photoshop. Like, here you go. I don't think we would have been fast enough. I don't like that was not good for the innovation that we needed.”
Helfand: Pair programming and switching pairs prevents bottleneck single ownership
“You want people pairing and switching pairs. So they're not single owners of the system. So when they have an opportunity to do something that could be really important to the company, like be on one of these isolated teams, they can kind of fade out and not b…”
Helfand: Isolated innovation teams often leave unmaintainable technical debt for others
“I, I've seen isolated teams within companies where someone has the opportunity to sell something and they talk to their friends who are the engineers who build the feature for them, but then it leaves something for other people to maintain later and they weren…”
Helfand: Splitting teams creates new dependencies and shared role bottlenecks
“Sometimes splitting, though, can create dependencies that weren't there when you were together as one team. So you inherit other problems, or you might inherit challenges like, all right, the team decides it's more effective if they split into two or three, bu…”
Helfand: Menlo Innovations mandates regular pair rotation across all roles
“They built their company Menlo to have people work in pairs, not just the software engineers, team members work in pairs and they switch pairs at a regular cadence.”
Helfand: Org design is continuous Toyota Kata problem trading
“A lot of it is problem trading. You know, we have this challenge today. We decide, oh, there's a few ways we could handle this pros and cons of each solution. And let's, you know, it's like the kata. It's like the Toyota kata, you know, like grasp the current …”
Helfand: Fractionally allocating people across multiple projects fails due to context switching
“A lot of the times the percentages don't add up. It's very hard for people to multitask and be involved in like multiple efforts at once. It's hard for the brain with all the context switching that, that needs to happen in that case.”
Helfand: Redgate Software conducts open self-selection team reorganizations
“Redgate Software in Cambridge, UK, Chris Smith is a colleague of mine, and they do regular open self-selection reteaming activities when they're changing their strategic priorities.”
Helfand: Reorgs imply top-down mandates, unlike dynamic reteaming patterns
“I think reorg, you know, again, it's true that reorganization is a traditional word and implies on the large, it implies Top down changes that you have no say in. It's just, it's something different than what I consider reteaming, which is these five patterns …”
Helfand: McDonald's saved the Chicken McNugget using an isolated SWAT team
“The Chicken McNugget was saved by an isolated team, SWAT team. There's a book called Teamwork. It's an old book from, I think the seventies I have in my bookshelf here. And there's a story of the Chicken McNugget that you can read about where they brought in c…”
Helfand: Having new hires talk about themselves boosts retention and connection
“So you need to pay attention to the new hires that are joining, help them feel a sense of belonging, get them to talk about themselves, which is said to increase their sense of connection and retention. There's some research in the book, The Culture Code by Da…”
Helfand: Cross-Team Events Ease Future Reorgs by Building Relationships Early
“You could work with different people, build these larger relationships, which, you know, later makes it easier for reteaming because then later if you reteam, you're not strangers with people. So you want to cultivate the community.”
Helfand: Co-active coaching defines three levels of listening from internal to environmental
“I'm trained as a co-active coach, which involves different levels of listening. So you have level one, which is internal listening. Like if you and I are talking, but I'm thinking about like, what am I going to have for lunch? I'm in level one. I've got to red…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Heidi's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Consultant, Coach, and Author, Heidi Helfand Consulting | 1 | 18 | 75% 3/4 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |