Town Hall Meeting
Okay, this time I'll post the summary of the Town Hall Meeting, which I've promised. I've talked with my co-workers and the staff association also sent out a summary with some comments.
In general I asked questions about the current and future situation of our product, how product-development will be handled and what developers can expect.
Well, I can't really complain much about the situation of our team in the last weeks, our department leader did his best to protect us from the almost-random and changing moods of our company leaders which always wanted to pull out the best people from existing teams and stuff them into new projects. Everyone can guess, that such a behaviour does no good to existing teams and projects and the chances that these will fail, not finish within timeline or become unprofitable are rising with every removed developer.
It seems, that all such stuff comes to a stop now and we'll focus again on existing and or proved products and knowledge and we won't accept every (really every!) project, which crosses our path, even if we don't have any experience in that areas (what aparently has been done in the past).
At the Town Hall Meeting there was a clear committment towards our product development, which will be enforced in the future. We'll get (a bit) more marketing and sales, our target market is enlarged from the top-only to the whole enterprise-market and we have a bit more freedom in development, so that we can implement features which (we hope) will be asked for in the future.
Of course there were other questions at the meeting and most of them have been answered in a way, so that I can look very optimistic into our future, but I want to concentrate on those, which more or less affect me, our team or product.
Some questions were also answered in a "business"-manner, so that you wouldn't have less information if there wouldn't have been an answer at all, but on nearly all questions it was said that more talks and discussions will happen to improve the situation.
If you would ask me now to tell you my motivation on a scale of 10, I'd give it an 8-9. Quite high :)
Somewhere in the (past) bad day's I think I were down somewhere to 3-4, I'm now happy that I kept hopefull.