Great teams build great products. But what makes a team ‘great’? We have a pretty good understanding of how to improve our code from a technical perspective, but how can we increase the effectiveness of the team creating that code and designs? In the end, software is a technical activity, created by human beings, so it’s crucial to understand the underlying social dynamics that affect our code and designs.

We should especially try to understand the social heuristics that we are using continuously to make sense of the world. In this talk, Evelyn van Kelle will discuss why we need a shared sense of reality and how this relates to team structure and the quality of your products. Second, she will explore two famous perspectives on sensemaking, and relate them to three social heuristics that are heavily affecting our products and decisions.

• What you see is all there is (availability heuristic)
• Beware of the experts (related to overconfidence)
• The curse of first impressions (related to anchoring)

These heuristics have everything to do with tackling complexity at the heart of software development. In fact, they offer us ways to deal with the complexity we’re facing on a daily basis. If we know the domain, or ‘world’ that we’re operating in, and we are aware of heuristics that may affect our work, we can safely celebrate heuristics and make the best decisions of our lives.