First time I built something for myself

I have been managing and building design teams for a very long time, and I have noticed that I have never actually built anything for myself. Something that I would have day in, day out, and I took the chance to do it finally.

Let me tell you why I built BrickThink first. I fell in love with the methodology from the very first time I was brought into a workshop. At the time, I was working at a bank with many egos and had worked with these people on multiple projects, where the person who shouted the loudest won. But this workshop was different. It was the first time I saw everyone's ego thrown out the door and come together as a group working at the same company. It made many people realise their aims and targets, which were obscure to others, as well as their view of how our application is meant to be built. These were people who hated one another, but after that workshop, they felt a different attitude towards one another and what each person was responsible for.

It was at that moment that I realised the magic that these workshops can bring. I decided to take it on. Though I was never officially certified as a facilitator, I was able to bring it in for multiple teams I was building. In every workshop, the ending was the same. Everyone had agreed on what the application they are building is meant to do, and on the sacrifices product management would have to make to stabilise the application (I will explain my workshop tactics in another article).

As I started building and growing larger teams across the world, it became harder for me to conduct these workshops. Luckily, I was at an age when most people had kids, so that made life a bit easier, since I knew some people had LEGO sets at home, but it was never the same as doing it in real life. We had just come out of COVID, so you can imagine asking my manager for funds to fly people over to play LEGO was a no. I started to get frustrated more and more that, as more people are working remotely and abroad in many companies, only a few will be lucky enough to take on this methodology, and I believe if you are going to make something open-sourced, as someone explained to me what LSP is, then people who work remotely should take advantage of this as well.

That's when I came up with BrickThink. It's only been a week since I released it, and it's already starting to pick up traction. Let's see how this project pans out.