The Original Skunk Works – Nickolas Means | The Lead Developer UK 2017

Nickolas Means shares the history of Lockheed's Skunk Works and draws lessons on agile practices, tight deadlines, and team dynamics for modern software teams.

Long before Agile and Lean became buzzwords, a scrappy group of aerospace engineers at Lockheed's Skunk Works were using similar practices to produce some of the most amazing aircraft ever built. The famous U-2 spy plane, the SR-71 Blackbird, and the F-117A Stealth Fighter are among the incredible planes the engineers at Skunk Works produced under impossibly tight deadlines and very limited budgets. What can we learn from the stories of these amazing planes and the engineers who built them? Let’s go back to our roots and let the original experts teach us about building awesome stuff together. About Nickolas Means Nick hails from Austin, TX, the Taco Capital of the World. When he’s not busy eating tacos, he’s the VP of Engineering at Muve Health, working with an incredibly talented team of developers to change how healthcare is delivered and paid for in the US. He’s a huge believer that software development is mostly human interaction and that empathy is the key to building great software.