Michael Lopp's Blog, page 26

Radical Efficiency

Silicon Valley earned its name for the early chip-making business which staked early claims in orchard filled valleys. Companies such as Fairchild Semiconductor and later Intel and AMD were in the business of silicon, but they were also in the business of reinventing business introducing such concepts of stock options for employees and openly denying the hierarchical culture of the traditional corporation. “People remained faithful to each other, but not to the employer or the industry.”1

I’ve spent a good part of the past three decades at companies such as Borland, Netscape, Apple, Palantir, Pinterest and now Slack and all that time I’ve been watching. What is the secret sauce? What are the attributes of high growth start-ups that allow some to be wildly successful where others plateau, stagnate and die?

Here’s one common thread I’ve observed: healthy companies and teams efficiently communicate.

A Diverse Set of Eyeballs

I can’t stop highlighting Kim Scott’s recently published Radical Candor. I watched the original video several years back and was instantly infected with her simple (but complex) framework around both delivering and receiving feedback:

At the core of the concept of Radical Candor is the idea that the humans you work with and for are uniquely equipped to give you feedback. These are the humans that day in and day out are watching how you treat others, how many you make decisions, and how the results of those decisions play out.

Not only do these humans have a wealth of useful feedback, but they are also distinctly not you. They are each shaped by a different set of experiences that subtly shape their feedback with a healthy bias. Whether this bias increases or decreases the quality of the feedback is a moot point if they never effectively give it to you.

My rule: all ideas get better with a diverse set of eyeballs. Radical Candor preaches a clear and humane strategy for developing relationships with your circle of relevant humans so that everyone’s operating mode defaults to efficiently sharing feedback.

That’s the third time I’ve typed “efficiency.” When I reflect on teams that I consider efficient communicators, I measure in the following ways:

How long does it take new (perhaps controversial) information to be introduced?
How quickly do they adapt to new information? How fast do they error correct?
How vigorous is the debate? How respectful?

The core mechanic in each of these communication interactions is feedback. It isn’t just data moving Human A to Human B; it’s the required amount of effort for Human A to build, convey, and deliver that data plus the required amount of effort for Human B to receive, digest, and act on the data. If you define effort as work plus time, the higher the total effort, the lower the efficiency.

Scott writes, “Defining [work] relationships is vital. They’re deeply personal, and they’re not like any other relationships in your life. But most of us are at a loss when we set about to build those relationships.”

Well defined work relationships define the teams I’ve admired in my career. They were not the nicest teams, they were not the most pleasant, but these were teams with deep trust in each other. They deeply heard each other. They weren’t worrying about personality conflicts or politics, they were listening for real treasure… the signal.

Silicon Sauce

Radical Candor is not just a framework for delivering feedback; it’s an entire management philosophy about building high-trust teams. While it covers the compounding strategic value of efficient feedback, the book also dives into developing growth plans for your team, creating a culture of open communication, techniques of avoiding boredom, and defining a results-focused team.

If you’re looking for the secret sauce of the Silicon Valley, I would argue that each chapter of Radical Candor captures a component of that sauce. If you are a leader of humans, aspire to lead humans, or just want to iterate on the craft of communication, grab a highlighter, and dive into Radical Candor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitor... ↩

From the 2016 Panic Report

Via Panic Blog:

Defining roles is important What happens when you’re truly a “flat” organization and you have a bunch of incredibly smart people that can all offer valuable input on almost every task happening at any one time? Things can actually slow down a little at times. You want the right people on the right tasks, and you want someone who can make tough decisions and process the possibilities. It’s possible we’ve outgrown complete flatness. We’ll be experimenting with this more into the future, although it’s so tricky — you don’t want people feeling excluded, and you don’t want to extinguish the passion of creating!

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How to Build a Button

My Touch Bar rage has peaked.

It is a point of pride for me how I type. I am proud of the fact that I can sit in this here chair, stare at the screen, and let the words flow effortlessly. I very rarely look at the keyboard, and when I do, I have a word that describes this state. It is an interruption.

Productive work is the successful chaining together of uninterrupted minutes. The longer the chain, the higher the productivity. Interruptions break the chain.

In week #3 of actively using the 15” MacBook Pro, I am delighted by its build quality. I love its weight. Last night, I found myself admiring the machining of the aluminum notch that allows me to open the computer. I type deftly on this hardware.

I am also equally deft at randomly muting my music, unintentionally changing my brightness or volume level, and jarringly engaging Siri.1

It is maddening. And it’s not improving.

However, the essential law of technology is evolve or die. This means it is worth my time to deconstruct the Touch Bar to infer design intent. To do this, we must answer the basic question: “What is a button?”

My Button Definition

Let’s start with my brief definition of an efficient button:

It has a perceptible boundary that makes it findable.
It exists in an expected location relative to its container.
It is “pushed” to achieve an obvious purpose.

To understand this definition, let’s test it against buttons, button-containers, and button-like-things:

A keyboard button. Your classic button. It’s got an edge you can both see and feel. It’s in a fixed location. When you push it, you normally see the result immediately. This is a button.

The home button on the iPhone. This button has gone through significant mechanical and design changes and is another classic button. As the iPhone is a far more mobile device than a keyboard, the importance of the perceptible boundary that makes it findable is increased. Close your eyes, grab your phone and unlock it. No problem, right? Keep those eyes closed and launch Safari. No fair using Siri.

Minor point. On the newer iPhones, you don’t push and physically move the button. The button doesn’t move, but it gives you the impression it does with haptic feedback. To fully experience this, “press” the button an iPhone with a dead battery. Apple has done an admirable job creating the impression of a satisfying button press.

The Force Trackpad. It has a perceptible edge, it is always in an expected location, and you do press it. However, the Trackpad serves a multitude of functions. Its purpose changes based on application, the number of fingers on the Trackpad, and the gymnastics those fingers perform whilst on the Trackpad. There is an argument that mechanically it’s a button, but due to its myriad functionality, I would say it’s not a button, but a Trackpad.

The Apple TV remote. I’m bringing this one up because the Apple TV buttons are a frequent source of frustration for me. When you look at my button definition, the flaw is clear. The Apple TV buttons are just fine provided that you understand which end of the remote, the container, is pointed where. It’s when the bottom of the remote is pointed forward, and your fingers start to the explore the remote when you realize, “Something’s wrong” and you glance at the remote to orient yourself.

The Apple TV remote has a pleasant feel in my hand. It’s by far the most visually appealing remote that I own. It offers a sensible set of useful button options. However, this grace is interrupted each time I have to stop and ask, “How am I holding it?” The buttons are fine; the flaw is that to work, you must visually inspect the remote. Even my worst remotes with their plethora of buttons easily convey which end should be pointed forward.

The Touch Bar The Touch Bar buttons fail my definition in a couple of ways. I’m going to give it partial credit for the perceptible boundary because, yes, you can look at the bar and see the buttons. However, try the close your eyes test and turn up the volume on your MacBook Pro. How’s your brightness looking? Did Siri say hi?

When you combine this difficulty in tactile findability with the fact that the buttons on the Touch Bar are gleefully changing position when you move from application to application, it appears the Touch Bar has more in common with the Trackpad than the keyboard. The buttons on the Touch Bar are most certainly buttons; my issue is with their container.

Grace Interrupted

In the history of keyboards, I have never been as inept as I’ve been with the Touch Bar keyboard. I’ve been finishing this piece for the last hour and I’ve been keeping track of the number of times I’ve accidentally hit a Touch Bar button, and that number is nine. The total number for this article is likely 5x the number.

Developers were the ones who originally raged on the Touch Bar because it contained one of their most frequently used keys – the escape key. The absence of the clear feedback of a physical key press is a violation of perhaps the most important word in my definition we have not explored “efficiency.”

The Touch Bar is gorgeous but is inefficient.

Apple’s job has always been to courageously lead the charge on design. Apple has a strong defensible opinion regarding where we should go versus where we’ve been. The Touch Bar hits common Apple Design high points. It cleanly integrates the keyboard and extends it. The gentle animations with occasional splashes of color are a joy to share with others.

… but it’s inefficient.

Apple, I am with you on this design journey. I am cool with the dongle explosion that accompanied the MacBook Pro because your opinion is one universal port and I get that. The future is shaped by those who lead.

However, the role of a well-designed keyboard is to stay the hell out of the way. A good keyboard is a tool designed to be unnoticed because its job is to get the ideas out of my head, through my fingers, and into the computer as quickly and efficiently as possible.

It’s called a Mac Book Pro. Pro. For professionals. I’ve worked under the assumption that professionals were interchangeable with developers. After multiple weeks of usage, I can’t see how a developer or a writer would choose the Mac Book Pro.

You can arrange the Touch bar buttons via System Preferences. ↩

Hi. Thanks for the Unsolicited Mail!

Never in the history of ever have I acted on unsolicited mail. Ever. Your mail is unsolicited which means I did not request it. This makes your email spam. This is unfortunate because there is a non-zero chance the goods and/or services you’re selling might be useful. Given to my own devices, it is probable that in my endless compulsive wandering of the Internet that I would have discovered your goods and/or service and learned about the value you created.

But you blew it.

By spamming me, your product is cast as useless. And it’s not.

I realize that your strategy works. I realize that blindly spamming email addresses costs you very little and a single digital response percentage justifies your effort. You are going to continue with this strategy because the reward outweighs the risk and it feels like the fiscally responsible move.

My strategy works, too.

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Trust Your Gut

Despite the growing reliance on “big data” to game out every decision, it’s clear to anyone with a glimmer of self-awareness that humans are incapable of constantly rational thought. We simply don’t have the time or capacity to calculate the statistical probabilities and potential risks that come with every choice.

I feel I’ve spent 22.3% of my last four years of my life arguing with data-minded engineers about this topic.

“The number of objective facts deserving of that term is extremely low and almost negligible in everyday life,” he says. “The whole idea of using logic to make decisions in the world is to me a fairly peculiar one, given that we live in a world of high uncertainty which is precisely the conditions in which logic is not the appropriate framework for thinking about decision-making.”

Preach it.

(Via Quartz)

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The New Manager Death Spiral

The starting gun fires and when the starting gun fires, you run. You’re a new manager, and while the sound of gun firing is startling, you run because this is finally your chance. You’ve been promoted to the role of manager, you want this gig, and this is your chance to shine, so you run.

I will now explain how your good intentions and well-trained instincts are going to erode your credibility, stunt the growth of your team, and re-enforce the theory that most managers are power hungry jerks working with all the authority and making judgment calls with woefully incomplete data.

It’s called the New Manager Death Spiral and, unfortunately, I can effectively write about it because I’ve performed parts of it. Over and over.

BANG

This is a synthesized version of the New Manager Death Spiral. It combines every single leadership mistake you can make spun into a beautiful, cascading, horrific mess. It is unlikely that you’ll perform the Death Spiral this completely, but I guarantee that you’ll perform parts of it.

It begins with a thought, “I can do it all. I’m The Boss.”

As a new manager, you want to prove yourself, so you sign-up for all the things, you work late, and you do your very best to kick ass and make a good first impression. This is the approach that worked well for you as an individual, so, of course, it’ll work when leading a team. This is where the Spiral begins because the initial thought is actually, “I can do it all myself. I’m the Boss.”

You are used to having complete visibility and total ownership of your work because that is how it worked in your former individual contributor work life. You are instinctually reluctant to delegate your work because it represents an unfamiliar loss of power. Compounding your poor judgment is your belief that you are the best person to do this because you’ve done it before as an individual.

The problem is your enthusiastic effort to prove yourself. You signed up for far too much work than you possibly do yourself, which leads to your first failure mode: the quality of your work drops because you lack the time to correctly complete it. Missed deadlines, dropped commitments, and half-completed work passed off as the final product are just a couple of awkward situations you discover.

The Spiral starts to pick up speed now because you can see the glimmer of your failure in their eyes. You update your mantra with an affirmation, “I can do it all myself. I’m in control because I am the Boss.”

With the first admission of the reality of the situation, you begin to half-delegate the smaller less important projects. Half-delegation is the act of giving them the work, but not full control nor context. They don’t need it, right? You’re the Boss. You’ll tell them when they need to know.

Like you, they start to fail either because they feel they don’t have the authority to change the course of the project or their lack of understanding of the fun context around the project had them pointed in the wrong direction from day one. They bring this to your attention.

First, They Tell You

This is where the Spiral gets painful. Remember – every possible wrong decision stitched together.

The team on the failing project says, “We didn’t understand that this portion of the project was more important, so we started over here which, in hindsight, was clearly the wrong place to start.”

You’re internally frustrated. You think, but do not say, “It’s obviously the wrong place to start. If I were running this project, we wouldn’t be in this situation.” You’re right, but you’re also so wrong. You’re right that if you were hands on running this project, your prior experience would’ve improved execution. You’re wrong because a strategy of not building trust through successful delegation is one the greatest accelerants to the New Manager Death Spiral.

However, you can not appear weak. Remember the line, “I can do it all myself. I’m in control because I am the Boss.” Changing strategy is an admission failure, failure is a weakness, and you are the Boss. You give the barest of corrective advice and tell them “Go figure it out… or else.”

Your team leaves this interaction with the following impression: they are failing, and you’re mad, inflexible and unwilling to listen to their opinions. This is the point of the of the Spiral where they stop talking to you and start talking to each other.

Then, They Tell Each Other

Since you aren’t listening, this team starts talking to each other and other teams. They are trying to self-correct and perhaps they might, but this is the Death Spiral, so they don’t. They fail. This is unfortunate because they had all the data to be successful and just needed a leadership nudge, but since it was clear you didn’t want to hear it they didn’t share, and the project failed.

Everyone is demoralized, everyone feels like they failed, but since no one is truly communicating all sorts of opinion starts to become facts. You tell yourself the story that you might not have the right people on the team and perhaps if shuffling people around you’ll get a better outcome. They think they failed because you didn’t get them context because you were busy withholding information, being proud, and not listening.

They continue to judge, and they create their versions of the truth and you and your leadership style. Again, there’s far more of them than you, which means that their version of the truth spread at a faster rate than yours. Eventually, a piece of that twisted truth regarding your leadership ability arrives on your plate from someone you listen to and you’re shocked.

That is not me.

Congratulations. Through a deft combination of poor communication, crap judgment, and systematic demoralization of the team, you and your team have not only failed at the task at hand; but you’ve also irreparably harmed your relationship with your team and your credibility.

You’re right, it’s not really who you are. Who you are now is precisely the opposite of a leader.

Management is Not a Promotion

You’re promoted when you are successful in your current job. It is equal parts recognition and reward. In many companies, the expectation is that you’re performing at that higher level for a period before you are promoted, so there is a good chance you are equipped for this gig.

You do not start management equipped for the gig. I’ve said it before, your first role in management is a career restart. Yes, you’ve acquired dealing-with-humans skills from being a part of a team, but the New Manager Death Spiral is deliberately constructed to demonstrate how the very instincts that got you the new role are going to steer you in the wrong direction.

The New Manager Death Spiral is an unrealistic, but deliberate construction. It is unlikely that you performed every single step in the Spiral. It is equally likely that as you read this article that you nodded your head, “Yup. I did that.” Whether you performed one or all of the steps, the lessons are the same, and they are lessons I wish someone would’ve given me as a first-time manager. Here are three:

Let others change your mind. There are more of them than you. The size of their network is collectively larger than yours, so it stands to reason they have more information. Listen to that information and let others change your perspective and your decisions.

Augment your obvious and non-obvious weaknesses by building a diverse team. It’s choosing the path of least resistance to build a team full of humans who agree with you. Ideas don’t get better with agreement. Ideas gather their strength with healthy discord, and that means finding and hiring humans who represent the widest spread of perspective and experience.

Delegate more than is comfortable. The complete delegation of work to someone else on the team is a vote of confidence in their ability, which is one essential way the trust forms within a team. Letting go of doing the work is tricky, but the gig as a manager isn’t doing quality work, it’s building a healthy team that does quality work at scale.

At the heart of each lesson is the same essential leadership binding agent: trust. When you are actively listening, and when their ideas visibly change your decisions, you build trust. When diversity of opinion is valued and creates healthy debate, you create trust. When you truly delegate the work that made you a better builder, they will begin to trust you as a leader.

And that’s who you want to be.

Don’t Yolo Hard Conversations

On the list of leadership merit badges, “Successfully deliver hard news” is one the hardest badges to acquire. It’s not just that you have news, it’s hard news. It’s an honest something the human sitting across from you does not want to hear. Not only do you need to deliver it, but you need to successfully deliver it.

There are endless ways to screw this up. This is why it’s a merit badge. Once you learn how to successfully deliver hard news, you will never forget. The experience is hard-earned.

Bad news, I’m not going to give you a complete strategy, these are simple tips. Starting with:

Write down what you are going to say. Don’t yolo hard conversations.
Share that writing with another neutral human who you know will give you critical feedback. They will find flaws and optimizations that you have not seen.
Sleep on the conversation that you’ve written down and vetted with the neutral humans. Your background processing skills are strong.

The final tip is the most important. You can fail to write down your thoughts, you can not share your thoughts with a neutral human, and you can fully yolo the delivery, but the final bullet you skipped is my simple tip: let them sleep on it.

The moment that a human being hears hard news they stop listening. It’s a normal and healthy fight or flight instinct. Right or wrong, the human on the receiving end of this news feels attacked and when you’re attacked you run because who wants to be attacked?

They hear you, they are recording the conversation, but they are not listening because their mind is telling them to run for it. Their first reaction, the first words tell you, are not how they feel. They need to let their guard down, and that only comes with time.

Successfully delivering hard news means honestly and compassionately delivering the news. It’s quietly listening to their reaction, hearing each word, but understanding what they feel won’t be known until they’ve taking their time to hear you.

A Short History of U.S. Presidents

(Via Reddit)

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Your Culture is Rotting

Whoever came up with the name “Human Resources” deserves a medal. Such a descriptive, helpful, and seemingly useful name. Why yes, I’m human and I sure could use some resources. Purely viewed by the name, Humans Resources or HR seems like such a great idea. These are the people who are responsible for looking after your people whether it’s their health, compensation, or career.

So, why do we freak out when HR is in the building? What’s with the hush whispers when you see your boss huddled with HR in her office? Layoffs? Reorg? Has anyone seen Ryan today? HR’s presence typically makes folks paranoid. I’ll repeat that: the folks whose job it is to be resources for humans collectively gives us the shakes. What happened?

It’s not HR; it’s your culture.

Humane Resources

Disclaimer: I’ve never worked in HR, and all of my observations regarding HR have been made without what I assume is the daily toil of having a gig where the expectations are so high, but corporate support is traditionally low. However, both as manager and as a former employee of an HR-focused start-up, I know a bit.

Simplification: There are all sorts of different jobs inside of HR and depending on the size of your company, your HR team may have one or all of them. Benefits, recruiting, compensation, training, it’s a long list. For the purpose of this article, let’s consider HR to be the folks who are responsible for helping a team thrive. They have many other jobs, but that’s the one I’m thinking about in this piece.

HR is a tough gig. They have constraints which often leads to unique behavior that affects their reputation. Two examples:

Lack of clear measures. Just like managers, HR folks have fuzzy measures of success. You write code, you fix bugs, you make it 27.5% faster, and everyone can point at that work and say, “You did something of measurable value.” While engineering managers can ride the coattails of this work by completing meta-goals like “Ship on time” or “Deliver the features the customers needs,” HR often has fewer obvious concrete deliverables that directly affect the production and selling of the product.

As a support team and a cost center, HR traditionally does not receive a lot of investment. How many folks is your manager responsible for? Ok, how many is your HR partner responsible for? My guess is your HR person has 10x the number of people for whom they are responsible. This under-resourcing has interesting consequences.

First, because of their limited numbers, they logically gravitate towards informed decision makers because these humans are an early warning system regarding what is and aren’t going well. This network helps keep them as to the state of the company.

Second, because of their allegedly human-related skills, they are called in when there are people-related problems. This means you only see them when something is going down. These infrequent appearances when the sky is falling contributes to their grim reaper reputation.

Finally, when they do arrive because the sky is falling, they are informed because of the carefully built information gathering network, but when they start talking, they don’t sound like you. They, like every group at your company, have a language all their own, which when accompanied with the penchant for showing up when the shit is going down makes their language the language of trouble.

All of these attributes contribute to the problematic reputation of HR. Yet, in two decades of work I’ve discovered that when the team is freaked out by HR, it’s not HR, it’s the culture. Something is rotting.

Culture == Values

Your company has values regardless of whether you’ve painted them on the wall or produced an employee handbook. They exist as a result of the Old Guard employees working together, making decisions, and successfully building the company.

Values exist as stories. Back in our first building, Christine once stayed up all night working on a single performance bug that ended up revealing fundamental flaws in our architecture. The implied value? Persistence or perhaps craftsmanship.

Values exist as people. When I watch Brad run a meeting, I realize how poorly I run my own. The implied value? Everyone’s time is valuable, efficiency, or maybe constant improvement.

Values are principles or standards of behavior, and in a group of humans, they are first defined by the founding employees and then evolved over time by the leadership team. Painting them on the walls or writing them down in an employee handbook makes them accessible and obvious, but it is how these values are consistently applied especially during times of crisis that gives values value.

When I hear, “I don’t trust HR,” I ask, “Why?” The answers vary, “They are political. They are risk mitigators. They protect the company… not the employees.” There are humans in HR who exhibit this behavior. However, it is equally likely there are humans at every level of leadership who exhibit this behavior, and all are allowed to behave in this way because of the values of the company.

Has Anyone Seen Ryan Today?

The rule is: in the absence of information, humans will make up a story to fill the vacuum. When this happens, listen to the story because not only do they usually find the worst case scenario, it’s a situation that reflects the perception of your company’s values.

Where is Ryan? Well, he left early on Friday and was out all day on Monday. I think he’s checked out and you know what we do to checked out people here? HR fires them without warning.

No, HR doesn’t fire people without warning. No, Ryan is not checked out. He’s just sick, and his manager forgot to send a message to the team. The issue here is that the team believes HR has nefarious unchecked power and in my experience they rarely do. They are capable, overworked, emotionally intelligent humans who I call when I need help.

Yes, they swarm around disasters. Yes, they have access to a lot of information. You should hold them to them a high bar. More importantly, you should understand how in the world your team comes to hold seemingly irrational beliefs because their existence is not a sign of their character of your team, it is a sign your culture is rotting.

In Egypt, Blue Means Justice

What do different colors symbolize in different countries? I’ve been staring at this for twenty minutes straight.

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